
Brand Strategy needs a new strategy.
It’s about time we bring Brand Strategy up to speed with what brands are actually asking for.
The ultimate outcome of a brand strategy is being questioned. Clients and consumers are skeptical about brand building — the first increasingly values short-termism over long-term growth (with initial signs of a counter-trend); the latter increasingly distrusts whatever brand “layer” is sitting on top of a product.
I have a thesis that the basic inputs of a brand strategy are also being questioned. Clients — just like consumers — are more selective when it comes to engaging with storytelling (especially if told through numerous slides), and are trained to pick apart every single statement it’s grounded on, including the well backed up ones.
As a result, the good ol’ brand strategists, known to be responsible for dissecting brands into sharply articulated and carefully copy-written propositions, are being left out of some of the most strategic decisions brands need to make. Why? Because turning complex challenges into simple-sounding solutions through proposition copywriting isn’t actually going to solve those challenges.
The Brand Strategy that people like me were originally trained on has become a tiny fraction of the growing range of strategic thinking brands actually need.
When people ask my point of view, I put things in different boxes for a second just to explain myself. I believe that the type of brand strategy that’s needed and valued today gets pretty close to Business Strategy, with one minor difference — Business Strategy’s desired outcome is increased business profit and growth; Brand Strategy’s desired outcome is improved brand experiences (which should result in profit and growth).
Brand Strategy is playing with business, but brand strategists are still playing with words. It’s time for us to update ourselves — to define a new strategy for Brand Strategy.
R/GA’s Tom Morton, in this article for WARC, claimed that “the job of Brand Strategy expands from telling the brand story to building the brand system”. It’s for the improvement of this “system” that brand strategists should work. This north star takes us closer to actually understanding how consumers behave — not only through data sets and user journey maps, but through cultural understanding too as you’ve gotten to have a more holistic view of the brand you’re working with. Brand systems include transactional experiences, and also the ones that are harder to measure.

To illustrate that, take the work Virgil Abloh is doing for Louis Vuitton as their Artistic Director, connecting it with pop culture; the work Fernando Machado is doing to give Burger King its own authentic voice back, from the stores to the stunts; the work John Schoolcraft is doing on Oatly — since he joined in 2012, company revenues have increased 100%. None of those people are “brand strategists” per se, but they’re at the top of the game when it comes to improving brand experiences.
Morton goes all the way to suggest experience strategists are the new brand guardians. I mostly think that titles don’t matter, but the “brand” prefix is potentially holding Brand Strategy back.
The set of tools of (Brand) Strategy is in constant expansion. In my point of view, no in-house, consultancy or ad agency is being able to clearly define their strategic offer. I think it’s naive to even try. It should be too rich to be defined with a fancy title, a new discipline or a trademarked methodology. It comes down to how much we manage to adapt and adopt as Apple’s Nick Law emphatically said, and for which purpose we apply those tools, without leaving behind the foundational principles of all great brand thinking. We’re still in the same game of paving the path for growth, with or without profit, and ideally always with a sense of social responsibility, clarity of thought and imagination. But we need to update ourselves so that imaginative, well grounded path actually leads us there.
