Create a Strategy System for your Brand: A High-Level Guide Using Brand Thinking

Published in

Agency In The Wild Mag

9 min readJul 8, 2020

Creating a successful, durable brand starts with developing a strategy system. The strategy system is the blueprint of your brand, it’s the map, and as we know, maps are the building blocks of incredible adventures.

The exercises we are going to show you come from industry leaders and our own experience working and building brands for companies such as EA, Microsoft, IBM, LEGO and Disney.

Before we get into the method and exercises behind creating a strategy system, it’s essential to understand the role that brand thinking plays in the process. For a deep dive into the subject visit our blog on Brand Thinking. For those of you who want the short version, here’s a quick review of what we mean when we talk about brand thinking.

How Brand Thinking Works

Brand thinking takes the best aspects of design and business thinking and allows individuals and teams to remove their own bias so they can always reference back to a single source of truth, their brand. Brand thinking is a way to distill complex problems, remove egos, and have a repeatable process that anyone can use at an organization to solve problems across all departments.

The brand thinking process has 3 pillars at its core. Each pillar has a governing system: the strategy system, design system, and growth system. This blog will focus on creating the strategy system.

Defining The Strategy System

These days, everyone talks about design systems and component libraries, but what about your strategy system? What’s the story behind all those components? Why do they look the way they do, and how do they reflect the company’s vision, values, and personality? Where does the strategy live? These are the questions we answer when designing a brand’s strategy system.

Bitcoin became the digital gold standard without any significant monetary investment. It only had a well thought out strategy system, a one-page white paper that articulated the technology’s vision and values, and a community that embraced them. Think about that for a second.

Creating a Strategy System

The first step in any quest is finding the goal of the journey in the first place. The goal should be challenging enough to spark the quest, but achievable enough so that you feel motivated to embark and empower others to join you.

We recommend creating your strategy system within a tool that’s easily accessible. We use Miro because anyone can access it without logging in. It’s also incredibly easy to use — imagine having a massive whiteboard in the middle of your office with your entire brand strategy organized in it. That’s the power of Miro.

We love Miro so much that we have partnered with them to create a free template with all the exercises in this blog that you can use right now. You can thank us later. But for now, below are the base exercises to creating your strategy system:

Research

The first stage of building your strategy system is aligning everyone in what the brand is at a high level, we call this your brand hypothesis. After that, you must put yourself and everyone else in the customer’s shoes. As Jeff Bezos puts it, “Your brand is what other people say about you when you’re not in the room.”

Once everyone is aligned on the above, you must look at what’s happening in the industry and what trend waves you can ride. Below are the three exercises to complete in order to have useful research for your brand:

1

What are the ten most essential questions to help you and everyone else understand your brand’s hypothesis? The Brand Questionnaire has them:

What’s your brand’s why, how, and what?
Who’s your target audience?
What makes your brand different?
What are the 5 key goals over the next year/five years?
What are your biggest fears in achieving these goals?
Who are your competitors?
What are your customers’ tangible benefits from your product/service?
How does your product/service make your customers feel?
What are the values of your company?
What should the personality of the brand’s communication be?

2

The Value Proposition Canvas, created by Strategyzer, is an exercise to position your product and service around what your customer values and needs. This exercise is the tool you need to put yourself and everyone else in your customer’s shoes.

To begin, you need to think about what your customer is trying to achieve, what needs to be done in order for them to achieve it, what’s not working in the process (pains), and what is currently working for them (gains).

Your next job is to find ideas to fix the pains and generate more significant gains. Those ideas should give you a good understanding of what your customers need and want from your brand.

3

The Focus Difference and Trends exercise is a framework, created by Marty Neumeier. We use it as a way of distilling your brand research and strategy’s fundamental building blocks. In this exercise, you need to extract what you want to focus on as a brand, what makes you different from the competition, and what trend waves you can ride.

At this step, you will research your competitors and look at what’s happening in the industry. Google is your friend here. Use the Brand Questionnaire as a starting point and refine it from there.

Positioning

This part is a critical step that ensures you’re carving out a unique space in the market and distinguishing your brand from the rest. It’s a useful tool to carry forward your research findings to identify clear market differentiation and ensure alignment of business and brand strategies. Below are the four essential exercises to create a positioning for your brand:

1

Brand mapping is the visual plotting of your competitors’ brands against axes, where each axis represents a desirable attribute among consumers and enables maximum differentiation between brands. Brand mapping illustrates the position of competing brands based on how others perceive those brands. [AMA Boston] The purpose of brand mapping is finding the sweet spot between these attributes and positioning your brand there.

2

If you’ve seen Simon Sinek’s TED Talk on how great leaders inspire action, you’re familiar with The Golden Circle. The idea behind The Golden Circle is that most brands answer the questions of what, how, and why in precisely that order. Every organization knows the result or outcome of what they do, most know the processes or methods of how they do it, but few can answer why they do it (and we’re not talking about making money here).

Sinek argues that inspired leaders work the opposite way, starting with the why, defining their purpose, cause or beliefs — and why people should care about it — before moving on to the how. The order in which you answer these questions determines how your brand thinks, acts, and communicates. This exercise gives you the chance to refine the first Brand Questionnaire question with all the knowledge you have gained.

3

The third step to fine-tuning your brand positioning is an exercise by Marty Neumeier called The Onliness Statement. The exercise is based on the idea that, of all the information available about your brand, consumers will probably only remember one thing about it. Your challenge is to figure out the one big idea, the compelling, overarching selling point that makes your brand unique. Take this exercise as an opportunity to validate and refine your initial hypothesis.

The template for coming up with an Onliness Statement should look something like this:

4

The final step in the positioning of your strategy system relates directly to The Onliness Statement → coming up with your Trueline and Tagline. Essentially, both are the same information, just framed in two different ways. Your brand’s Trueline is a distillation of your Onliness Statement; it’s the internal definition of what you’re doing and what separates you from the competition. Your Trueline is your north star.

On the other hand, your Tagline is the consumer-facing version of your Trueline — it transforms the same information into a catchy, powerful, and irresistible hook for customers. In this interview with Neumeier, he uses Southwest airlines as an example of Trueline and Tagline.

Architecture

Now that you’ve established your positioning in the market, you have the basis for a robust architecture. Below are the three essential exercises to create a strong brand architecture:

1

A brand pyramid is a framework that answers most of the fundamental questions in a diagram that can be easily shared and communicated across an organization. The brand pyramid is the blueprint of your brand. It should be a synthesis of all the previous exercises, including the Brand Questionnaire.

2

A brand manifesto describes why your organization exists, its purpose, and why people should care about your brand. [Hubspot] As Emotive Brand puts it, “If a vision and mission steer your organization in the right direction, a brand manifesto is the incandescent energy source propelling you forward. It’s inspired, creative, motivating, an appeal to pathos. It infuses the emotional ‘why?’ into a brand. Why do you matter? Why should we care?”

As Chris Langathianos writes, “The manifesto is a versatile tool designed to clearly articulate what the brand stands for — what is it that gets its employees out of bed every morning and motivates them every day to deliver on the brand’s vision. It is explicitly not about a brand’s product or service, but rather speaks to the heart of why they sell it in the first place.”

It’s Apple saying, “The people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.” It’s Nike saying, “If greatness doesn’t come knocking at your door, maybe you should go knock on its door.”

Three considerations for writing an impactful manifesto:

Know your brand purpose (your why). Your manifesto can only come to life if your brand purpose is communicated clearly to everyone, internally and externally.
Identify the problem you’re solving. After all, your brand’s success depends on its ability to improve the lives of your customers.
Write your copy with intention. Placing your audience in the narrative helps engage them on a personal level. You want your manifesto to inspire and spark imagination. Keep it concise, aiming for 100 words or less.

3

Your brand’s creative direction is the story that glues together your strategy system and your design system. To create a creative direction, you need to find a good “brand insight.” The best way to find a good brand insight is by looking at what makes your brand unique. Your Trueline, values, personality, purpose, vision, and mission could define your brand’s insight. Once you find your insight, look for quotes related to it that inspire your idea further. After having a couple of insights, your next quest is to “Zag” them — to Zag is a process that combines two possible unrelated brand insights into one, so you can create something truly unique.

Conclusion

You now have the tools to master the first pillar of brand thinking. By creating a strategy system, you will have a clear understanding of your brand’s soul and architecture. Writing everything down should make you feel a little uncomfortable. After all, you are creating the map of where your brand needs to be. Your strategy system will give you the tools to communicate consistently, to hire, to make decisions, to solve problems, and to design the look and feel for your brand.

By working your way through each exercise in the blog, from research to manifesto, you will have a blueprint of your brand and the path to success. Remember, your strategy needs to be a call for adventure. It should get people going. So, shoot for the stars! So if you fall, you land on a cloud.