What Does a Brand Strategy Consultant Do?

Why We Look · 3 November 2026 · Reviewed by Faisal Zaidi

The role runs from diagnosis and research to decisions on audience and position, leadership alignment and measurement. Four studies and one book on judgment show why an outside view helps.

Answer to the question

What Does a Brand Strategy Consultant Do Day to Day?

A brand strategy consultant diagnoses how a business is seen, researches its buyers and category, and helps leaders decide the audience, position and messages the brand will hold. The work ends in a short written decision and a plan to measure it. An outside view helps because insiders know too much to see the brand as a newcomer does.

Key takeaways

A brand strategy consultant works through diagnosis, research, decisions on audience and position, leadership alignment and a measurement plan. The output is a short written decision.
In a 1985 simulated caucus, Garold Stasser and William Titus found that groups usually backed the candidate members favoured at the start, which is why consultants collect written answers from leaders before any group discussion.
In 1989 experiments, Colin Camerer, George Loewenstein and Martin Weber found that better-informed people struggle to ignore what they know, and market conditions reduced the effect by about half without removing it.
Emily Pronin, Daniel Lin and Lee Ross reported in 2002, across three studies, that people judge others as more prone to bias than themselves.
Daniel Kahneman and Dan Lovallo wrote in 1993 that taking the inside view anchors forecasts on one's own plans and neglects comparable cases. An outsider can supply those cases.

Hire a brand strategy consultant and most of the fee pays for questions, put to people inside and outside the business until its leaders can agree in writing on a few choices about whom they serve and against what. Interviews and workshops exist to reach that agreement and make it hold.

Diagnosis and research come before any design

Diagnosis starts with what already exists. A brand strategy consultant reads the sales material, the customer feedback, the product range and the pricing, and asks staff to explain the business as they would to a stranger. The differences between those explanations are the first piece of evidence, because a brand lives in what people say about it when no one is checking the wording.

Interviews follow. The consultant talks to leaders, to people who deal with customers every day, to current customers and to people who considered the business and chose another. That last group is the hardest to reach and the most informative, since it shows how the brand looks from outside its own customer base. The diagnosis closes with a plain statement of what the brand now stands for in a buyer's mind, offered as a hypothesis for the research stage to test.

Each method is chosen for a question. Customer interviews ask what job the product does and what the buyer would have used otherwise. A category review lays out how competing offers describe themselves, so the crowded claims and the open ones become visible. Sales and service records show the words customers use unprompted. A survey, when numbers are needed, checks whether a short list of possible positions is understood and preferred by the intended buyers and not by the internal team.

A brand strategy consultant who can say which question each piece of research answers keeps the work short. A business owner can use that as a test of any proposal: if a research step has no question attached, ask what decision it will inform.

Deciding audience and position, then getting leaders to agree

The research feeds three decisions: which buyers come first, which ground the brand will occupy among the alternatives those buyers already weigh, and what proof the business can offer for choosing it. A useful audience description names the buyer's situation and the moment of choice, and not only age or income.

The hardest part is leaving things out. Every business can name a dozen groups it could serve and a dozen claims it could make, and the consultant's contribution is often a ranking that puts most of them lower down. The result is short enough to read in one sitting, with the choice stated in a sentence and the supporting messages in order of priority. It becomes the brief for the identity team, and the handover is described in Branding Agency vs Brand Strategy Agency.

A position that one person accepts and three others read differently will drift once the work leaves the room. The consultant therefore runs workshops in which each leader writes an answer before hearing anyone else's, and the answers are compared side by side.

The format follows research on how groups pool what they know. Participants in one simulated political caucus read candidate profiles whose partial information made the strongest candidate look weaker, in a 1985 study by Garold Stasser and William Titus. Groups that discussed the candidates usually backed the one members had favoured at the start, and recall of candidate traits suggested that talking together kept the distorted impressions in place. Discussion gravitated to what everyone already shared and to what supported existing preferences.

A leadership team holds the same kind of scattered knowledge: finance sees margins, operations sees delivery, sales hears objections. Written answers first give the piece held by one person a place on the table before the conversation settles. Daniel Kahneman, Olivier Sibony and Cass Sunstein make the same case for organisations in Noise, recommending that people form assessments independently before a group compares them.

Why an outside view helps

People who know a great deal find it hard to set that knowledge aside. Better-informed participants struggled to ignore what they knew when predicting how less-informed people would judge, in experiments that Colin Camerer, George Loewenstein and Martin Weber reported in 1989, and market conditions cut the effect by about half without removing it. Founders and long-serving staff know the product so well that a buyer meeting it for the first time is hard for them to imagine. A newcomer brings the first-time view, which is why the consultant asks the plain questions that insiders stopped asking years ago.

Self-assessment has a similar pattern. Across three studies, people judged others as more prone to bias than themselves, and kept regarding their own assessments as accurate after being told how bias could have shaped them, a pattern Emily Pronin, Daniel Lin and Lee Ross reported in 2002. A team's confidence that it sees its own brand clearly is therefore weak evidence, and an outside reading serves as a second opinion.

Planning has its own version. Kahneman and Dan Lovallo wrote in 1993 that decision makers tend to treat each problem as unique, anchoring forecasts on their own plans and scenarios and neglecting the record of comparable cases, which produces optimistic forecasts. A brand strategy consultant with experience across many businesses can bring that record of comparable cases to a question such as how long a repositioning takes to register with buyers.

None of this work tested consultants, so the practical reading stays modest: an outsider has less to unlearn, no stake in the old story and a wider set of comparison cases.

Questions to ask, and how results are measured

A short list helps a business owner judge how the work will run, and it suits the provider comparisons in How to Choose the Top Branding Agency in Dubai and What Makes the Best Branding Company.

- What will you read, and whom will you talk to, in the first month?
- Which decision will each piece of research inform?
- Will each of our leaders give a written answer before any group discussion?
- Who in our business signs off the final decision, and by when?
- What finding would lead you to recommend that we change nothing?

Measurement is set before launch. The consultant picks a few indicators tied to the decisions: whether the intended buyers recognise the brand, whether they describe it in the terms the strategy chose, whether the sales team uses the agreed messages, and whether materials from different teams read as one brand. The baseline comes from the diagnosis, and the same questions put later to the same kind of respondents give the comparison.

Each indicator needs a named owner and a date for the repeat survey. Without both, a shift in how buyers see the brand is hard to tell apart from a shift in how its own staff feel about it.

Common questions

What does a brand strategy consultant do day to day?

How is a brand strategy consultant different from a branding agency?

The consultant works on the choices behind the brand; a design team works on how those choices look and sound once made. Some firms offer both under one roof.

When does a business need a brand strategy consultant?

When the customer or category is unsettled, when a business is entering a new market or adding a product line, or when leaders describe the brand in different ways.

What does a brand strategy consultant need from a business?

Access to customers and to records of sales and service, time with the leadership team and one person who can approve the decision.

Sources

Kahneman, D., Sibony, O., & Sunstein, C. R. Noise. Seed book; vault hub Books/Noise.

Stasser, G., & Titus, W. (1985). “Pooling of unshared information in group decision making: Biased information sampling during discussion.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 48(6), 1467-1478. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.48.6.1467 https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.48.6.1467

Camerer, C., Loewenstein, G., & Weber, M. (1989). “The curse of knowledge in economic settings: An experimental analysis.” Journal of Political Economy, 97(5), 1232-1254. doi:10.1086/261651 https://doi.org/10.1086/261651

Pronin, E., Lin, D. Y., & Ross, L. (2002). “The bias blind spot: Perceptions of bias in self versus others.” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 28(3), 369-381. doi:10.1177/0146167202286008 https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167202286008

Kahneman, D., & Lovallo, D. (1993). “Timid choices and bold forecasts: A cognitive perspective on risk taking.” Management Science, 39(1), 17-31. doi:10.1287/mnsc.39.1.17 https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.39.1.17