What Is Brand Strategy? With Examples
The seven choices inside a brand strategy, each illustrated with an invented business, and the research on why a clear plan is easier for buyers to remember.
Answer to the question
What is brand strategy?
What is brand strategy? It is a written plan for what a brand should mean to a chosen group of buyers and how it will earn that meaning. It covers the audience, the category and frame of reference, positioning, proposition, personality, proof and the rules that keep it consistent.
Key takeaways
- A brand strategy is a written plan for what a brand should mean to a chosen group of buyers, built from seven choices that each rule something out.
- Joan Meyers-Levy and Alice Tybout found in three experiments, published in 1989, that products moderately incongruent with their category drew more favourable evaluations than close fits or sharp departures.
- Jennifer Aaker identified five dimensions of brand personality in 1997: sincerity, excitement, competence, sophistication and ruggedness.
- Gregory Carpenter, Rashi Glazer and Kent Nakamoto argued in 1994 that buyers may infer that an irrelevant attribute is relevant, so a chosen difference carries weight.
- Raymond Burke and Thomas Srull found in 1988 that advertising for competing brands weakened memory for a brand's advertisement, and repetition helped recall only when few similar products competed.
Every business that sells anything has already made most of the choices a brand strategy contains, usually without writing them down: who it serves, what it competes with and why someone should pick it. What is brand strategy, then, if not those choices? It is the same set made on purpose, recorded in a few pages and held steady, so that every sign, post and conversation draws on it. Writing it down matters because research on consumer memory shows how easily one brand's message is crowded out by others in its category.
What is brand strategy, exactly?
What is brand strategy in working terms? It is a plan for what a brand should mean to a chosen group of buyers, and for how it will earn and keep that meaning. It sits upstream of the visible work.
The name, logo, colours and voice carry its decisions to customers, and the plan is what tells a designer or a writer which decisions to carry. The difference between the two kinds of work, and who usually does each, is set out in Branding Agency vs Brand Strategy Agency. The memory view of the brand itself, as knowledge held by buyers, is covered in What Is Branding The Psychology Behind Strong Brands, and the parts of the visible identity in What Is Brand Identity (Beginner's Guide).
Ask what is brand strategy made of, and seven parts recur in most working strategies: the audience, the category and frame of reference, the [positioning](https://thewhyweproject.com/articles/brand-positioning-strategy), the proposition, the personality, the proof and the consistency rules. Each is a choice, and each choice rules something out. A plan that rules nothing out has not yet made a decision.
To keep the parts concrete, each one below is illustrated with the same invented business, a neighbourhood bakery that exists only for this article. It is a hypothetical example and not a real case.
Which buyers, compared with what?
The first answer to what is brand strategy for is a group of people. The audience is the group the brand is built around, described by situation and need as much as by age or income. A useful description is specific enough that a stranger could tell whether they belong in it. It also names who the brand is not trying to win for now, which is the part owners find hardest to write.
Hypothetical example: the invented bakery chooses parents buying breakfast on the way to school and office workers ordering for morning meetings. It leaves celebration cakes to other shops for now. That single choice shapes opening hours, the size of the counter, the menu and the tone of every sign, before any design work begins.
Buyers judge a new offer by first placing it in a category they already know, and the category brings expectations with it. The frame of reference is the set of alternatives the buyer will compare the brand with. For anyone asking what is brand strategy in practice, choosing it is one of the clearest strategic acts, since the same product can look expensive in one frame and good value in another.
Research on category schemas suggests why the choice deserves care. Joan Meyers-Levy and Alice Tybout tested an earlier proposal in psychology, that how well a product fits its category schema affects how people process information about it and so how they evaluate it. Across three experiments in new product settings, products moderately incongruent with their category drew more processing that led to more favourable evaluations than products that fitted the category closely or departed from it sharply.
Carried over to brand work, the finding suggests a strategy should pick a category clear enough to be understood at once and then make one or two departures from it, not ten. Hypothetical example: the bakery frames itself against the packaged bread aisle, not against cafés, and makes one departure, a second bake in the late afternoon so the evening loaf is fresh.
Where does positioning end?
Positioning is the place a brand aims to hold in the buyer's mind relative to the alternatives in its frame. It is usually written as one sentence for internal use. The proposition is the promise made to the buyer, the reason to choose, phrased as something the buyer gets. When people ask what is brand strategy, these two are often given as the whole answer. Positioning faces the market and the proposition faces the customer, and the two are often confused because both are short.
Hypothetical example: the bakery's positioning is the neighbourhood's breakfast stop for the school run. Its proposition is a warm breakfast handed over before the school bell, with no queue to speak of.
Gregory Carpenter, Rashi Glazer and Kent Nakamoto took up a puzzle in this territory: brands that stand apart on an attribute which seems to create a meaningful difference but is, on inspection, irrelevant to buyers, and still succeed. They argued that buyers may infer such an attribute is relevant under certain conditions, and experiments in three product categories supported their account. For a strategist the lesson is a responsibility: buyers will read meaning into a chosen difference, so the difference should be one the business can stand behind.
Why do personality and proof matter?
Brand personality is the set of human traits people associate with a brand. Jennifer Aaker developed a framework for it in a paper in the Journal of Marketing Research, identifying five dimensions, sincerity, excitement, competence, sophistication and ruggedness, and building a scale to measure them. She discussed how consumers use brands symbolically, which is where personality earns its place in a strategy.
In practice a strategy picks one or two dimensions and lets them settle questions of voice that would otherwise be argued case by case. Hypothetical example: the bakery chooses sincerity. Its signs use plain speech, the staff write the day's bakes on a chalkboard in their own hand, and nothing is described as artisanal unless a customer could see why.
A personality written down this way is also a test. Any new piece of copy can be held against it and judged in seconds.
Proof is the evidence a buyer can check for each promise the proposition makes. It may be a demonstration, a guarantee, a visible process, a credential or the plain record of having done the thing for years. A promise without proof asks the buyer to take the business at its word, and most buyers have learned to wait.
Hypothetical example: the bakery's promise of a fresh breakfast before the school bell is backed by a window onto the ovens, a board showing the time of each bake and a counter laid out so that a parent can pay and leave in one movement. Each proof is something a customer meets without being told about it.
A simple rule keeps this part honest. Every claim in the proposition gets at least one proof the customer can see, and a claim with none is cut or rewritten until it has one.
What should never change?
Consistency rules say what stays fixed across every channel and what may change. Without them, the strategy lasts only as long as the people who wrote it remain in the room.
Byron Sharp's How Brands Grow gives these rules a central place. The book argues that meaningful perceived difference between rival brands is low and varies little, and that what marketers can build instead is distinctiveness, unmistakable identification through colours, logos, characters, taglines and advertising styles. On its account brands grow by being easy to think of in buying situations, which the book calls mental availability, and easy to buy.
Positioning writers put more weight on a meaningful difference. The two views answer different questions, why a buyer should choose and how a buyer finds the brand at the moment of choice, and we agree with keeping both in the plan, with the consistency rules protecting the second.
Hypothetical example: the bakery writes its rules as two short lists, one for what never changes and one for what may.
- Fixed in every channel: the colour, the shape of the paper bag, the one-line promise and the chalkboard voice.
- Free to vary: seasonal bakes, window displays, daily posts and the offers of the week.
The fixed list is deliberately short, because each item on it has to be repeated for years before buyers come to rely on it.
Why does clarity help memory?
Memory is where the seven choices either add up or cancel out. Raymond Burke and Thomas Srull ran three experiments on memory interference in advertising. Memory for a brand's advertisement was weakened when people later saw advertisements for competing brands in the same category and for other products from the same manufacturer, and earlier exposures interfered with later memory as well. Repetition improved recall only when few or no similar products were competing for attention.
A later experiment by Robert Kent and Chris Allen varied the familiarity of the featured brands and of their rivals. Familiar brands produced much better recall of new product information, and competing advertisements hurt that memory less. The authors concluded that established brands hold an advantage in a crowded field.
For a written plan, the two findings bear directly on what is brand strategy for. A brand that repeats one coherent set of associations gives memory a structure that rival messages find harder to disturb, while a brand saying something different in every channel competes with itself as well as with its rivals. The written strategy is the device that keeps the associations few and repeated. Here is the invented bakery's whole strategy on one page.
| Part | What it decides | Hypothetical bakery example |
|---|---|---|
| Audience | Who the brand is for, and who it is not for now | School-run parents and office breakfast orders |
| Category and frame | What buyers compare it with | The packaged bread aisle, not cafés |
| Positioning | The place it aims to hold in the buyer's mind | The neighbourhood's breakfast stop for the school run |
| Proposition | The promise and the reason to choose | A warm breakfast before the school bell |
| Personality | The human traits it should call to mind | Sincerity, in plain speech |
| Proof | What makes the promise believable | Oven window, bake-time board, fast counter |
| Consistency rules | What stays fixed and what may vary | Fixed colour, bag and promise; seasonal bakes vary |
An owner would fill each row from interviews, sales records and a hard look at rivals, and revisit the page when buyers or competitors shift. Most of the work lies in agreeing the rows, the honest answer to what is brand strategy as a task. Holding to the page afterwards is the slow part.
Common questions
What is brand strategy?
What is brand strategy in one line? It is a written plan for what a brand should mean to a chosen group of buyers and how it will earn that meaning, covering who it serves, what it competes with and why someone should choose it.
What are the main parts of a brand strategy?
Most working strategies cover seven parts: the audience, the category and frame of reference, the positioning, the proposition, the personality, the proof and the consistency rules. Each part is a choice that rules something out.
What is the difference between brand strategy and brand identity?
Brand strategy decides what the brand should mean and to whom. Brand identity is the name, logo, colours, type and voice that carry those decisions to customers. The strategy comes first and tells the identity what to express.
What is an example of a brand strategy?
The illustration in this article is an invented bakery, not a real case. It serves school-run parents, frames itself against packaged bread, promises a warm breakfast before the school bell, speaks with sincerity, proves its promise with a window onto the ovens and fixes its colour and bag across every channel.
Sources
Sharp, B. How Brands Grow. Seed book; vault hub Books/How Brands Grow.
Meyers-Levy, J., & Tybout, A. M. (1989). “Schema congruity as a basis for product evaluation.” Journal of Consumer Research, 16(1). doi:10.1086/209192 https://doi.org/10.1086/209192
Carpenter, G. S., Glazer, R., & Nakamoto, K. (1994). “Meaningful brands from meaningless differentiation: The dependence on irrelevant attributes.” Journal of Marketing Research, 31(3). doi:10.1177/002224379403100302 https://doi.org/10.1177/002224379403100302
Aaker, J. L. (1997). “Dimensions of brand personality.” Journal of Marketing Research, 34(3). doi:10.1177/002224379703400304 https://doi.org/10.1177/002224379703400304
Burke, R. R., & Srull, T. K. (1988). “Competitive interference and consumer memory for advertising.” Journal of Consumer Research, 15(1). doi:10.1086/209145 https://doi.org/10.1086/209145
Kent, R. J., & Allen, C. T. (1994). “Competitive interference effects in consumer memory for advertising: The role of brand familiarity.” Journal of Marketing, 58(3). doi:10.1177/002224299405800307 https://doi.org/10.1177/002224299405800307