Nobody cares about your brand strategy.

The 80-page problem

Every creative director has inherited one: a beautifully designed brand strategy, eighty pages long, with a purpose, a vision, a mission, four values, three pillars and an onion diagram. Everyone signed off on it. Nobody can remember any of it.

The audience certainly can’t. They have never seen your onion. They only see the work.

A good strategy is a filter

The test of a strategy is whether it helps you say no. If it can’t kill a bad idea in a meeting, it is too vague to be useful. “We believe in innovation” kills nothing. “We explain things better than anyone in our category” kills a lot, including most stock photography.

When we build a brand from nothing, as with Katch, the first deliverable I care about is not the logo. It is the one sentence that tells everyone what to stop doing.

Strategy you can feel

I love strategy. I just think it should be felt, not read. The best strategies show up as a tone of voice you can recognize with the logo covered, as a type of story you always tell, as a refusal to do what everyone else in the category does.

Write the strategy. Then spend ten times as long making it visible.

If you’d like help with this kind of problem, it’s what we do at Summer Friday.