When brand strategy is done before the development of externally facing creative brand hallmarks, such as the name, visual identity and messaging, you will receive a better return on your investment by designing a brand that’s built for purpose.

But what exactly is a brand strategy? It’s the strategy behind the foundational brand elements and hallmarks that drive consistency for your brand’s external expression.

A successful brand strategy sets the stage for your brand’s creative choices – the things it must do; the things it cannot do; the ideas that will work; the ideas that will not work – to ensure your brand’s message breaks through today’s cluttered and chaotic world.

When strategic choices are in place, creative teams have the exact coordinates for where to dig, allowing them to go deep and find precious material that will help your brand stand out.

Without the foundational and unifying brand strategy, creative teams will likely dig shallow holes in a wide area before settling on something that gets approved but stops short of creating a successful brand that provides an impactful reason for consumers to change behavior.

To develop impactful strategic guidelines, Addison Whitney begins with thorough market intelligence. This research provides our creative teams with the necessary insight to evoke behavior change through consumer-driven empathy and brand distinction. How do both play into creating a successful brand?

Our Brand Strategy team is adept at capturing the audience’s current mindset, including the tensions that exist between their current and ideal self, as well as finding and analyzing competitive data to decipher the white space. With these insights at the ready, we bring cross-functional teams together — both client-side and within Addison Whitney — in co-creation sessions to facilitate alignment on the path the brand must take to be successful. These collaborative sessions produce the raw material our Strategy team utilizes to develop the unifying ideas the ultimate brand must represent.

We then go on to define the language and concepts your brand must adhere to in order to incite behavior change. In order to accomplish this, we use a plethora of vehicles:

With these strategic and unifying foundational elements set, strategy work equips our creative teams to develop externally facing assets that reinforce your brand’s messaging and build consistent, durable and meaningful associations. The outcome? A successful brand.