Brand Strategy: The 9-Step Framework, Workshop & Templates

Brand strategy is the long-term plan for what a brand stands for, who it is for, how it differs and how it sounds, so that every design and marketing decision builds the same perception.

You write it before anyone designs a logo or books a campaign.

It is not a logo, and it is not a marketing plan.

This guide is the 9-step brand strategy framework: nine decisions in three sections, Brand Core, Brand Positioning and Brand Persona.

You get nine exercises, a statement template for each one, a one-page worksheet and a workshop agenda.

This is a step-by-step guide to building brand strategy with absolute minimum theory and maximum practicality.

Some of my colleagues think I’m crazy for sharing my secret sauce.

I don’t think this guide will put me out of the branding game, but I do hope it will put you on.

The same nine steps sit in my public Miro template, used 474 times so far, and in The Brand Strategy Guide.

I filled the worksheets with dummy text, so that you know where the answers go.

• Each exercise ends in one short written statement.
• You can run all nine in half a day, with the people who can approve the brand.
• Write the strategy first, then design the identity from it.

If you want the short route through a long guide, find your path first.

What is brand strategy?

Brand strategy is the long-term plan that defines what a company stands for, who it serves, how it differs and how it sounds.

In a workshop, a brand strategy is nine decisions the leadership team makes and writes down on one page.

Marty Neumeier, who wrote The Brand Gap, puts it more formally in its glossary.

“A plan for the systematic development of a brand in order to meet business objectives.” — Marty Neumeier, The Brand Gap

His later Dictionary of Brand ends the same line with “in alignment with a business strategy”.

The goal of brand strategy is to shape the perceptions of a brand’s audience so that ultimately we can influence them.

The brand itself is not the plan, because a brand is a person’s gut feeling about a product, service or company.

That is Neumeier’s definition.

It is sharper than the American Marketing Association version, a distinctive feature such as a name or symbol that identifies goods or services.

I put that line on a slide in every workshop, because it separates the brand from everything you can control.

You want them to choose you over competitors, even at a higher price.

Brand strategy was once reserved for the global brands in the Interbrand Best Global Brands ranking.

Today small business owners run the same nine exercises.

What a brand strategy is not

A brand strategy is not a logo, which is one asset inside the identity that expresses the strategy.

A brand strategy is not a color palette or a typeface, because those decisions come after the strategy is written.

A brand strategy is not a marketing plan.

Marketing decides this year’s channels and budgets, while strategy decides what you mean to people for the next five.

How several brands inside one company relate to each other is brand architecture, which is a different decision again.

What a brand strategy contains

A brand strategy contains nine elements in three sections.

Brand Core is purpose, vision and values.

Brand Positioning is target audience, market research and awareness goals.

Brand Persona is personality, voice and tagline.

Other guides count four pillars or seven elements, and those are the same decisions grouped differently.

Mine splits them into nine, so each one ends in a statement you can write down.

Whichever type of brand you are building, personal, product or corporate, the foundation is the same nine elements.

The 9-step brand strategy framework

The 9-step brand strategy framework turns what a client believes about their brand into nine written decisions, grouped into three sections: Brand Core, Brand Positioning and Brand Persona.

What a brand strategy framework is

A brand strategy framework is a fixed set of questions, answered in a fixed order, that turns opinions about a brand into written decisions.

The sequence is deliberate: first clarify the brand internally, second position it in the market, third define a human persona.

How to develop a brand strategy in nine steps

You develop a brand strategy by answering nine questions in a fixed order, grouped into Brand Core, Brand Positioning and Brand Persona.

Every step gets 20 minutes when you run all nine in one sitting, or 30 to 40 minutes if you split them across three sessions.

Each exercise uses answers from the one before, so voice needs the audience and the personality, and the tagline needs keywords from all eight earlier exercises.

If you only want the definitions, I recap the nine elements of brand strategy in a shorter article.

Here is the framework explained in a short video.

How every exercise works

I ask the question, I draw the grid, the room fills it in fast, and we write down the line that becomes the answer.

From here on, a blockquote is a line the facilitator, meaning whoever runs the room, reads out loud, whether that is the question or the instruction that goes with it.

A blockquote with a name after it is a quote from that author rather than something you say.

Draw: a bold run-in label like this one is what the facilitator puts on the whiteboard before anyone answers.

The framing sections are me talking to you, and inside the nine exercises I talk to you as if you were my client, which keeps it practical.

So that you can just read it out loud and run your first strategy session with ease.

How this framework compares with other brand strategy models

Five well-known models cover the same ground from different angles, and each one shows up somewhere in the nine steps.

Those models explain how brands work, and mine is built to be run in a room in a few hours.

The closest published method is Marty Neumeier’s guide to agile strategy.

April Dunford puts competitive alternatives before customers, and I put the audience first because it suits a client room.

Start With Why and Positioning are both on my list of brand strategy books.

For the longer conversation about frameworks and their limits, listen to my episode with Mark Pollard.

Byron Sharp argues in How Brands Grow that buyers pick the brand they recognize instantly.

My answer is to position for meaning first, then be distinctive and consistent everywhere.

The framework on one infographic

Here is the whole framework on one page, to print or pin above your desk.

How to use this guide: founder, designer or marketing lead

If you are a founder doing it alone

Run the nine exercises yourself this week, alone or with a co-founder.

Start at Section 1: Brand Core with the worksheets open beside you, and finish at the deliverables.

If you get stuck on an answer, the AI Brand Strategist gives you options to react to.

If you are pre-launch, start with the brand strategy framework for startups.

If you are a designer or consultant facilitating for a client

You develop the brand strategy, as the strategic designer, consultant or facilitator.

Read how to run the workshop first, for the room, the timings and the rules.

Then read sections 1 to 3 out loud as your script, one exercise at a time.

Hand over what is listed in brand strategy deliverables.

If you are a marketing lead aligning leadership

Start at brand strategy vs brand identity, the argument for doing this before the next logo or campaign brief.

Then read who should be in the room, because you can have multiple stakeholders or just one CEO / Founder as participants.

If leadership needs a neutral facilitator, bring me in at book a workshop.

If you have ten minutes rather than an afternoon, learn brand strategy is the crash-course version.

Start here this week

Here is the shortest route to a first draft.

1. Block at least 3 hours with the people who can decide.
2. Print or open the worksheets.
3. Run Brand Core, Brand Positioning and Brand Persona in order, with a timer.
4. Copy the nine answers onto one page and sleep on them before you edit.

Inside the session, speed beats accuracy, which is the rule I explain in what to say first.

Brand strategy vs brand identity vs marketing strategy

Brand strategy is the plan for what you mean to people.

Brand identity is how that meaning looks and sounds.

Brand strategy vs marketing strategy is the easier half of the question, because marketing puts that meaning in front of buyers this year.

They are made in that order, and each one briefs the next.

Alina Wheeler makes the cleanest distinction in Designing Brand Identity: identity is tangible and appeals to the senses.

The standard definitions of brand strategy draw the same line.

Business strategy sits above all three, because it decides where to win before anyone decides what to mean.

Read branding vs brand identity for the wider distinction, and my branding package for what an identity includes.

Which comes first?

Business strategy comes first, then brand strategy, then brand identity, then marketing.

Clients arrive asking for a logo, which is exactly where that order gets skipped.

That is the John scenario in why brand strategy matters.

I do both the strategy and the identity, so I see the hand-off daily.

The archetype from step 7 and the voice from step 8 become typography, color and imagery choices.

I show how in from brand strategy to brand identity.

The bridge the other way is Exercise 6: Awareness Goals.

It hands marketing its starting list, and it is deliberately not a marketing strategy.

Why does brand strategy matter, and who needs one?

Brand strategy matters because it gets the people who approve the work to agree on what the brand means before anyone designs or advertises anything.

Without it, every logo round and every campaign is judged on taste.

With it, feedback is judged against nine written decisions.

Meet Arek and John

As a designer, you may wonder why you need strategy.

Arek is a good designer, but he’s also a strategist and his clients think he’s a genius.

John is a good designer, but he struggles with his clients who often tell him what to do.

Follow my steps for creating brand strategy to align yourself and client on the same vision.

So that you can turn these findings into insights that will help you design something that is “on brand”.

Your clients will love you, because they’ll feel like the ideas come from them.

Then comes the creative phase, which for me starts with my logo design process.

Ehrenberg-Bass found that up to 95% of business buyers are not in the market at any one time, a B2B finding, so the brand has to be remembered later.

The Ipsos and JKR distinctive assets study found that only 15% of the brand assets it tested were truly distinctive.

Kantar BrandZ 2026 is a valuation ranking rather than an experiment, and it concludes that being meaningful and different matters more as AI mediates choice.

Who needs one, and when

A new business needs one before it pays for a name, a logo or a website.

An existing business needs one for a rebrand or a repositioning, under new ownership, when it goes after a new audience, or when the team describes the company in five different ways.

In each case the fastest way in is a half-day workshop.

Dhruv Patel, founder of AMI, said it “guided me so well, to reach a conclusion on how the brand should be perceived”.

What you are buying is a strategy written down on one page, instead of one argued about in the next design review.

Brand strategy template and worksheets

My brand strategy template is ten worksheets, and it comes out of the branding workshops I run with real clients.

There is one brand strategy worksheet for each of the nine exercises.

The main Strategy Worksheet then collects the nine outputs on a single page.

Every exercise in this guide shows its worksheet as an animation and repeats its statement template as plain text you can copy.

The complete text version of all nine formulas is in the one-page brand strategy template, and a filled example follows it.

File formats and downloads live on my free brand strategy template page.

What is free and what is in the paid guide

Everything you need to run the nine exercises is free on this page: the prompts, the worksheet images and the statement templates.

Print the worksheets as a brand strategy PDF, or copy my brand strategy workshop template from Miroverse and run the exercises there.

The Brand Strategy Guide is $199, bought once.

It adds an 89-page guidebook with the facilitator’s script, 13 video tutorials and editable worksheets.

What each route costs in time and money is in how long a brand strategy takes.

How long does a brand strategy take, and what does it cost?

The workshop itself takes 3 to 6 hours, depending on whether you run it in one sitting or split it across three sessions.

Running it yourself with the worksheets on this page costs nothing.

You should book at least 3 hours, which gives you about 20 minutes for each of the 9 exercises.

With the opening, a break and the wrap-up, block about three and a half.

The strategy is finished once the nine statements are refined and presented back, which happens after the session.

So the real question is not how long it takes, but who runs it.

What a full identity project costs once the strategy is done is in my branding package.

If you are a freelancer working out what to charge for this, I wrote down everything I know about how to sell brand strategy to clients.

How to run a brand strategy workshop

A brand strategy workshop is a facilitated session where the people who can decide answer the nine exercises together, on a whiteboard, against a timer.

The facilitator — you, not your client — asks the questions and writes the answers down.

Book at least 3 hours, and time every exercise.

It is also called a brand discovery session, or a brand identity workshop when the identity design follows straight after.

My branding workshop checklist covers planning and logistics, while this page holds the nine exercises themselves.

Three ways to run it

So there are three ways in which you can run this workshop:

1. Run a whiteboard session
2. Fill out the worksheets with pen
3. Fill out the worksheets on computer

I’d strongly encourage you to run a whiteboard session — that’s certainly the best option.

Whichever way you run it, print the worksheets before the session.

Who should be in the room

Only the people who can approve or veto the brand belong in the room, and nobody else.

You can have multiple stakeholders or just one CEO / Founder as participants.

First, get consensus from leadership — brief the CEO or primary stakeholders on what’s going to happen during the workshop.

Enroll them on being a “partner” in the process and explain what you are going to do and why it is important.

Give them a short overview of the brand strategy framework and what you’re going to be able to accomplish together.

Workshop agenda: one long session or three short ones

The agenda is one briefing call with the CEO, then the three sections of the framework in order.

In one sitting, book at least 3 hours, which gives you about 20 minutes for each of the 9 exercises, with a 5–10 minute break after Brand Core.

Split across the diary, run three sessions of roughly two hours, one per section, at 30 to 40 minutes per exercise, which is the pace I set on my Miro template.

What you hand over after the wrap-up is listed in brand strategy deliverables.

In person or remote

In person, I rent a meeting room with at least 2 whiteboards and a TV to display the guide.

If meeting your client in person is not an option, run the workshop on Zoom, Google Meet or Teams with a Miro or FigJam board, now that Skype has been retired.

I’ve also done a combination of both, where I run a whiteboard session over a video call, while my client fills out the worksheets with a pen.

My walkthrough of running these sessions remotely comes with The Brand Strategy Guide.

Here is my walkthrough of running one of these sessions in person.

Rules for the facilitator and the participants

Here are the three principles that provide the foundation for what makes the workshop powerful.

• Live — Get all decision makers in the room or on a video conference call
• Visual — Document everything in a visual way where everyone can see it
• Fun — Make them feel comfortable to share ideas without reservation

It’s also important to ask participants to not veto, contradict or counter any suggestion a team member makes.

And as a facilitator, you need to:

• Control the agenda.
• Remain empathetic.
• Be encouraging.

What to do when the room disagrees

Disagreement is not a problem to solve in the session, it is a decision to surface and park.

The timer does most of the work, because it ends circular debate for you.

It is the same speed beats accuracy rule, so park the contested answer, move on, and come back to it after the break.

Before anyone speaks, have everyone write their answer silently on sticky notes, so that the loudest voice in the room does not anchor everybody else.

When two options both survive, take a quick vote and let the decision maker break the tie.

And when a client cannot state a purpose at all, go back to the stories of when they felt most proud to do their work.

What to say first

Note: From now on, use this article as your script.

This is what you say as a facilitator — just repeat after me, memorize it, or at least try to remember key concepts.

Let’s get started.

So first, let me give you a quick overview of what we’re going to accomplish today.

The brand strategy framework is divided into 3 sections, which you can see on the animation above.

Firstly, we’re going to clarify your brand internally, starting with your brand core: your brand purpose, your brand vision and your brand values.

Secondly, we’re going to position your brand in the market, which includes your target audience, your market research and your awareness goals.

And thirdly, we’re going to define your brand persona, which includes your brand personality, your brand voice and your brand tagline.

I’m going to draw each exercise on the whiteboard, but you can take notes for yourself by using the worksheets provided.

And we’re going to set timer for each exercise, and it’s important to do it fast rather than being super accurate — speed is more important than accuracy.

Don’t worry about being perfect in your answers, because it’s also going to change and evolve.

Let’s jump right into the first section — defining the core of your brand.

Section 1: Brand Core — purpose, vision and values

Your brand core is the internal half of your brand, and it holds three answers: why you exist, where you are going, and how you behave.

Let’s start with your brand core, which includes your purpose, your vision, and your core values.

And this is the part of strategy that most skip over.

Before they buy anything, people now read your reviews, look up your founders and check what you say you stand for.

And when your brand knows who it is, knows where it’s going and knows why it’s here, customers can feel that authenticity and will stick around because of it.

Internally it unites the team and helps make decisions that are “on brand”.

Purpose is your WHY, vision is your WHERE, and values are your HOW.

My framework deliberately uses those three labels and folds mission into purpose and positioning, because a mission statement usually repeats one of the two.

Companies use all four labels loosely, so classify a statement by the question it answers rather than by the word printed above it.

If you need the mission version specifically, I collected mission statement examples separately.

Those definitions come from Collins and Porras in Building Your Company’s Vision and from Graham Kenny’s HBR follow-up.

Exercise 1: Brand Purpose

Firstly, we’re going to find the purpose behind what you do.

What’s the greater good behind your work?

Here you need to know why you’re in business and talk about it to rally your team and foster connection with your audience.

Why brand purpose matters

Brand purpose is a higher order reason for a brand to exist, other than just making a profit.

Collins and Porras add the distinction that matters in the room: a purpose is never completed, unlike a goal you can tick off.

Be careful with the money claims you repeat here, because most of them are marketing rather than evidence.

In PwC’s 2024 Voice of the Consumer survey people said they would pay 9.7% more on average for sustainably produced goods, which is stated intent rather than observed behavior.

How to run the brand purpose exercise

You have 20 minutes, and this is how I split them.

1. 4 min — draw the Golden Circle and fill the WHAT, the HOW and the WHY.
2. 2 min — pick a cause.
3. 5 min — write the contribution from your proudest stories, using at least 3 action verbs.
4. 3 min — write 3 impact statements.
5. 5 min — combine contribution and impact, then redraft.
6. 1 min — copy the statement into the main Strategy Worksheet.

We’re going to use the Golden Circle concept developed by Simon Sinek, the author of the bestselling book Start With Why.

Draw: three concentric circles, and label the outside circle “what”, the middle circle “how”, and the inner circle “why”.

First, in the outer circle, list your WHATs.

WHAT — List all the products you sell, the services you offer, or the jobs you perform.

Next, in the middle circle, let’s list your HOWs.

HOW — all the values, actions and guiding principles that make you stand out.

Call it your differentiating value proposition, your proprietary services or your unique selling proposition — anything that explains how you’re different or better.

And finally, let’s state your WHY.

Why you do what you do, and when I say WHY I don’t mean to make money — that’s a result.

WHY — Why does your company exist? What’s your purpose, cause or belief?

Sinek asks it the same way in Start With Why.

“Why does your company exist? Why did you get out of bed this morning?” — Simon Sinek, Start With Why

And here you can link what you do to one of the causes that help people, animals or the planet.

Now we need a few examples of contribution and impact.

CONTRIBUTION — Think about specific stories of when you’ve felt most proud to do your work.

The contribution starts with an action verb, because our ultimate aim is to make your purpose actionable.

IMPACT — What did the contributions of your organization allow others to do or to be?

Let’s come up with 3 impact statements.

Spend a few minutes combining your contribution with your impact to draft your purpose statement.

The outcome of each exercise goes into the main Strategy Worksheet, so that we’re going to end up with 1 page strategy sheet.

Causes and action verbs to choose from

When the room cannot name a cause, give them a list to react to instead of an empty circle.

That sheet is adapted from the UN Sustainable Development Goals.

The causes on it run from ending poverty, hunger and poor health to quality education, gender equality, clean water, clean energy, decent work and climate action.

Then look at the list of action verbs and pick at least 3 that capture the essence of your contribution best.

The sheet groups the verbs by what they do, from define, describe and explain through discover, teach and connect to design, invent and inspire.

Brand purpose statement template

A purpose statement template:

That contribution-plus-impact format comes from Find Your Why by Simon Sinek, David Mead and Peter Docker (2017).

Brand purpose example

The clearest small-company example I can point at today is Tony’s Chocolonely, which says it exists to end exploitation in the cocoa industry by fighting poverty, child labor and deforestation.

That purpose is not a slogan, because since June 2023 a Mission Lock golden share and three independent Mission Guardians stop a future owner from quietly changing it.

At the other end of the scale, Coca-Cola publishes a much broader purpose, to refresh the world and make a difference.

It shows how wide a purpose can get before it stops guiding any decision.

And purposes do evolve, because Tesla retired “accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable energy” in January 2026.

Brand purpose: common mistake

The most common mistake is a purpose that is really a product description, such as “to make great software”.

The second is a profit goal dressed up as a cause, such as “to become the market leader in our category”.

If your purpose could be completed, or if a competitor could sign it without changing anything, it is not a purpose yet.

Go deeper with my collection of brand purpose statements.

Once we’ve found your brand purpose, now let’s look into the future and define your vision.

Exercise 2: Brand Vision

Secondly, you need a vision of where you’re going.

Where is your brand heading?

Here we want to influence long-term business decisions to ensure that your brand is navigated toward the right direction.

Why brand vision matters

A vision is what the organization wishes to be like in some years’ time, which is Graham Kenny’s definition and the one I use in the room.

So if your purpose was WHY, then your vision is WHERE — Where you’re going.

Collins and Porras put the horizon at 10 to 30 years, which is what the 5, 10 and 15 year timeline is walking you toward.

Remember that the vision needs to be big enough that both the challenge and possibility of achieving it are audacious and intimidating.

Although it should be bold, achieving it needs to be a possibility, so that the team buys into it.

How to run the brand vision exercise

Twenty minutes again, split like this.

1. 2 min — draw the timeline and write the Now column.
2. 4 min — the 5 year prompt.
3. 4 min — the 10 year prompt.
4. 4 min — the 15 year prompt.
5. 3 min — the aspiration and the ideal.
6. 3 min — combine, redraft, and copy the statement into the worksheet.

Draw: a timeline on the whiteboard, labeled Now, 5, 10 and 15 years into the future.

Now, let’s write a short description of the current state of your business.

So where are you now, in terms of business metrics such as company size, customer base, market share and lifetime value?

Of course if you’re a startup, you just write down overall things like: we invested X amount in this project, burn X amount each month, have a website.

Where do you see your brand in 5 years in terms of growth?

This is the destination you want the brand or business to reach, so let’s dream big and write everything down.

What will your brand look like in 10 years?

How big will it be, and what market share will you have?

And what other products or services could you possibly offer?

Will you expand to other locations or to other categories?

What impact will you have on your industry in 15 years?

15 years is hard to predict, but this is not about being accurate.

It is about avoiding the mistake of spreading yourself thin, and staying on track with a bigger vision instead.

And now, let’s talk about your ultimate aspiration.

ASPIRATION — If it all goes right, how will you impact the category you’re in?

Here you can use superlatives like “The world’s best”.

And finally, let’s define the ideal future state — your final destination or desired end state.

What would the world look like if this problem was solved?

Remember here to be simple and concrete, and avoid any buzzwords or jargon.

Then put the finished statement into the main Strategy Worksheet, exactly as you did with your purpose.

Brand vision statement template

A vision statement template:

It might take a few tries, so spend a few minutes combining your aspiration with your category, or simply use your ideal as your vision statement.

Brand vision example

IKEA has run the same ideal-style vision for decades, “to create a better everyday life for the many people”.

It is short, concrete and free of jargon, which is the whole brief for this exercise.

LinkedIn is useful because it publishes a vision and a mission side by side.

The vision is to create economic opportunity for every member of the global workforce, which is an end state.

The mission is to connect the world’s professionals to make them more productive and successful, which is what the company does today.

The superlative pattern is older: in the 2000s McDonald’s aimed to be the world’s best quick-service restaurant experience, and today it publishes a purpose and a mission instead.

Brand vision: common mistake

The most common mistake is a vision that is really next year’s revenue target.

The second is a paragraph of jargon that nobody in the room can picture.

If you cannot draw it, it is not a vision yet.

Go deeper in my guide to brand vision, or browse more vision statement examples.

Exercise 3: Brand Values

And thirdly, let’s determine your core values and philosophies.

What are your guiding principles?

Define your brand values and create a culture and driving force for what to stand for in the world.

Why brand values matter

Core values are basically the compass that points to the true North of your business success.

Collins and Porras define them as a small set of three to five enduring tenets, and Kenny calls them a behavioral compass, which is the same metaphor from a different direction.

This is about how you DO things, so it’s more about the experience that your customers, suppliers and the wider public will have with your brand.

How to run the brand values exercise

Twenty minutes, and this one moves fast.

1. 2 min — draw the grid.
2. 4 min — at least 3 negative experiences.
3. 3 min — at least 3 negative feelings.
4. 4 min — flip them into the desirable experiences.
5. 3 min — the positive feelings those experiences would leave.
6. 4 min — pick 3 to 5 values, describe each, and copy them into the worksheet.

I see often people choose random values that just sound “nice” or “noble”.

But choosing standard values like “honest” or “timely” or “reliable” won’t help you stand out from the crowd in any significant way.

And this is because it’s not really actionable, so your team won’t know how to put it in practice and communicate it to the world.

Richard Branson made the same point from the other side in Business Stripped Bare.

“Too many companies want their brands to reflect some idealized, perfected image of themselves. As a consequence their brands acquire no texture, no character.” — Richard Branson

So how can you dig deeper?

Draw: a 2 x 2 grid, label the columns negative and positive, and then label the rows Experiences and Feelings.

So first of all, forget about idealized perfections — let’s start actually with things you don’t like.

Describe negative experiences you had with brands in your or similar category

And here you can even check negative reviews on the internet to see what customers don’t like about your competitors.

So in the first cell let’s list at least 3 negative experiences.

How did that bad experience make you feel internally?

So here, list at least 3 negative feelings.

What’d be desirable experience that you wish you had instead?

Here, turn negative into positive.

How would that positive experience make you feel internally?

Lastly, find values that you would like to adopt to ensure designing those positive experiences and feelings.

Find a list of common brand values and pick 3 to 5 that fit best.

And then describe them shortly — what they stand for, what they mean to you.

Once you’ve found your 3 to 5 core values, put them into the main Strategy Worksheet, as you did with the other outcomes.

Brand values statement template

A brand values template:

Repeat that line 3 to 5 times and stop, because a sixth value is one nobody will remember.

Brand values example

Atlassian publishes five values written in its own voice, and the first one is “Open company, no bullshit”.

Nobody would mistake that for a competitor’s value, and that is the entire test.

IKEA is the second case, because every value carries the behavior with it, like cost-consciousness, which it describes as making more from less without compromising on quality.

Values also get replaced, and Coca-Cola swapped its older list — leadership, collaboration, integrity, accountability, passion and diversity — for four growth behaviors: curious, empowered, inclusive and agile.

Brand values: common mistake

The most common mistake is table stakes — integrity, quality, teamwork — with no description of the behavior underneath.

Collins and Porras give you the test in one question: would you keep this value even if it became a competitive disadvantage?

If the answer is no, it is a preference, not a value.

Go deeper with my collection of core values examples.

That’s it when it comes to the first section of our brand strategy toolkit.

And here we can take a 5-10 min break to grab a coffee or use the bathroom.

Ok so now, let’s move onto the 2nd part of our brand strategy, which is positioning.

Section 2: Brand Positioning — audience, market and awareness

Since you’ve defined your brand internally, now let’s position your brand externally — in the marketplace.

In the 2nd section, we’re going to develop your positioning strategy, which includes your target audience, your market research and your awareness goals.

Because look, positioning is all about perception.

Positioning is what you do to the mind of the customer, so positioning happens in the minds of the target audience.

That idea is Al Ries and Jack Trout’s, from Positioning (1981), where the word they use is prospect rather than customer.

“Positioning is not what you do to a product; it is what you do to the mind of a prospect.” — Al Ries, Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind

Kotler says the same thing in one line: positioning designs the offering and image to occupy a distinctive place in the mind of the target market.

And just to give you an example — let’s think of 3 luxury car brands.

Perhaps you think of brands like Mercedes, BMW and Audi.

Now let’s do the opposite — let’s think of affordable car brands.

Perhaps you think of Hyundai, Ford and Toyota?

Whichever brand comes to your mind, this brand was able to take a specific position in your mind.

However, different customers can position brands differently, based on their lifestyle and experiences.

A certain audience could say that Lexus is an affordable car and wouldn’t even consider buying a Ford or Toyota.

That’s why we need to start with getting to know your audience first, so that we can understand and resonate with them.

I collected 22 brand positioning examples separately.

So let’s jump into the 4th exercise overall — your target audience.

Exercise 4: Target Audience

Now, we need to get to know your target audience in order to resonate with them.

So, who’s your primary customer?

Here we get to understand your audience well enough to address their problems and needs.

Why target audience matters

Your target audience is the group your brand is built to serve, and a customer persona is the named profile of its most common member.

HubSpot calls that profile a fictional representation of a company’s ideal customer, built from market research and real customer data rather than from a hunch.

And we do this to uncover the emotions they go through, so that we can connect with them on a human level.

In Building a StoryBrand, Donald Miller argues that the goal of branding is for every potential customer to know exactly where you want to take them.

His character and problem sit in this grid: the customer is the hero, and your brand is the guide that removes the problem.

How to run the target audience exercise

Twenty minutes, and the goals cell takes the biggest slice.

1. 2 min — Name the customer.
2. 5 min — Goals.
3. 4 min — Problems.
4. 3 min — Feelings.
5. 3 min — Desires.
6. 3 min — Circle the findings and write the description.

Draw: a 2 by 2 grid labeled Goals, Problems, Feelings and Desires, with a circle in the middle.

Then read the prompts out, one cell at a time.

Pick a name for the most common customer, and give him or her a simple label in the middle circle.

For example, “Ana, first-time founder in her early 30s” or “Operations director at a 50-person logistics firm”.

GOALS — What objectives and goals they have as it relates to your offering? What kind of strategic aspirations or hopes they might have?

List here as many goals as you can in 5 minutes.

PROBLEMS — What are the problems your customers face before they can get what they want? What are their pain-points and core challenges?

FEELINGS — What do they fear because of those problems? What emotions and feelings do they go through?

DESIRES — What’d be the desirable experience? Imagine the best case scenario, and the opposite of these problems and fears.

Circle the most important findings in order to describe our target audience in 1 or 2 short sentences.

And we’re going for quantity over quality, because later we can eliminate the less important facts.

Here’s the thing: speed is more important than accuracy, and we will adjust this later and dig deeper.

And then we put this outcome in the main Strategy Worksheet.

Target audience statement template

A target audience description template:

Target audience example

Stanley sold the same flask to workmen for more than a century before it changed who the brand was for.

The Buy Guide, a women-run shopping site, proved that women wanted the Quencher, so Stanley rebuilt its colors and drops around her.

Revenue went from about $73M in 2019 to a projected $750M in 2023, according to CNBC.

Same product, different primary customer.

Target audience: common mistake

The common mistake is a persona built on demographics only, with nothing in the problems and feelings cells.

The other one is trying to serve everyone, which is the fastest way to resonate with nobody.

Now, since we’ve created the overall target audience profile, let’s analyze your marketplace to find your differentiator.

Exercise 5: Market Research

In the fifth exercise we’re going to analyze your competitors to find opportunities.

Who are your direct competitors?

Here we’re going to look for gaps in the market to find your differentiator — how you can stand out and stand for something.

Why market research matters

Market research in this framework means mapping the alternatives your customer already has.

April Dunford defines competitive alternatives in Obviously Awesome as what your customers would do if you did not exist, which often means doing nothing at all.

I see many entrepreneurs look at their competitors for inspiration — their identity, website, offering and social posts.

When you look at your competitors, your goal is to set yourself apart, not to copy.

So you must look at them from the point of view of your shared audience and see what options they already have in the market and where the market is under-served.

“Marketers can choose to stand for something. Instead of saying ‘You can choose anyone, and we’re anyone.’” — Seth Godin, This Is Marketing

So let’s go to the extremes and find that edge — let’s stand for something, not everything.

If you are repositioning, run a brand audit first and bring its findings here.

How to run the market research exercise

Plotting the competitors takes the biggest slice of the twenty minutes.

1. 4 min — Choose the two axes.
2. 6 min — Plot the competitors.
3. 3 min — Read the landscape.
4. 5 min — Write the differentiator.
5. 2 min — State the end-benefit.

Draw: a simple XY grid, and ask participants to pick one extreme for each axis.

Then read the prompts out, one step at a time.

AXES — For each axis choose something that people care about, and it could be something like convenience, price, speed or skill level.

PLOT — Plot the options your audience have on this chart, because here we want to list 5 to 10 competitors.

LANDSCAPE — Look at the landscape you have drawn and think about what you can do differently.

DIFFERENTIATOR — What can your brand or product say that no one else can say?

Are we claiming superiority or exclusiveness over other products or services in your category?

Write it down beside the grid.

BENEFIT — State the end-benefit to your customers. Not features, but benefits.

Every industry is different and you know your space far better than I do, so you may come up with extremes more relevant to what you do.

Seth Godin makes this concrete in This Is Marketing (2018), with six ways to get diamonds across town plotted on speed against security.

An armored truck and the postal service both insure the envelope, but one takes an afternoon and the other takes weeks.

A bike messenger is faster if you ignore security, and a stamp is fine if you care about neither.

The point is that each option is appropriate, depending on what you seek.

Can you see how this chart would be totally different if the axes were convenience and cost instead?

As a business you can do many different things, but as a brand you want to be known for ONE thing.

Not one product or one service, but one idea.

Volvo is known for safety, which it earned by opening up its three-point seatbelt patent in 1959.

BMW has been “The Ultimate Driving Machine” since 1974, and Mercedes-Benz says “The best or nothing”.

State what the brand does for the audience that is emotional and intangible.

Coca-Cola’s end-benefit could be “feel energetic and vibrant” and Dove’s “feel confident and glowing”, though both are my illustrations, not official wording.

Positioning statement template

A positioning statement template:

Marty Neumeier’s onliness statement is a sharper test of the same idea: our brand is the only [category] that [difference].

More examples are in my guide to writing a positioning statement.

Now, remember to write the positioning statement in the main Strategy Worksheet.

Market research example

Put bottled water on a grid of healthy against unhealthy and boring against entertaining, and every brand sits in healthy and boring.

Liquid Death took the empty corner, healthy and entertaining, with tallboy cans and “Murder your thirst”.

It was valued at $1.4B in March 2024, selling water.

poppi positioned itself against soda rather than against health drinks, and PepsiCo agreed to buy it for $1.95 billion in March 2025.

Market research: common mistake

The common mistake is a statement that names no real alternative, because “unlike other agencies” is not a choice your customer is weighing.

The second is picking axes your company cares about, like years in business, instead of axes the customer cares about.

One counterweight from Byron Sharp and Jenni Romaniuk in How Brands Grow Part 2: brands grow by being noticed and remembered, so position for meaning, then be recognizably you everywhere.

Ok, so now let’s prioritize awareness goals, so that we can start acting upon your positioning.

Exercise 6: Awareness Goals

In the sixth exercise, we’re going to set marketing goals to bring awareness.

How will customers find out about you?

Here, we’re going to brainstorm and prioritize how customers can learn about your brand.

Why awareness goals matter

Your awareness goals are the prioritized list of ways customers will discover your brand, and the list scopes the branding project.

This is NOT marketing strategy, but we need to run this exercise to get clarity and define the scope of work for this branding project.

The other reason to run it now is the Ehrenberg-Bass finding from earlier, that most business buyers are out of the market at any one moment.

So this work is for the buyer who will need you in two years.

How to run the awareness goals exercise

This one starts with a long list, so spend the twenty minutes in this order.

1. 6 min — List every initiative.
2. 2 min — Add today’s channels.
3. 3 min — Judge the effort.
4. 2 min — Place it on the X axis.
5. 3 min — Judge the impact.
6. 4 min — Repeat until the grid is full.

Draw: a similar XY grid to the previous exercise, then label the Y axis high/low impact and the X axis easy/difficult.

Then read the prompts out, one item at a time.

LIST — List all the marketing initiatives that you can take to bring awareness on the left side of the grid.

Sample awareness goals would be: website, blog, stationery, business cards, social media, email marketing, trade shows.

CHANNELS — Add the channels that matter now: LinkedIn, a newsletter, a podcast, partnerships, and visibility inside AI search answers.

EFFORT — Is it easy or difficult to do? How long does it take to complete? How much does it cost?

PLACE — Move it onto the X axis where it makes most sense.

IMPACT — What kind of impact would this initiative make on your business?

REPEAT — Do this with each of the items until everything sits on the grid.

Would designing a website bring you awareness and make you money?

Probably yes, so it’s probably high impact.

Once we have every item on the grid, it works like this.

The examples are illustrative, and the workshop decides where each initiative really lands.

Watch the fourth rule, because it is the one people get wrong: difficult and low impact is what you ignore for now.

Awareness goals template

A prioritized awareness goals template:

And that’s about it — if everything looks right to you, let’s translate the prioritized awareness goals into the main Strategy Worksheet.

Awareness goals example

Duolingo is my clearest difficult and high impact example.

Building an in-house social team around the Duo mascot took years.

Sprout Social documented how that account grew past a million followers on trend-led videos rather than on ad spend.

Awareness goals: common mistake

The common mistake is turning this into a full marketing plan, which is a different project with a different budget.

The second one is marking everything high impact, which leaves you with no priority at all.

This list is the hand-off into marketing strategy, and the boundary is drawn in brand strategy vs brand identity vs marketing strategy.

So we’ve completed the 2nd part of our strategy workshop, and the 3rd and last part is all about your brand’s personality, voice and tagline.

Section 3: Brand Persona — personality, voice and tagline

Brand persona is the human character your brand shows in public: its personality, its voice and its tagline.

In the 3rd section, we’re going to develop your brand persona, which includes your brand personality, your brand voice and your brand tagline.

Here, we’re going to focus on making a human connection with your audience.

Because reviews, social replies and AI assistants describe your brand when nobody from your company is in the room.

So the character has to be consistent enough that a stranger repeats it correctly.

Mark and Pearson’s argument in The Hero and the Outlaw (2001) is that archetypes connect what a customer is motivated by to what a brand sells.

And the way we do that is by identifying your brand personality, then projecting the right voice, and finally nailing it down with a memorable tagline.

So that we can create a brand persona, a real character that they can trust and feel connected to.

Exercise 7: Brand Personality

In the seventh exercise we’re going to define the personality of your brand.

If your brand was a person who’d it be?

Here we’re going to give your brand a human side by defining its personality, in order to build a relationship with your customers.

Why brand personality matters

Brand personality is the set of human characteristics associated with a brand, which is Jennifer Aaker’s definition from 1997.

If you want a validated academic model, she scores brands on sincerity, excitement, competence, sophistication and ruggedness.

In the room I use archetypes instead, because a client can pick one in ten minutes and a five-factor score needs a survey.

Carl Jung introduced the archetype concept, as models of people, behaviors, or personalities.

The 12 brand archetypes and the four groupings below are Margaret Mark and Carol Pearson’s, from The Hero and the Outlaw.

“Archetypes provide the missing link between customer motivation and product sales.” — Carol Pearson, The Hero and the Outlaw

For example, Yoda is the Sage in Star Wars, Indiana Jones is the Explorer, and Maximus is the Hero in the Gladiator.

You might end up with 70% of the core archetype and then 30% of the secondary archetype for differentiation, which is my own working rule, not theirs.

How to run the brand personality exercise

Drawing the wheel takes the biggest single slice of the twenty minutes.

1. 5 min — draw the archetype wheel and fly through all twelve.
2. 3 min — identify the core desire of your audience.
3. 4 min — decide what role your brand plays in their lives.
4. 3 min — mark the core and the secondary archetype on the wheel.
5. 2 min — set the percentage ratio.
6. 3 min — answer what you love and what you hate, then copy both into the worksheet.

Draw: the archetype wheel, while shortly explaining what all twelve stand for.

The first core desire, exploring spirituality, is common for the Innocent, the Sage and the Explorer, who all have yearning for paradise.

The second, leaving a legacy, is common for the Outlaw, the Magician and the Hero, who all want to leave a mark on the World and be remembered.

The third, connecting to others, is common for the Lover, the Jester and the Everyman, whether it is romance and love, mother love, or just belonging.

The fourth, providing structure, is common for the Caregiver, the Ruler and the Creator, who want to build something that wasn’t there before.

Look at the archetypal wheel and identify the core desire of your audience.

And based on that let’s think about what role your brand plays in their lives.

For example, if they desire power, it doesn’t necessarily mean that your brand should choose the Ruler archetype.

Because if your brand educates them to help them get that power, they are likely to be drawn to the Sage personality that demonstrates wisdom and knowledge.

What archetype would define your brand personality best?

Mark it on the wheel and decide on the percentage ratio.

The key and the trick is to keep your archetypal mix refined and focused.

Once we have that, then with your archetypal mix in mind, answer the two questions about what you (as a brand) love and hate.

Brand attitude statement template

You state what you love in order to connect, and what you hate in order to express empathy.

The example on my worksheet reads: we love revolution because we want to change the world for the better, and we hate regulations because they restrain our freedom of choice.

Then translate that attitude together with your archetypal mix to the main Strategy Worksheet.

Brand personality example

Liquid Death reads to me as an Outlaw with a Jester secondary, roughly that 70/30 mix, in a category full of Innocents.

Bottled water is usually pure and mountain-fresh, and this one sells tallboy cans and tells you to murder your thirst.

Duolingo reads as a Jester core with a Caregiver secondary: the owl jokes, then cheers you on.

Both readings are mine, not archetypes those companies declared.

Brand personality: common mistake

The mistake I see most is cherry-picking four or five archetypes, because each one sounds flattering.

By doing so, you will end up diluting your focus and therefore confusing your customers.

The second is picking the founder’s archetype instead of the role the brand plays for the audience.

My guide to brand personality goes deeper, and the $29 Brand Archetypes Course walks through all twelve.

Exercise 8: Brand Voice

In the eighth exercise, we’re going to project a compelling voice for your brand.

How do you want to sound to others?

Here, we’re going to define your voice to set guidelines for how you want to sound to your target audience.

Why brand voice matters

Brand voice is how the personality of your brand comes through the words you use.

Mailchimp puts the rule well: you have the same voice all the time, but your tone changes with the situation.

Tone of Voice is essentially, an extension of your personality.

Your tone is not only about how you speak, but also the words you use and how you use them: cadence and rhythm, velocity, and length.

For example, do you speak fast or with a drawl?

Are you loud and bombastic or quiet and reserved?

Do you speak in long, ornate sentences?

Do you use industry jargon or plain English?

How to run the brand voice exercise

The four sliders take the biggest slice of the twenty minutes.

1. 2 min — draw the four sliders.
2. 2 min — revisit the target audience profile.
3. 2 min — reread the personality you just chose.
4. 8 min — move all four sliders, two minutes each.
5. 5 min — write two to four limit statements, with a sample sentence each.
6. 1 min — copy them into the worksheet.

Draw: four horizontal sliders and label each end: funny or serious, casual or formal, sassy or respectful, enthusiastic or matter-of-fact.

Those axes follow the Nielsen Norman Group’s four dimensions of tone of voice, from Kate Moran’s research, where the third pair is respectful or irreverent.

First, let’s revisit your target audience profile.

Your tone of voice should feel familiar to them, so your voice needs to come off as someone they’d get along with.

Second, look at the personality you just chose, because your voice must align or complement it.

Third, move each slider while the room watches.

Funny or Serious? Are you trying to be humorous?

Or is the subject approached in a more serious way?

So simply let’s move the slider toward the left or the right side — What do you think?

Casual or Formal? Are you formal and keep it professional at all cost?

Or more informal and casual?

Sassy or Respectful? Do you approach the subject in a respectful way?

Or do you take a sassy approach?

Where does your brand live on the spectrum?

Enthusiastic or Matter-of-fact? Are you excited about the offer?

Do you seem to be enthusiastic about the subject?

Or is the writing dry and matter-of-fact?

Fourth, write two to four limit statements, and give each one a sample sentence that shows where the line is.

Brand voice statement template

Once you’ve completed the voice sliders exercise, fill in the blanks “We are X, But we are not Y”.

And finally, let’s translate those sentences describing your voice to the main Strategy Worksheet.

Brand voice example

Mailchimp’s public content style guide describes a voice that is plainspoken and genuine with dry humor, and puts clarity above entertainment.

Monzo publishes its tone of voice as three principles: straightforward kindness, everyday magic and warm wit.

Copy that format, because each principle comes with guidance on how to apply it, point by point.

And GEICO is still the clearest case of a funny voice in a traditionally serious industry.

Brand voice: common mistake

The usual failure is a chart of adjectives with no do and don’t examples, which nobody can write from.

The second is a voice that contradicts the archetype you just picked, like an Outlaw brand writing corporate apologies.

My guide to brand voice has more examples.

And if you’re working on a marketing project such as a website, emails or ads, check my complementary brand story framework.

Exercise 9: Brand Tagline

In the ninth exercise, we’re going to craft a memorable tagline to seal the deal.

What is your mantra that creates interest?

Here, we’re going to distill your message to a selection of a few concise and memorable words that tell the story of your brand.

Why brand tagline matters

We need to define what we want our audience to remember us for, and an easy to remember tagline is key.

While your positioning statement is for internal purpose, your tagline is for external purpose — it’s customer facing, but your tagline should be aligned with your positioning.

So now, what’s the difference between a tagline and a slogan?

Alina Wheeler draws the line in Designing Brand Identity: a tagline belongs to the brand for years and distills its positioning and personality, while a slogan is shaped around a specific campaign.

It’s common that brands often adopt their most successful slogans as their tagline.

In the Ipsos and JKR study of distinctive brand assets, only 6% of the slogans tested were truly distinctive.

That is why we brainstorm many options and judge the shortlist against the positioning, not by taste.

How to run the brand tagline exercise

Twenty minutes, and fifteen of them are pure brainstorming.

1. 3 min — draw the mind map and pull keywords from exercises 1 to 8.
2. 3 min — imperative taglines.
3. 3 min — descriptive taglines.
4. 3 min — superlative taglines.
5. 3 min — provocative taglines.
6. 3 min — specific taglines.
7. 2 min — judge the options against the positioning, then circle three.

First, let’s create a mind map.

Draw: the brand name in the center of the whiteboard, then branches that point away from the center.

Each branch symbolizes a different thought or idea related to your brand.

So look at all the previous exercises and highlight the most important keywords that could work as thoughts or ideas.

From each branch more ideas can branch off, so there is no limit to the number of levels on your map.

Here we can use a thesaurus to look for synonyms and related words or phrases.

You should end up with a whole bunch of keywords on one page or one whiteboard.

Second, we have 5 categories of taglines, and the instruction is simple.

Create a couple options for each category.

The five categories, and most of the classic examples, come from Wheeler’s book.

Let’s look at our mind map and set timer for 3 minutes to brainstorm as many Imperative Taglines as you can.

Then repeat the same three minutes for Descriptive, Superlative, Provocative and Specific.

Third, once we have at least a couple options for each category, let’s judge them against our positioning strategy.

That way we can select 3 strongest candidates and circle them and put them in our main Strategy Worksheet.

Brand tagline shortlist template

Write the three survivors in one place, with the category each came from.

Brand tagline example

TED ran “Ideas worth spreading” for about two decades, then switched to “Ideas change everything” in 2024.

The first describes what TED does, the second claims what the ideas are for, which is a positioning decision rather than a copywriting one.

Brand tagline: common mistake

The first mistake is writing the tagline before the positioning exists, so you decorate a decision you never made.

The second is writing it by committee, where every objection is accommodated until nothing sharp is left.

More patterns are in my guide to brand slogans.

That is the ninth and last exercise, so let’s close the session and look at what you walk away with.

What you get at the end: brand strategy deliverables

A brand strategy workshop produces three deliverables: one filled page, nine written statements and a presentation deck that explains them to everyone else.

How to wrap up the workshop

Thank you for participating in this workshop.

Thank all participants for their time and input.

We’ve gone through many exercises and this is going to help us design relevant concepts.

So that ultimately we can build a successful brand that your customers will love.

Before anyone leaves, hold up the worksheet.

Collect all the notes or take pictures — don’t forget to record everything.

Speed mattered in the session, accuracy matters now, so the raw answers get edited into final statements.

What each exercise owes you

Every exercise owes you one filled box on the worksheet.

Two of those three are documents you hand over: the one-page Strategy Worksheet and the strategy presentation, which The Brand Strategy Guide calls the Strategy Brief.

Copy the one-page brand strategy template

Here are all nine formulas in the order you fill them.

A filled brand strategy example

This is the same page filled in for a fictional New York travel-guide brand, and it follows the layout of the one-page Strategy Worksheet above.

For famous brands see my brand strategy examples, and for newer ones the best brand strategy examples.

The brand strategy presentation

The presentation explains the nine statements to everyone who was not in the room.

A real client version sits in my brand strategy presentation template, built from the session I ran for Periti Digital.

If you are the marketing lead, this deck is what you circulate for leadership sign-off.

Treat it as a working document rather than a monument, because the strategy will change and evolve.

From brand strategy to brand identity

The finished strategy is the design brief, so every identity decision should trace back to one of the nine answers.

Where brand strategy sits in the branding process

Strategy is the second of four moves, and it is where the discovery work turns into decisions.

In my seven-step branding process the same work sits inside the research stage, before a single sketch.

How the nine answers become design decisions

Each of the nine answers points at a different design decision.

• The audience and the competitor grid say what the category looks like and where to break from it.
• The archetype mix steers typography, color and imagery.
• The voice statements steer headlines and naming style.
• The tagline shortlist steers the lockup.
• The awareness goals decide which touchpoints get designed first.

For Fox Berman that meant legal authority without the expected restraint.

A custom wordmark and a vivid orange palette carried it.

For Wingnut I elevated the identity for a high-end audience and positioned the business as the expert in its category.

For Medihuanna I positioned an education provider as a leading voice in medicinal cannabis.

It has medical credibility and no clinical complexity.

For Periti Digital the verbal positioning and the identity came out of the same session.

My full method for the hand-off is in translate brand strategy into design.

How to tell whether your brand strategy is working

You know it is working when customers describe the brand the way your one page does.

On the numbers, track awareness, consideration and the price premium you can hold.

Run a brand audit when any of them moves.

When to revisit your brand strategy

Revisit it on a trigger: a rebrand, new ownership, a new audience, a repositioning, or a team that has drifted.

Ownership is the sharpest of those, which is why I wrote about rebranding after an acquisition.

Once a year, check whether the touchpoints still match the one page.

Then check whether new hires can repeat the positioning without reading it.

Keep two ideas separate: the strategy is the plan, while brand equity is the accumulated result.

That holds whether you take Aaker’s definition or Keller’s.

If the brand needs a name next, my brand naming framework runs the same way.

And the brand story framework picks up where Exercise 8 left off.

Can AI build a brand strategy?

AI can draft a brand strategy in minutes, but it cannot decide what your company believes or which customers you are willing to lose.

What AI does well, and what needs people

The split is simple: machines are good at options, people at commitments.

AI is genuinely good at four jobs:

• Drafting personas for Exercise 4.
• Summarizing competitors and reviews for Exercise 5.
• Generating tagline options by category for Exercise 9.
• Tidying messy workshop notes into clean statements.

People still have to make four decisions:

• The purpose.
• Which three to five values survive.
• The positioning trade-off, meaning what you will not be.
• The archetype.

So the workflow is: run the workshop, paste your real answers into the tool, generate options, then let the decision makers choose.

Run the framework with AI Brand Strategist

Tired of having to learn to do it all?

I get it, as a designer I love designing too!

That’s why I built AI Brand Strategist on these same nine steps.

It walks you through my framework, asks questions, suggests ideas, and once you approve them it writes them down.

You can use it alone or with your client, and it creates a strategy deck on Google Slides in your own account.

The product overview sits on my AI brand strategy tool page.

For a general chatbot I keep a set of ChatGPT brand strategy prompts, which work best when you feed them real workshop answers.

A longer Book of Prompts comes with The Brand Strategy Guide.

Brand strategy FAQ

What are the key elements of a brand strategy?

A brand strategy is the long-term plan for what a brand stands for, and it has nine key elements in three groups.

Brand Core covers purpose, vision and values.

Brand Positioning covers target audience, market research and awareness goals.

Brand Persona covers personality, voice and tagline.

Each of the nine brand strategy elements ends as one short written statement.

What is a brand strategy framework?

A brand strategy framework is a repeatable sequence of questions a team answers in one order, so opinions become written decisions.

Mine has nine steps in three sections: Brand Core, Brand Positioning and Brand Persona.

Each step is a timed exercise with a worksheet and a statement template.

What is the difference between brand strategy and brand identity?

Brand strategy is the plan, and brand identity is how that plan looks and sounds.

Strategy defines purpose, audience, positioning, personality and voice in words.

Identity expresses them through the logo, color, typography, imagery and copy.

I write the strategy first, so every design choice has a reason the client already agreed with.

What is the difference between brand strategy and marketing strategy?

Brand strategy decides what you mean to people over years, and marketing strategy decides how you reach buyers this year.

Brand strategy sets purpose, positioning and voice, and it changes rarely.

Marketing strategy sets channels, campaigns, budgets and targets, and it changes often.

In my framework, the awareness goals exercise is the hand-off between the two.

What comes first, brand strategy or the logo?

Brand strategy comes first.

A logo designed without one gets judged on taste, so feedback turns into opinions and extra rounds.

With purpose, audience, positioning and personality written on one page, I can explain every design choice, and the client can judge the work against decisions they already made.

How long does it take to develop a brand strategy?

The workshop itself takes three to six hours.

Book at least 3 hours for one sitting, which gives you about 20 minutes for each of the 9 exercises.

Or run three 2-hour sessions at 30 to 40 minutes per exercise.

Refining the statements and building the presentation happens afterwards.

How much does a brand strategy cost?

Doing it yourself costs your time.

The nine exercises, the worksheet images and the statement templates on this page are free, while the editable worksheet files come with the paid guide.

The Brand Strategy Guide, with the facilitator’s script, editable worksheets and the presentation deck, is $199.

A workshop I facilitate is priced per project, so I scope it on a call.

Who should attend a brand strategy workshop?

Everyone who can approve or veto the brand should attend, and nobody else.

That can be several stakeholders or a single founder.

Brief the CEO beforehand and enroll them as a partner in the process.

During the exercises, ask participants to not veto, contradict or counter any suggestion a team member makes.

Can AI create a brand strategy?

AI can draft a brand strategy, but it cannot make the decisions.

It is good at drafting personas, summarizing competitors and generating tagline options in seconds.

Purpose, values and positioning trade-offs need the people who run the business.

My AI Brand Strategist follows the same nine steps and asks you to approve each one.

How often should you update your brand strategy?

Review your brand strategy once a year and rewrite it only when the business changes.

Purpose and values should hold for years, while awareness goals and taglines change more often.

The usual triggers for a rewrite are a new audience, a new offer, a position competitors have copied, or a merger or acquisition.

What is an example of a brand strategy?

A finished brand strategy is nine short statements on one page, not a document nobody reads.

The filled example on this page is a New York travel guide for first-time visitors with three days.

It runs from a purpose about meeting real New Yorkers through an Explorer personality to three tagline candidates.

How do you measure whether a brand strategy is working?

You measure it by whether customers describe the brand the way your one-page brand strategy does.

On the numbers, watch awareness, consideration and the price premium the brand can hold.

When any of the three moves, run a brand audit to find out which touchpoints drifted.

Get the full Brand Strategy Guide

Graphic designers (like John) are good at making beautiful things — I know I used to be one.

But running workshops brings real value to your clients and to your design practice as well.

Feel safe and strong about your process and as a result attract powerful clients.

You will be able to charge money for thinking, rather than having clients forcing their ideas onto you.

With a proven strategy framework, your clients will see you as a competent, strategic designer rather than just hands to do the design work.

And most importantly, you will level up as a designer, charge premium fees and run projects effortlessly.

What is inside

Everything in this article is free, and the guide is the packaged version I use with clients.

• An 89-page guidebook with the facilitator’s script.
• 13 video tutorials.
• Fillable and printable worksheets for InDesign, Illustrator, Photoshop, Keynote, PowerPoint, Google Slides and Canva.
• The editable Strategy Brief presentation deck.
• A Book of Prompts and the custom GPT.
• Lifetime access with free updates via Branding.study.

The Brand Strategy Guide is $199, bought once, updated for life.

Don’t be just a designer (like John), level up and become a strategist.

The naming and story guides come bundled with it in The Brand Master Bundle.

Keep learning

For structured lessons and the tools that go with them, I keep a list of brand strategy courses.

The books behind these nine steps are in my list of brand strategy books.

Want me to run your brand strategy workshop?

If you’re a CEO, founder or the marketing lead who needs leadership aligned, book me to run the workshop for you.

A brand strategist asks the nine questions, keeps the room to time, writes the statements and presents them back.

Hire one when the decision makers disagree, or when you are too close to the business to stay neutral.

Self-facilitate when you own the brand yourself.

I facilitate it in person and remotely, then write up the statements afterwards.

You leave with the one-page strategy and the strategy presentation, ready for identity design.

If you want it, I then carry the strategy into the identity and the website.

You can watch a case study of the tagline exercise on YouTube, and browse recent branding projects in my work.

Book a call and tell me about your project.