Skip to the good part? Not so fast.
Why skipping strategy is a shortcut to make expensive mistakes.
Everyone wants to get to the good part. The big idea. The beautiful creative. The campaign launch. The buzz. The results. Nobody walks into a marketing meeting and says, “You know what this needs? Three more weeks of rigorous strategic thinking.”
We get it. Strategy can feel like the bit that slows everything down before the real fun begins. The hard and uncomfortable truth is, the quality of your brand and marketing is only as good as the thinking behind it. And whilst everyone likes to think they’re a marketer, this is where the real skill of marrying the art and science separates the brands that win from the crowd.
You can have a cracking creative idea, a healthy media budget and an agency that makes everything look lovely. But if you're solving the wrong problem, talking to the wrong people or saying something nobody cares about, you're just making the wrong thing look expensive. Check your For Me Page, scroll your feed, or even dare to open your overflowing inbox of emails to see what we mean.
In recent weeks, a Senior Executive was overheard saying, “I don’t care how the sausage is made, I just want a good sausage.” A random analogy to make, yet a powerful one when you stop an think about it. So, let's get into how the sausage is actually made, and why it’s important to not take shortcuts.
Brand and Marketing
Related, but not the same!
Brand and marketing are often lumped together as though they're interchangeable. They're not!
Think of brand as the reason someone should choose you. Marketing is how you turn that reason into action. In our analogy of the sausage, brand is the ingredients that let’s you know it’s a sausage. Marketing is the display of that sausage in the butcher’s window.
Brand strategy defines who you are, establishes why you matter, builds meaning, distinction and trust to creates long-term value and the enduring reason to choose you.
Marketing strategy defines how you win in market, determines how you reach and persuade people, drives awareness, consideration and action, converts opportunity into measurable results, and is the plan for earning the choice of your brand, time and time again.
Brand gives marketing something meaningful to say. Marketing gets that meaning out into the world.
Without brand, marketing risks becoming a series of disconnected campaigns, chasing whatever happens to be trending this Tuesday. Without marketing, brand risks becoming a very expensive set of beliefs that nobody outside the business has heard of. When lumped together, and not managed for the different roles they play, they run the risk of only ever saying one thing and missing the important distinction of translating the brand into the action needed at the time to solve a commercial problem.
You need both. You need them working together.
The Brand Strategy Recipe
Know what you're bringing to the table
Good brand strategy isn't about choosing a nice colour palette or finding a clever line for the website. It's about making deliberate decisions about who you are, who you matter to and why anyone should care.
Here's the framework.
Audience — Who matters most? Define the people you need to connect with, not just a demographic segment that looks tidy in a spreadsheet, and not the Executive Leaders and their bias or preference. This is all about being clear on the customer you serve.
Insight — What do they really care about? Understand their needs, motivations, barriers and unmet expectations. Good insights are discovered, not brainstormed into existence, and rarely a copy and paste exercise.
Positioning — Why should they choose you? Establish a distinctive and relevant space in the market. If your competitors could all say the same thing, you haven't differentiated yourself.
Here’s an important distinction that we often see brands get wrong. Your positioning is a space in the market, or even more specifically, a space you hold in your customers mind when they’re considering your category or industry and drawing comparisons to your competitors. It is not the laundry list of your product features! Save those for your proof points. Your positioning should be the sum of the parts that makes you distinct and different from your competitors.
Promise — What do you stand for? Define the value and experience people should consistently expect from you. This can also be called your value proposition, and the translation of your positioning into the importance of why anyone should care.
Proof — Why should anyone believe you? Identify the evidence, capabilities, behaviours and experiences that make your promise credible.
These aren't documents for the sake of documents. They're the decision-making tools that help everyone, from leadership to creative teams, pull in the same direction for a brand with clarity, consistency and a compelling reason to exist.
The Marketing Strategy Recipe
Turn meaning into momentum
Now that we know what the brand stands for, marketing strategy determines how to turn that into action. This is where we get specific about commercial objectives, audience behaviour, channels, investment and measurement.
Here’s the framework:
Objective — What are we trying to achieve? Be precise and specific. Growth, awareness, consideration, acquisition and retention are different jobs. "Get more engagement" is not a strategy.
Audience — Who needs to do what differently? Prioritise the people most likely to influence your objectives, and understand where they are in their decision-making journey.
Insight — What will move them? Identify the behavioural or attitudinal barrier you need to overcome, using research and evidence rather than wishful thinking, bias, or preference. It’s ok to acknowledge that every brand and every leader has a bias and preference. The good leaders know the difference and know to manage their bias with research, data and insights. It’s important to not fall into the trap of being a sample size of one and assuming you’re the customer in every situation.
Proposition — What will we say that matters? Develop a compelling message that connects the brand's distinctive value with the audience's needs and the campaign's objective. The hard part here is to balance the brand tone of voice with the voice of the customer to strike the right relevance and resonance.
Channels and activation — How will we make it happen? Determine the right channel mix, customer journey, creative approach, investment and timing. Choose channels because they do a job, not because everyone else is using them.
Measurement — How will we know it worked? Set meaningful KPIs, establish baselines and determine how performance will inform optimisation and future decisions.
A good marketing strategy doesn’t need 100 page slide deck, and applying the right framework can help synthesize this plan into a single page when done well.
Now the creative team has a brief with a job to do. The media team has a reason for its investment. And the business has a way to judge success beyond whether everyone liked the launch.
The Bottom Line
Imagine two businesses launch campaigns. Both have great-looking creative. Both have decent budgets. Both go live on time.
One has invested in research, identified a meaningful audience insight, clarified its positioning and built a campaign around a specific commercial objective. The other has skipped straight to the big idea because the CEO loved it, the deadline was looming and, frankly, everyone was ready to get on with it.
One is making an informed bet. The other is hoping the algorithm takes pity.
Could the second campaign work? Of course. Even a broken clock gets it right twice a day. But without the right strategic foundations, you have fewer reasons to expect success, less ability to explain failure and very little insight to carry forward.
How the sausage is made matters because it influences the quality of the sausage. Strategy isn't a guarantee of success. Markets change, people behave unpredictably and even the best ideas can miss. But disciplined strategy improves the odds. It helps you make better decisions, allocate resources more intelligently and learn something useful from the outcome. Skipping it doesn't remove the work. It simply pushes the uncertainty into the campaign, where mistakes tend to cost more.
Brand strategy defines why you matter. Marketing strategy determines how you turn that relevance into results. Great creative brings the two to life. Each has a job. Each depends on the one before it. And none works quite as well when you pull it out of context.
The goal isn't to make more marketing or create brands for brands sake. It's to make brands with meaning and marketing that matters.
Strategy with purpose, creativity with direction and marketing that earns its place.
