In the battle of brand strategy vs creative strategy, both are important – but they are not the same. Often, when people talk about brand strategy, what they mean is the thinking that has led to the work they have been doing on the brand. That’s not brand strategy.
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Executive Brief
What’s the difference between brand strategy and creative strategy?
Brand strategy defines a brand’s long-term direction and contribution to the business. Creative strategy defines how that direction comes alive through storytelling and campaigns. Confusing the two risks biased investment, conflicted messaging and short-term visibility at the expense of long-term brand equity and valuation building.
Why does this distinction matter to brand leaders?
Brand strategy sets the “why” and “where”; creative strategy delivers the “how” and “what.” Together they align business growth and market storytelling. Without separating the two, your brand is only as strong as your last spend.
Who owns brand strategy vs creative strategy?
Brand strategy sits with the leadership team (CMO, Brand Director, CEO). Creative strategy belongs to the marketing and agency teams, guided by the brand framework.
What happens when brand and creative strategy are confused?
Brands chase engagement metrics without building equity. Teams burn budget on campaigns that don’t shift market position or business outcomes.
How can CMOs align brand and creative strategy?
Anchor creative briefs to the brand’s strategic goals, align metrics across teams, and schedule brand reviews alongside business planning.
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Why leaders lose sight of what their brands should achieve
It’s not hard to see why non-marketers struggle to identify the difference between their brand and creative strategy. In fact, many leadership teams assume their creative platform is their brand strategy.
That’s because it’s often the most visible way the brand shows up for most execs. Both in terms of the costs they analyse, and the feedback they get from customers, their own teams and others. If indeed one assumes the Bezos definition that “our brand is what people say about us when we’re not in the room”, it’s straight-forward to believe that this must be based on the latest campaign running across a plethora of channels and costing a pretty penny. That’s what people will see and remember. Therefore, that’s what the brand must be.
And if brand equals presence, brand strategy must be about distinctiveness, mental availability … what people see, read, feel and touch. That requires budget of course – and so, brand strategy, in the minds of many leaders, has become why businesses should spend money to execute “aesthetics” (as they were once described to us) that give them presence in the market.
Except that’s planning, not strategy.
This issue of how to understand and work with brand, never mind the full vocabulary of brand terms, is not new. A 2005 research paper by Strategy& and Wolff Olins revealed that while over 90 percent of companies believed their brand was a key element of their success, less than 20 percent put the management of their brand at the heart of their business systems and capabilities. For many leaders, brand is someone else’s concern.
Brand strategy serves the business
Powerful brands represent something that makes the businesses that own and manage them competitive in their marketplace. Choosing what they should mean, why they should mean that (and not something else) and the journey that the business must take to realise that meaning is the role of brand strategy.
If they are separated, then the brand strategy and the business strategy fail to work together, affecting not just alignment but also competitiveness, consistency and even valuation.
Our view is that the brand serves the business, and that indeed, brand strategy is business strategy made visible. But how it becomes visible, and stays visible, is the job of a robust marketing comms plan and strong creative strategy.
Nike chose to distinguish themselves in their market by representing the excitement of performance to achieve brand leadership. They backed that up with innovative design and celebrity sponsorships. But the genius of their creative strategy was to democratise that meaning to define every person as an athlete and to tell stories that invited any runner, walker or player to “just do it” and celebrated those who did.
The brand strategy defined what the brand needed to concentrate on. The creative strategy brought that meaning alive in ways that added profile, desirability and value to the products.
Here are three questions you can ask as you start to set your brand’s strategic direction.
A strategy for tomorrow
Brand strategy is the business case for change at a brand level. It envisages the future position of a brand in the marketplace, based on the company’s wider business aspirations and its ability to deliver and market brands that align with that desired position. It treats a brand as a business asset.
The purpose of brand strategy is to identify how far the brand must “travel” perceptually in order to be competitive, the benefits of getting there for the business, the purpose and values that the brand culture will need to adhere to in order to make that journey, and the competitive resistance that the brand may encounter getting to that end point. It’s the why and the where emotionally, complemented by positioning (which is the where, competitively).
In today’s tactical world, it’s tempting to think that there’s no time for all this ‘thinking through’. Conflations quickly follow.
More on this: How to develop a brand positioning strategy
We were doing a project with a fast-growing technology-driven company. Through the discovery process, we identified their intention to become a $100 million company (by valuation) within a set period of time. Building a strategy for the company brand on that basis provided a clear vision for what the business, through its brand, would believe and prioritise, how it would present itself, who and what it would be competing against as it emerged as a major player and so much more. Ultimately, should there be an acquisition, with any level of multiple x earnings, that’s what others will be buying into.
Brand strategy aligns with two questions that every leadership team should be asking: What are we building here? And how do we put a brand around that to maximise interest, impact, preference, margin and value?
Read: How to decide if you need a brand strategy
Your creative strategy serves the audience
Once that point is known and quantified as viable, the role of the creative strategy is to lay out the storytelling needed to make that journey happen. The creative strategy captures how the brand will tell that story, the compelling hook for audiences, the personality and behaviours that the brand will need to adopt in order for that to happen successfully and that will hold the storytelling together.
No customer buys a brand strategy. They buy a story, of course, and the role of the creative strategy is to take the brand’s strategic intent for the business and translate it into a campaign platform and then narrative that hooks customers and delivers powerful and valuable perceptions of the brand that enable it to deliver what’s needed for the business.
That brand alignment is critical.
Some brands reset their creative strategy regularly, potentially continuing to move towards the same goal, but using a range of stories to get there. Others expound a much longer story, filled with reveals, introductions, turning points and surprises.
Campaigns are how the creative strategy gets expressed across a range of channels over time – from advertising to content marketing to social media to direct marketing and so on. The purpose of the campaigns is to animate the creative strategy into tangible storylines for consumers. These may be linked together thematically or they may run independently of one another.
Further reading: Why linking strategy, culture and stories matters
Your approach to strategy also governs what you do with your brand
A lot of people talk about strategy as if it’s one thing. But of course, there are different types of strategy – at least four, in our books – and your approach to setting your overall strategy can dramatically affect how you think about your brand and influence your brand’s storytelling strategy.
For example, if your entire business strategy is iterative – chapter based, serial, pivoting as it goes – then, contrary to everything we have just been discussing, your creative strategy should be front and centre. The role of your brand with this type of strategy is to put a signature to the limited time-frame stories you are regularly bringing to market.
On the other hand, if your business strategy is deliberate – long-term, unerring, fixed path to the future – plotting the brand strategy is make-or-break. With a deliberate strategy, the brand projects back from that vision. It symbolises the business as that long before anything else gets there. Apple began representing itself as an ecosystem long before that was a reality. With every product release, it moved closer to what the brand already envisaged.
Then again, if your business is embarked on an adaptive strategy, the way the business pivots to situations should absolutely be reflected in how the brand strategy moves, and, subsequently, in the creative stories that the business shares with customers and stakeholders.
Being clear on the business strategy you have and the specific role of your brand in realising that strategy doesn’t happen often enough. In today’s tactical world, it’s tempting to think that there’s no time for all this ‘thinking through’. Conflations quickly follow. And yet, ironically, the need for integrated layering of strategy has never been harder, or more important. Done well, these layers control and focus what happens around them. Every level has a purpose.
Did you know? There are also three different types of brand strategy
Emotional impact underpins brand value
Tracey Lloyd’s lovely encapsulation that brand defines the “emotional impact” you want to have in a market articulates why leaders need to understand brand in more depth than just a budget line item. Brand strategy vs creative strategy, in this context, is all about balancing action-reaction: knowing why you want a market to feel a certain way about what you offer to achieve brand equity and business growth; and then applying creative strategy to make that happen through the stories you tell and the campaigns you run.
It’s healthy for businesses to chase engagement and results, of course, but the long-term pay-off comes from understanding the deeper residual value and presence you’re looking to build beyond just awareness and reach. For that reason, brand metrics need to focus on both results and relevance: on short-term reactions (generating sales); and long-term equity accumulation in the brand. The latter can be slow-going but it matters because it brings purpose and role to brand building beyond just recall.
It isn’t always easy to measure either, but having some form of constant and objective rating at least provides a way of assessing how competitive your brand is, both in your sector and beyond. For example, several years ago, we suggested a major corporate monitor their progress within the Top Corporate Brands Index. Setting a goal of being within the top 10 in their sector was a simple way of evaluating how they were performing relative to those around them. The movements year to year were less important than the shifts taking place over three to five years. The most important queries of course were: “given what we did or did not invest in our brand, how much did we move and what can we deduce from that?”
More detail: Inside our brand strategy process
Anchoring brand performance
In an era of AI-generated content and real-time campaigns, creating material has never been easier or cheaper. But if your brand strategy lacks buy-in at executive level, then your contribution as a brand leader will remain at risk of being overlooked. And the content you can now create will lack the focus and discipline to anchor meaningful long-term brand performance.
The brutal reality is that so many brands are forgettable because they don’t value their brand (in every sense), they fail at storytelling (because they think promos and stories) and they remain under-resourced because leaders have no reason to believe that what they contribute is meaningful to C-suite priorities. Lack of strategy and alignment force agencies to run multiple disconnected “campaigns” that fail to ladder up to a vital business goal.
Checklist: 11 elements to include in your brand strategy framework
6 ways marketing leaders can align brand strategy and creative strategy
If brand is part of your purview, we recommend you resolve brand strategy vs creative strategy like this:
- Define intent – Bring brand into the room. Confirm brand strategy as a manageable asset that sits with the leadership team (CEO, CMO, Brand Director). Seek agreement at governance and leadership level on defining the brand’s commercial and cultural role within the business.
- Document brand impact – Define and agree the brand in terms of its emotional impact in the market (and why you want to generate that emotion). Agree on why that emotion is distinctive, ownable by your brand and capable of driving competitiveness and margin.
- Assign your brand strategy a clear role – Treat your brand strategy as the long-term plan to make the business more valuable. Develop a brand strategy that plots a clear intention for growing the effectiveness of that impact over time and what you intend to gain, commercially, from increasing that emotional impact.
- Design powerful stories – Frame the creative strategy as the driver of that change. Craft storytelling that captivates audiences and serves the business goals.
- Protect integrity – Hold the creative strategy accountable to achieving that change over time, step by step, story by story, campaign by campaign. Challenge creative that doesn’t advance the brand’s long-term narrative. Ask: How have these stories advanced our brand’s strategic intent?
- Review at multiple levels – Align creative strategy reviews with annual brand strategy reviews and business reviews. Watch for siloing.
Further reading: What makes for a successful brand strategy?
Further reading: If you’re not sure whether you need to change or update your brand strategy, here’s our guide on how to audit and improve brand strategy.
Is your brand strategy driving your creative—or the other way around?
If you’re worried that the pressures to get stuff out, be visible and support sales are hampering your ability as a brand decision maker to strategically accumulate value, our Brand Blueprint workshop is designed for CMOs, Brand Directors and executive teams to reconnect brand intent with business ambition by sorting and prioritising actions and connecting them back to your overall brand strategy.
In the course of a few hours, we’ll examine what you’re doing, where your brand and creative strategies are blurring, and how to realign and prioritise thinking, tactics and opportunities:
- Diagnose where brand, creative and business strategies are misaligned.
- Prioritise the brand’s true contribution to commercial growth.
- Rebuild creative focus around the strategic direction of the brand.
By the end, your team will have a clear roadmap linking what your brand is capable of, your talents as a creative storyteller and your overall business performance. Please contact us to find out more.
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Photo by Abolfazl Ranjbar on Unsplash
Note: This post has been added to since it was originally published. A condensed version of this post has also been published elsewhere under the title Confusing Brand Strategy With Creative Strategy.