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Brand Strategy

A sound strategy entails what is not to be done as much as what is to be done. It is about answering to your needs and not just your wants. These do's and don'ts not only spearhead your business strategy. It takes ahead your brand name too. A name or a logo has to be taken much ahead of itself. The best way to do so is to build a strong brand identity that envelops a strong brand essence and purpose, positioning the brand right and making a brand experience that is meaningful and memorable. The strongest foundation of building a brand finds resonance in a robust brand strategy.

The Challenges to a Powerful Brand Strategy

The key to building a powerful brand is to build a strategy that resonates with the minds of your customers. It is important to understand who you are talking to and develop a consistent tone of communication to take your business further. A business in its conception does not always know where it is headed in term of its communication strategy because it is trying to understand its own self. More than decoding briefs at times it is also about creating one, by asking the right questions.

Brand Expert Speaks

Allen Adamson, chairman of the North America region of brand consulting and design firm Landor Associates says, "Every brand makes a promise. But in a marketplace in which consumer confidence is low and budgetary vigilance is high, it’s not just making a promise that separates one brand from another, but having a defining purpose."

Brand Strategy Creation – Navigating you through the strategy map

Our brand strategy map traverses the following terrain:

Data Gathering and Analysis

We undergo in-depth consumer behaviour research and market competition analysis to understand where your business and brand stand. Gathering as much data as we can in our first interactive exchange, slowly and surely, we proceed to create the brand identity.

Brand Positioning

The main challenge for brand strategists is to find a window in the mind of the consumer or the business where your brand fits in. Our strategic in-house proprietary methods help us position the brand in the market.

Brand Naming & Verbal Identity

What you are named, you have to stay on with for a long time. It is the first introductory touch point between the brand and the world. We have branding experts working on different combinations of words, creating a new identity for your brand.

Visual Identity & Language

The visual identity of a brand is not just the logo or the mark, it is the story weaved into it. We aim to maintain clarity and consistency in the visual identity and language.

Why is ABND the best brand strategy agency for you?

Our in-house proprietary methods help us establish a unique brand strategy for your business, developing brand solutions that define the business and make it stand out from the crowd. Each method covers a particular aspect of branding, be it naming or customer identification. For instance, the Kapferer’s brand prism is a model which aids us in developing the brand identity. Key elements of a brand like a physique, image, culture, relationship and personality are mapped. Kapferer says, “Strong brands are capable of weaving all aspects [of the prism] into an effective whole in order to create a concise, clear and appealing brand identity.” Another strategic method of using the 12 brand archetypes in decoding the brand personality, help in bringing a brand to life by deciding whether it is ‘The Hero’, ‘The Outlaw,’ ‘The Explorer’ and many more.

ABND is the brand strategy agency where branding for your business needs is taken seriously. We believe in building brands with a purpose, a brand that is much beyond its logo, leaflet and label.

Frequently Asked Questions

Brand strategy is the thinking that precedes everything else. It defines what a brand stands for, who it is for, and why that claim is credible. Without it, identity becomes decoration and communication becomes noise. The questions below address what strategy work involves, how it is done, and what it produces.

Brand strategy defines the position a brand will occupy, the audience it is built for, the territory it will claim, and the logic that makes that claim credible. It is the thinking that precedes all creative work and ensures that what gets made is grounded in something true about the business and its market.

If you are making decisions about identity, communications, or market positioning without a documented strategic foundation, you are making those decisions on instinct. That works until it does not. Strategy becomes critical when the stakes are high, when the market is competitive, or when the business is changing faster than the brand can keep up with.

A brand strategy engagement typically covers: a diagnosis of the current brand position, competitive landscape analysis, audience understanding, the articulation of a positioning (what the brand stands for and why), a defined brand territory, key messages, and the strategic rationale that connects all of it. The output is a document a leadership team can build against.

Strategy. Always. Design without strategy is decoration. The visual and verbal identity should express a position, and that position needs to be defined before any creative direction is explored. This is not a question of process preference. It is a question of what produces work that holds up under commercial scrutiny.

Yes. Audience understanding is a core component of the Foundational Research stage. We look at what customers and prospects actually believe about a category, not just what they say they prefer. The gap between stated preference and actual behaviour is often where the most useful strategic insight lives.

It depends on the scope. Research and positioning can be completed in six to eight weeks. A comprehensive brand building projects for a complex organisation with multiple business units typically takes three to four months. We do not compress the research phase to hit a deadline. That is the phase where the positioning is found.

A defensible position and the documented rationale for it. A strategy that the organisation can build against, communicate from, and use to make decisions. Not a document that sits in a drawer, but one that becomes the filter through which every subsequent brand decision is passed.

Because without it, every brand decision is made in isolation. Strategy connects the identity to the business, the communications to the position, and the position to the competitive reality. It is the difference between a brand that accumulates meaning over time and one that generates activity without building anything.

Yes. A good strategy is not static, it is durable. The core positioning should remain stable enough to build equity, but the strategy should be revisited when the business, its market, or its competitive environment changes significantly. We often work with clients at the point where the existing strategy has run its course and a new one needs to be built.

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