Brand Strategy

Most companies do not have a brand strategy.

They have a list of activities.

This episode is about the single mental habit that separates the two. Strategy is choice. Activity is addition. One closes doors. The other refuses to.

We will cover the 200-page brand document that taught me what real strategy is not. The three "brand pillars" that could have been written for any competitor. And the question every strategist should ask before signing off on anything:

What did we decide not to do?

Plus the difference between a theme and a position. Why your brand pillars probably belong on your competitor's slide too. And what it actually costs you when you refuse to choose.

A tool you can use. A sharper way to look at your own brand.

Transcript

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I'm John Luke and welcome to Positioning to Win, where you can find consistent branding and positioning advice for founders and CMOs. Today we're going to talk about how brand strategists think and how they actually differ from marketing strategists or marketing directors, right? There's often a bit of a confusion on that. So let's start off with a quick story. Years ago, I was working at a global agency in New York. I was a design and strategy lead. Our clients was one of the largest commercial real estates in the world. They were Fortune 500. They had 100,000 employees, operations in over 80 different countries. They had five business units: capital, markets, workplace services, prop tech management, investment management, and advisory. All right. They had dozens of CMOs that all worked for the same firm, each running a different geography or a different business line. So then they had a list of industries that ran about 20 different industries. So they had data centers, healthcare, hospitality, financial service, governments, law firms, retail, and on and on and on and on. Okay. And so our assignment was to build a global branding house. And that document that defines the whole company, defines what the brand stands for and every business unit that it has aligns with. I remember the moment that I realized what was actually happening in that project. The senior strategist had added another audience, another vertical, another activation, another tagline. And there was going to be a co-working space launch, an industry-specific subcampaign, a sustainability showcase, a technology demonstration. Every week there was another thing. Never, never less. It was always more. And I looked at the latest draft and I realized across six months of work, across dozens of meetings with a room full of very, very smart people, nobody had asked one question that separates strategy from activity. What did we decide not to do? And so this is a good question to ask because I could not think of the answer. Not one vertical had we cut, not one audience had we said no to, not one claim had we abandoned because another one was stronger. The document was going to cover every business unit, every region, every industry, every CMO's top priorities. So then we made the brand guidelines, which we eventually shipped, that was over 200 pages. The longest single brand document I have ever been part of. And every page was well designed, internally coherent, professionally researched, and none of it closed any doors to anyone. It was always there for any type of scenario. That project is what I want you to hold in your head while I walk you through this next episode. Because what the team had built was not a strategy, it was a menu of activities wearing strategy clothes. Until you understand the difference, strategy from activity, nothing you produce down the stream will be coherent. Alright, so this is episode two. Today I want to walk you through how brand strategies actually think. Not about frameworks, about positioning exercise, not about specific deliverables, just how they think and the underlying mental habit that separates strategy from activity, or simply marketing. Before I get into core principles, I want to pull out one specific artifact out of that project because it makes the diagnosis concrete. The three barren pillars we landed on after months of workshops, research and debate and execution exercise were technology enabled insight, sustainability as a return on investment, and the future of workplace. Read those three again. Now ask yourself the question: how does that separate a theme from a positioning? Which of those could a competitor not also claim tomorrow? Every commercial real estate firm in the world could put all three of those on the slide with a completely straight face. None of them closes any door, none of them separates them from a competitor or excludes them from a competitor, and none of them excludes any customers or any audience. They are themes, not positioning. They describe the category we happen to work with, and they do not describe us within the category. So that is a tell. When your brand payers could sit unchanged on your competitor's slide, you probably don't have a positioning. You have a summary of the space you operate in. And this is oftentimes the case. The summary is not something that the market remembers, it's something the market skips over. It skims. Okay? So as a core thesis, let's dive into this a little bit further. Here's a distinction that should run through your head every time you are planning a marketing meeting. Most marketers are trained to add, they add channels, messages, content, experiments, and also this to every slide. Strategists do the opposite. They are trained to choose. A strategist's job isn't to say what could work, it's to decide what will be true and what won't. That last line is the whole job. A good strategist is not prediction about the future, it's a commitment about the future. It's a set of statements that the team has agreed to held to. We are this, not that. We serve these people, not those. We win this way and not that way, right? Everything downstream flows from these choices. It's not about just who your ideal client is, it's about who your ideal client isn't. All right. Companies struggle with this because choosing is uncomfortable. Every choice closes a door. We aren't inherently brand strategists by choice. We have to be trained and disciplined into becoming brand strategists. Every we are this implies what we are not. It's much easier to say yes than it is to say no. And the we are not is actually what keeps founders awake up at night, right? This is a struggle between founders and leaders, and they typically don't feel comfortable with this kind of topic. So most companies quietly avoid the discomfort and refuse to close any doors. They produce a strategy that is a real list. It's a menu, it's a bet on everything. We serve everyone for everything at any price when they come. Strategy is not a menu or a list, it's a decision. If your strategy reads like a menu, it is not a strategy, it's an activity, it's a description. All right. A real strategy makes you uncomfortable because it closes doors. We're for this buyer, not that one. We win this moment, not every moment. We lead with these five claims, and we are priced like this and not like that. We sound like this and not like that, so that we stand out from everyone. That's the work, right? That's what strategy looks like. If you're not, if you don't have that comparison of that, then you're missing 50% of the work. All right. That's the work is saying no. Matter of fact, you'll be saying no a lot more than you'll be saying yes. A page with five sentences like those are worth more than a hundred slides or two hundred slides without them. Because a hundred slide deck that refuses to choose is just an aspiration expressed. Okay. It brings and adds confusion. So I want to say this clearly the measure of strategy is not how much ground it covers, it's how many other things a team has explicitly agreed not to do. So when you read a company strategy documents, you can tell whether they're actually doing strategy by counting the knots. If there are no knots in a document and they're not saying what they're not explicitly doing, that's not a strategy, right? This is simply a list of things to do. Here's a commercial interest of why choosing matters more than listing activities. And people don't remember the brands that try to cover everything. They remember the brands that took a clear stance, right? That focused. Think about the market that actually stores you in the memory. You're not remembering a list of features, you're not remembering a list of different phrases, you're remembering a single phrase. The one for designers, the one for developers, the one where you can get anything by tomorrow, the one that stands for less stuff. Okay. If you have not chosen a phrase, the market will not remember you. It will remember whoever chose more clearly, and you will be one that also rants. So a strategy keeps asking, what's the single most important thing we want to be known for? What's the one problem we want to own? And what's the one buyer we want to win first? If you can't answer those, you don't have a focus yet. You have options, you have descriptions and activities, and options are not a positioning. Options are what you have before you've done the strategic work. The whole point of strategy is to convert those options into commitments. So let me put a positive example next to the one that I opened with. All right, a company that made an uncomfortable choice and won because of it. Who was it? Well, Figma. In 2012, Dylan Field and Ellen Wallace started building Figma. They designed a tool that market at the time was dominated by Adobe. Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, XD. It was a suite of features that creative tools used by every type of creative professional. Photographers, graphic designers, product designers, right? It served everything. And Adobe strategy was to cover everything, and it was a sweet play. Figma could have tried to compete with a better suite. They could have tried to do more modern designs, a tool built for everyone who makes the creative work. And that would have been a menu approach, right? To try to cover everything for everyone and try to pick users from every category. Instead, Figma made a choice and it was very uncomfortable at this time. And they decided to solve the problems for one specific kind of user: product designers working on teams inside software companies. Not photographers, not illustrators, not graphic designers working on print or solo freelancers, product designers in software companies. That choice closed many doors. It meant that Figma was not competing for Photoshop users or illustrator users or print designers. And for several years, that looked like a handicap. Adobe had 20 times the total addressable market, but the choice also opened up a specific lane so wide that Figma could become the obvious answer to it. They built the one workflow that matters the most to product design teams: real-time collaboration in the browser. That feature inside that specific workflow, inside the specific audience, was enough to turn Figma into the default design tools for an entire category of software companies. Adobe tried to acquire Figma in 2022 for $20 billion. The deal ultimately did not close. Regulatories blocked it, but the valuation is what you need to remember. $20 billion. Okay, and for a company that had deliberately narrowed itself to one audience and walked away from every other slice of Adobe's market, $20 billion. Figma didn't win because it had become a smaller version of Adobe. It won because it owned that specific group of audience so well that Adobe could no longer win it back. The only way Adobe could win it back to his users is by buying Figma. The discomfort was evidence that this strategy had teeth. Compare this to the real estate project I opened with, right? We have the same kind of ambition, same kind of talent in the room, same amount of work, totally different habit. One of those companies said we're the product designers inside software companies, and the other said we're for everyone, everywhere, across 20 different industries. One of them became a $20 billion brand. And the other shipped a 200-page brand guidelines that nobody could summarize. Now, here's the part that most founders do not want to hear. If you go premium, you lose price shoppers. If you go niche, you lose the everyone deals. And if you go simple, you lose the edge case features. And if you go bold, then you lose the safe approval. So there's always a trade-off. Marketers often try to write strategy that avoids trade-off. They want premium positioning and volume customers, they want niche audience and mass appeal. They want simple products and the edge case handled. Okay, it cannot be done. Strategy that avoids trade-off is strategy that has not actually been written. Strategies do the opposite. They name the trade-off, they accept them, and they use them. The acceptance is part the founders struggle with the most. Founders and leaders and marketing directors, right? Yes, we are going premium, which means we will lose a segment. We are okay with that. In fact, that's the whole point. That sentence said out loud and confidence is worth more than any piece of brand work that tries to hedge and be for everyone. A line that I've learned the hard way is if nobody agrees with your positioning, it's too vague. A good positioning should provoke disagreements somewhere. A competitor should feel attacked, a segment of customers should feel excluded, an internal team member should say, well, this is going too narrow. And if nobody in your orbit or nobody flinches, the positioning is too comfortable, which usually means it's too generic. Figma's positioning provoked disagreement. We are only for product designers and software companies. That's a choice. That choice offended every other kind of designer who thought that tool could serve them. Okay, it offended salespeople who wanted to sell it to the creative agencies, and it offended investors who wanted to have a bigger ROI. That offense was a signal that Figma had actually chosen something. The discomfort was the evidence that the strategy had teeth. Every narrowing provokes a defense from whoever feels excluded. So that's the test. If nobody is flinching, the choice has not actually been made. Okay? So let's do less on purpose. Here's where a lot of founders mishear the advice. They think that focus means minimalism. And focus is not minimalism, it's sequencing, it's finding the order of things. Minimalism companies are small companies by design. All right. A company focused is a company that knows what to do first, they know what to do second, and they know what to do in three years from now. It still has ambitions and it still wants to grow, but it refuses to do everything at once. A strategist will ask typically three questions to figure out what matters the most. And so here are the three. Number one, what matters most right now for this stage? What needs to be true for growth to happen in this stage? What is the smallest set of messaging that can carry you through this whole story? So focus keeps the brand from becoming we do everything blob, and it keeps the team in line. It keeps the work shippable. The we do everything blob is what happens to most mid-stage company. They add a product line three years ago because a customer asked. They add a vertical two years ago because a partnership came up. They add a price tier last year because the sales wanted it to. And each edition makes sense on its own. And taken together, they produce a company that cannot be described in one sentence. Right? This is where you need brand strategy. Focus is how you get out of the blob. Focus is how you say these three things are the top priority. The others may be true, but they are not the messaging. They're for downstream. And without that kind of focus, every marketing dollar gets diluted across any claims. Okay. So when you're stuck, or when you're planning meetings and you cannot decide between the options, run every decision through these three questions. Question one, does this make us sound easier to choose? Or does it add confusion? Or is it not helping? Every addition you add to your positioning or your messaging or your product line has to pull its own weight by making the decision for the customers easier. Not harder. If your thing you are considering adding makes the buyers hesitate, it's working against you. Cut it out. Alright, question two Does this create a stronger point of view? If it could be described to any competitors, it's weak. The language of your strategy has to be something that your competitors generally cannot say. If you're saying we are customer obsessed, it's not a point of view. Anyone can say that. Matter of fact, most people do. If you say something like we refuse to add a feature unless it works for 90% of our users, that's a point of view. Because your competitors who adds everything for everyone literally cannot say that. So question three: Does this match the stage that we're in? If you're a $15 million company and you are copying the strategy of a $100 million company, you are going to fail. What works for rock brands can break scissors brand. You do not have to have distribution, the capital, the team, or the credibility to execute that strategy. Your strategy has to match the stage that you're in. We talked about this on episode one and competing down the cycle and not up the cycle. If a decision does not pass all three, the decision is not strategic. It's reactive. And when a company is small, survival requires adding. Because you cannot afford to turn anything down. All right. But this is a habit that keeps a company alive when it's pre $1 million in revenue. But when you're post that and you're at $20 million in revenue, this can kill you. So saying yes to every customer means that the product roadmap is fragmented, right? You have too many things going on. Selling in every vertical means the sales team cannot specialize. Offering every tier means the pricing page is confused. The thing that made you nimble becomes a thing that is incoherent. The transition from add everything to choose deliberately is a transition that we often don't do deliberately, and we need to do it through discipline. It's a decision from being an operator to being a strategist. It is the single highest leveraging mental shift a founder can make from $5 million to $10 million a stage. But it will be uncomfortable. Because it requires you to do the things that felt dangerous when you were small and you were trying to survive. And that's likely saying no. So if you want to become a strategist, your new reflex is this stop asking, what should we do? And start asking, what are we choosing? And that shift is the whole game. Hold that question in mind. What are we choosing? What are we not doing? What doors are we closing? What trade are we accepting? And if the answer is nothing and we are doing everything, then the meeting is not strategic. It's activity planning. But there's nothing wrong with activity planning. It is how work gets done. But do not confuse it with strategy. That's the point. And do not let the team assume they've done strategic work when they've just done activity planning and produced a list. The companies that I've watched compound the hardest are the ones that are addicted to the discomfort of choosing. And they get used to saying no. They get used to making one claim and letting the rest go. So they get used to the trade-offs of being the cost of being remembered. That discomfort is the price. Strategy is a tax you pay in certain need about what you are not. And once you pay it, everything else downstream, positioning, naming, voice, story, marketing, sales gets easier. Because it has something to point to. Right? So here's your takeaway. A strategy is a set of decisions, it's not a set of activities. If it does not close doors, it is not strategy. If it does not provoke some disagreement somewhere, it's too vague. Alright, so if it cannot answer what are we not doing, you haven't even done the work yet. Okay. These are three questions to use as a tool that'll stay with you forever. Does it make it easier for the customers to choose? Does this create a strong point of view? And does this match the stage that we are in financially that we are able to achieve uh achieve? Hold this filter up to every decision you make the next year, and you will start seeing the difference between strategic work and activity or marketing. Next episode, we put together the first big choice on the table. Who are you for? And we're gonna go deep in ICP. ICP is ideal customer profile, and this is the single most downstream affecting decision in all of brand strategy, the one that most companies avoid by calling it their target market, and also the not our ICP list, and that is way harder to write, and usually the most important, and the ones that people usually skip. So, thanks for tuning in to positioning to win. I look forward to seeing you next episode.