The future of brand strategy.
The future of brand strategy.
10 trends that are shaping the future of brand strategy.
Brand strategy is a growing field. For a few years, it’s no longer just the domain of brand planners and managers but also designers are starting to claim the discipline and agencies all around are adding it to their services. How does the future of brand strategy look like?
— Don’t feel like reading? Listen to the podcast episode below:
1 - Designers becoming strategists.
For a few years, we are seeing a boom of designers turning strategists. That’s me included. Thanks to trailblazers such as Chris Do and Jose Caballer, the field has opened up and designers are picking up brand strategy to become more valuable and have more impact.
The good: Designers can have more impact, better pay, and better results.
The bad: Designers advising on marketing based on ‘branding’ mindset without a good understanding of marketing science.
The ugly: Designers giving clients wrong advice that amounts to negative effects on the business.
2 - Brand strategy commoditization.
A lot of agencies, freelancers are offering strategic services today. The question becomes, is strategy becoming commoditized? Is the meaning of it eroding? Is it becoming a buzzword like storytelling? In my opinion, I think things won’t go that fast, people have been claiming for years that logo design, for example, is becoming commoditized, because of logo generators and cheap Fiver-ish options. Today we still have a lot of clients that are willing to pay top dollar for good logo design.
This should things in perspective. Brand strategy is still a fairly unknown field in the world.
I think the same is true for strategy. Yes, there will be a lot of noise on the bottom, people selling ‘strategy’ in the shape of just glorified checklists and frameworks, but with proper reputation and the right clients, strategic services can still deliver the right value with the right perception.
3 - Emergent vs Top-down approach.
Emergent strategy is becoming increasingly popular. The idea of a less traditional, more ‘on-the-go’ type of strategy that focusses on ‘learning’ by doing and shifting quickly. It fits with the whole ‘design-thinking’ and agile movement. I think it definitely has merit. It’s not a replacement of the more traditional approach where you go in a pyramid structure from broad research to definition and plan of action. It’s a mindset that needs to enabled in the right context. For example when working with startups, or when big organisations need to think outside the box.
I see it as a thinking hat. Switch to emergent strategy when you feel the environment is to unstable and things need to be adjusted on the go. But keep the traditional strategy approach for big decisions that take time to research. Also, understand that there is research that yields insights that are durable, and research that yields very temporary insights. When a lot of people critisize a more traditional approach because ‘you can’t predict the future’, they often are referring to bad research methods that yield results that are not representative of actual consumer behaviour.
4 - Marketing science influence.
Marketing science has had a huge impact on me as a brand strategist. It was a big shift in my thinking. I’m seeing increasingly more dialogue and acceptance of some of the important marketing science laws coined by Byron Sharp’s seminal book ‘How brands grow’.
Now the acceptance of some of these laws also has a huge influence on what ‘brand strategy’ and ‘branding’ means. Because a lot of people see brand strategy as a way to differentiate and create meaning, while marketing science tells us meaningful differentiation doesn’t really exist.
My take on it is that there is plenty of room for brand strategy. It’s the platform that bridges business strategy with branding and communication. It’s a way to create internal and external clarity on the what, the how and the why (don’t get me started).
5 - Digital vs media-neutral strategy.
There is way too much ‘media-specific’ strategy out there. Instagram strategy, Tik-Tok strategy, or even ‘digital’ strategy are all a bit weird concepts in my opinion. Strategy usually is about solving a bigger problem, choosing channels and execution goes into tactics. The problem is when the word strategy is used everywhere, it again becomes more hollow. Instead of having a ‘digital strategy’, look at what the business strategy is and decide how to use ‘digital’ as a way to achieve that strategy.
6 - Comms strategy merging with branding.
Advertising and branding people talking together is a great thing. In my opinion, it's what should be happening more. Actually, it's what this podcast is about, bringing different disciplines together that build a brand to create a more unified field.
Comms strategy and branding go hand in hand, they need to work together, when developing a new advertising campaign, often it seems the brand’s distinctive assets need an update, this overlap can be of huge value to organizations, since branding is a more long term game than ad campaigns, letting the 2 work together to create consistently, yet fresh communication for business means a lot.
Personally, I've also just been really interested in the world of advertising and comms in general, there is so much overlap yet we are still far apart. So as much as I coin this as a trend, it's actually more of a wish (If you think it, it will happen).
How many of these startups have eventually shifted their original idea of ‘cutting the middleman’ and got back to traditional advertising and distribution models?
7 - Blurred lines between brand, marketing, and business strategy.
This is a big one, i see brand becoming more and more part of the language of business. A lot of entrepreneurs want to 'build brands'. The extreme version of this is in the VC world where a lot of D2C brands are so focussed on building differentiated brands they just forget about important business principles.
8 - Eroding title of a brand strategist.
Should you call yourself a brand strategist? It depends on what you want your perception to be. If you want to become the best identity designer, maybe it's not necessary, if you want to be the best creative guy, maybe it's not the best.
Or should I call it ‘branding strategy’? Call it what you want. To be honest, I would advise against another field as 'branding strategy', it's not necessary, branding is in essence understanding what makes a brand distinct, and so to know how to stand out, you need to research the competition and the consumer. So 'good branding' is strategic in nature, just as is good marketing. 'Marketing strategy' then is just a thing, a marketing strategy. You can have a marketing strategy but you can't be a marketing strategist. Maybe this thinking could apply to brand strategy as well. Maybe it's time to scratch my title.
9 - An evolution towards more breadth, and not just depth.
There is plenty of advice out there on how to specialize, and I think you can't avoid 'specializing' after some time, it's just how our economy is structured, you gain experience, you attract more clients in that space, you become more experienced and gain a reputation for a certain thing.
That being said, I would argue for 'breath', get a bigger understanding, of business, of culture, of philosophy. If you truly want to be a 'brand strategist', you should look for a broader understanding, not just a deeper one.
Then look for collaborations with specialist practitioners. You can even wear that head, but don't try to be everything. For example, I help clients with strategy, but also still design a lot of brand identities, but I don't go being a photographer or social media marketeer. As soon as I created a strategy and I become an executioner, I focus on my craft as a branding specialist and let other people come in to do other parts.
10 - The big T strategist (by Julian Cole from Planning dirty).
Me personally, I see my future as becoming a 'big t strategist', I found this on Julian Cole's planning dirty website. The idea is you understand marketing, branding, and business and can help organisations take the right course of action. If we can all become more knowledgable brand-builders, then the future of brand strategy is just fine.
