Brand strategy is one of the most powerful growth levers available to organisations, yet it is also one of the most misunderstood. Too often, it is treated as a question of messaging, visual identity, or tone of voice, rather than as a set of strategic choices that shape how a business competes and grows.
At its best, brand strategy provides clarity. It defines what a brand stands for, who it is for, and how it creates value in the market. Brand strategy consulting should bring structure, evidence, and objectivity to these decisions, ensuring they are grounded in market reality rather than internal assumption.
This article explains what brand strategy consulting really involves, how it draws directly on core market research services such as brand tracking, customer experience research, and proposition development, and why many organisations benefit from specialist support rather than attempting to develop brand strategy alone.
What Is Brand Strategy Consulting?
Brand strategy consulting is the structured process of defining, refining, or reorientating a brand’s strategic role in the market. It focuses on decisions that shape how a brand creates value for customers and competitive advantage for the business.
This typically includes:
- Clarifying brand purpose, positioning, and value proposition
- Defining target audiences and priority segments
- Establishing meaningful points of difference versus competitors
- Aligning brand strategy with business strategy and growth objectives
Crucially, brand strategy consulting is not about creative execution in isolation. It sets the strategic framework that guides experience design, proposition development, innovation, and communication over time. Without this clarity, brands risk inconsistency, tactical drift, or internally driven decisions that lack market relevance.
Breaking Brand Strategy Down: Its Core Components
A brand strategy is often described as a single organising idea, but in practice it is made up of several interlocking components. Together, these form a coherent, decision-ready framework that guides choices across proposition design, experience delivery and investment.
Target audience and priority segments
Strong brands are built for specific audiences, not for everyone. This element defines the priority customer segments the brand must win with in order to succeed commercially, based on their needs, value, growth potential and relevance to the organisation’s capabilities. It requires clear choices about whom the brand is for — and, just as importantly, whom it is not for — so that strategy, messaging and experience can be sharply focused.
Category role and competitive frame
This defines the category or categories in which the brand chooses to compete, and the role it intends to play within them. It clarifies the competitive frame of reference – for example, whether the brand is a specialist, challenger, partner or trusted incumbent – and therefore which competitors truly matter. Getting this right ensures the brand is compared on favourable terms and avoids being trapped in an undifferentiated or overly broad competitive set.
Value proposition
The value proposition articulates the total value the brand delivers to its target audience, from the customer’s perspective. This includes functional benefits (what the brand enables people to do), emotional benefits (how it makes them feel) and, where relevant, social benefits (what it signals about them to others). A strong value proposition is rooted in genuine customer needs and is clearly linked to the organisation’s ability to deliver it consistently and profitably.
Differentiation
Differentiation defines how and why the brand is meaningfully different from the alternatives available to customers. This may come from the offer itself, the experience it delivers, distinctive assets, or the way the brand behaves and communicates. Crucially, differentiation must be both relevant to the target audience and difficult for competitors to replicate so that it supports long-term preference rather than short-term novelty.
Brand promise and positioning
The brand promise sets the expectations the brand creates through what it says and does, while positioning defines how it wants to be perceived relative to competitors. Together, they provide a clear articulation of the brand’s intended place in the market. For credibility, the promise must be consistently reinforced across communications, customer experience and delivery — any gap between promise and reality will quickly erode trust and brand equity.
Strategic focus and trade-offs
Effective brand strategy depends on explicit choices. This component defines what the brand will prioritise — and what it will consciously deprioritise — across audiences, offers, channels and behaviours. By making these trade-offs clear, the brand avoids dilution, aligns internal decision-making and ensures resources are concentrated where they will have the greatest strategic and commercial impact.
These components together form the foundation for downstream decisions, from customer experience design and proposition development to marketing investment and performance measurement
Brand Strategy in B2C and B2B Contexts
While the fundamentals of brand strategy are consistent, their application differs between consumer and business-to-business markets.
Brand Strategy in B2C Markets
In B2C markets, brand strategy operates in highly competitive environments characterised by emotional choice, habitual System 1 buying behaviour, and high levels of substitution. Brands compete for attention, mental availability, and preference at scale.
As a result, B2C brand strategy places greater emphasis on emotional positioning alongside functional benefit, availability and salience at the point of choice, and distinctive brand assets that support recognition. Market research plays a vital role in understanding how consumers choose, what shortcuts they use, and which brand cues genuinely influence behaviour.
Brand Strategy in B2B Markets
In B2B markets, decisions involve more deliberative, System 2 decision-making behaviour. They are likely to involve multiple stakeholders and carry higher perceived risk. Brand strategy therefore plays a different but equally important role.
B2B brand strategy tends to focus on clarity of expertise, credibility, trust, and reassurance. It supports confidence, reduces perceived risk, and helps buyers justify decisions internally. Research is essential to understand how different stakeholders influence decisions and what builds trust over time.
Where B2C and B2B Converge
Despite these differences, B2C and B2B brand strategy increasingly converge. Buyers in both contexts expect clarity, relevance, and strong experiences. Emotional reassurance, ease of decision-making, and consistency matter regardless of sector. Effective brand strategy consulting recognises these nuances and avoids one-size-fits-all approaches.
The Role of Market Research in Brand Strategy Development
Strong brand strategy is built on evidence, not assumption. Market research provides the external perspective that internal teams often lack, revealing how customers actually perceive a brand and how they make choices.
At Brandspeak, our brand strategy consulting work typically uses one or more forms of market research as its base. For example:
Brand U&A, brand tracking and brand equity research to establish a clear baseline of how a brand is currently perceived, where it is differentiated, and which perceptions matter most for choice and loyalty.
Customer experience research which shows how brand promise is delivered in practice, identifying where experience supports brand strategy customer satisfaction and where it undermines it.
Proposition and innovation research which tests how strategic intent translates into tangible offers, helping ensure propositions strengthen rather than dilute brand meaning.
Brand strategy consulting synthesises insight from these sources into a coherent view of the market to define the nature of the strategic challenge.
Developing Brand Strategy Across Multiple International Markets
Creating a unifying brand strategy across international markets introduces additional complexity. Customer needs, social and cultural norms, and competitive contexts vary, making it difficult to balance global consistency with local relevance.
Common challenges include differing decision drivers, variations in how brands are interpreted, and legacy positioning that varies by market. Without robust research, organisations often default to either excessive standardisation or excessive localisation, both of which carry risk.
Effective international brand strategy identifies what must be globally consistent, such as core positioning and value proposition, while allowing flexibility in local expression based on market insight. Cross-market research plays a critical role in distinguishing universal drivers from genuinely local ones.
Why Organisations Often Struggle to Do This Internally
Many organisations attempt to develop brand strategy internally. While this can work in some circumstances, it is often constrained by internal bias, legacy assumptions, competing stakeholder agendas, and lack of strategic distance.
Brand strategy consulting brings an external, evidence-led perspective that helps organisations see their brand as customers do. It provides structure, momentum, and objectivity to what can otherwise become a prolonged or diluted process.
When to Invest in Brand Strategy Consulting
Organisations are most likely to benefit from brand strategy consulting at moments of change or uncertainty. These include slowing growth, increased competitive pressure, business transformation, acquisition, international expansion, or when innovation pipelines lack coherence.
At these moments, investing in brand strategy consulting helps reduce risk, align stakeholders, and ensure decisions are grounded in market reality rather than instinct alone.
Conclusion: Brand Strategy is a Growth Enabler
Brand strategy consulting is not about creating a brand story for its own sake. It is about providing clarity in complex markets and enabling better decisions across the organisation.
When rooted in robust market research, brand strategy becomes a growth enabler. It aligns teams, sharpens focus, and ensures investment is directed where it will have the greatest impact. For organisations willing to invest in evidence-led thinking, brand strategy consulting provides the insight and structure needed to compete with confidence and build brands that endure.
