Brand Strategy

Brand strategy is a long-term plan that defines who a brand serves, what it wants to be remembered for, how it differs from competitors, and how much it will invest over how long to get there. It answers “why” and “what” before the design team works out “how it looks” and the media team decides “where to say it”.

What goes into a brand strategy

• Target customers: a specific group of people, with their needs and their barriers to buying.
• Positioning: which category the brand competes in and where it is different.
• Brand promise and personality: the input for brand identity and tone of voice.
• Brand architecture: how the parent brand and its product lines relate to each other.
• Budget and metrics: how money is split between brand building and sales activation, and what it is measured by.

Positioning: three questions from Keller, Sternthal and Tybout

In Three Questions You Need to Ask About Your Brand (Harvard Business Review, September 2002), Kevin Lane Keller, Brian Sternthal and Alice Tybout lay out a positioning framework built on three questions:

• Frame of reference: which group do customers put the brand in, and what goal do they use it to reach?
• Points of parity: what must the brand have to count as a legitimate option in that group?
• Points of difference: what is meaningful to customers, believable, and hard for competitors to copy?

A common mistake is to jump straight to points of difference. A digital bank that shows off a slick interface will struggle to persuade anyone who doesn’t yet trust it to be as safe as a traditional bank. Safety is a point of parity, and it has to be settled first.

Splitting the budget: the 60:40 ratio

In 2013, Les Binet and Peter Field published The Long and the Short of It for the UK’s Institute of Practitioners in Advertising (IPA), using campaign data from the IPA Effectiveness Databank. The most quoted conclusion: the optimal budget split is roughly 60% for brand building and 40% for sales activation. According to the IPA’s 10-year retrospective (September 2023), the authors’ 2018 report Effectiveness in Context arrived at a 62:38 ratio.

That’s an average across many industries, not a formula. A newly launched brand, a category that sells mostly through marketplaces, or a B2B company will each need its own split. A strategy should write down a ratio and the reason for it, rather than letting the budget drift toward conversion ads simply because they are easier to report.

Illustrative example (hypothetical)

A hypothetical vegan cosmetics brand sells mainly on Shopee and TikTok Shop and spends almost its whole budget on conversion ads. Cost per order climbs quarter after quarter, while searches for the brand name barely move. A brand strategy here might include locking the positioning around an ingredient competitors haven’t talked about, moving part of the budget into long-term video content, tracking aided awareness every quarter, and using incrementality testing to see whether brand spend produces additional orders.

Brand strategy vs marketing strategy

A brand strategy lasts for years and only changes when the positioning changes. A marketing strategy is set annually, covers product, price, distribution and promotion, and has to follow the brand strategy. A deep discount might hit the quarterly sales target and still work against a premium positioning. In that case the brand strategy is the grounds for saying no.

The results of both show up in brand image, which is where you check whether the strategy is heading the right way.

Frequently asked questions

How often should a brand strategy be reviewed?

Check the metrics every quarter. Revisit the whole strategy when the market or the business model changes significantly.

Do B2B companies need a brand strategy?

Yes. B2B buyers also build vendor shortlists from names they knew before the need came up.

If you need a brand strategy tied to a realistic ad budget, Adtek’s Brand Strategy team can build it with you, starting with a conversation.