Don’t skip the strategy for your brand
- Frank
- 6 days ago
- 18 min read
Most small businesses don't even consider developing a brand, let alone a strategy, but if developing a brand is one of your goals for 2026, don't skip the strategy to develop it.
In 2009, Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia found themselves at a crossroads. They were running a young, struggling startup they both founded, that was burning cash and searching for proper momentum. At the time it was a business that was pegged against a long standing industry of the biggest brands around the world. They had their blue ocean, unique business idea that hadn’t been done before and had the potential to disrupt that entire industry if they succeeded. Naturally, on paper you’d think that an inherently differentiated offer like theirs would be all that was needed for things to take off. But after a year of battling away as most lean startups do, something was missing.
Instead of chasing growth hacks or rushing new features like most do to try to fill the holes they might have missed, they made an almost counterintuitive decision. They stopped, stepped back, and defined a clear strategy that reshaped everything. They decided what their company truly stood for, who it was for, and why it deserved to exist. They reframed their offering around trust, belonging, and human connection, then aligned their product, storytelling, design, and customer experience to serve that single, focused vision. They even went door to door photographing their customer experiences themselves, because their strategy demanded credibility and emotional resonance that had been missing. Their strategic clarity became the turning point, unlocking growth, loyalty, and a global movement that felt bigger than a business. It was now a brand. But was the brand? Airbnb.
A strategy for your brand is the part that I conservatively believe is skipped by 9/10 businesses when they set out to make a mark on their market. Could even be 9.9/10 businesses and it wouldn’t surprise me. And herein lies the reason why most products and services come and go, but brands last. I’ve often said that it’s called ‘branding’ for a reason. A brand is made to last long term. If it wasn’t, it’d be called ‘stamping’. Now that’s a bit of a dad joke, but truly many skip the brand development part before taking it to market and I see it so often for businesses, even if they reckon they’ve got a good business plan in place.
It’s usually because one of two reasons:
They don’t wanna spend the time to do it themselves or with someone and just want to get something out there and onto the shelf.
They don’t wanna spend the money to have someone help, because why invest in something you’ve never done or heard of before? Hell, if you don’t understand it, then it’s not an essential need shrugs. Just the same as marketing a business is usually the first thing that gets the chop when cutting costs, because it’s the thing most people in business don’t understand how it can work for them as a main driving force behind their revenue stream.
These objections I completely understand and have experienced several times. Sometimes you just don’t have the budget for a good strategist to come in and set the right course, especially when the payoff is 1000 yards down the way and you’re a cash-strapped start up. To this I’d say, find the money, if you can. Seriously, we invest in accountants, insurance and other overheads like office spaces. But do those essential things move the dial when it comes to actually bringing in customers and generating revenue? The point of a strategy is to develop a brand that creates value. It attracts people and gives them a reason for buying into your business, guiding you to business growth much like a business plan. So why are we skipping a strategy if it’s essential to the success of a brand and in turn, your business?
I talked about this in a previous blog on my website that a brand strategy is similar to a business plan. In both, you’re setting out how you will succeed with an offer that meets the needs of a specific market, for a specific price and in a certain place they can buy. What a business plan falls short of what that a brand strategy does, is to go a bit deeper to define the inherent reason the customer should think of and choose the company and its offer over others, in addition to how that will be achieved. The goals of both, yes, are the same: to make the business profitable. Because without profit, you don’t have a business and the brand dies with it, like the Blockbusters of the world. But if a customer doesn’t have a reason to buy beyond features and price, you don’t have a brand, you just have a product or service.
The value of a strategy
If you scroll Facebook long enough, you’ll no doubt come across a bit of content that is an ad for some nifty little gadget that a person will be talking about in the video ad and will show you the impact it has made on their day-to-day, acting as a customer testimonial. It’s usually not a well-known brand and they appear to be a small business with their own innovative new product that is directing you to buy from their website.
Now you might see this ad a few times before clicking on it or be compelled to click on it the first time you see it and think Mark Zuckerberg must be listening to your conversations about needing a better hair brush for your daughter's knotty hair. It’s a brush that can eliminate the tears and glide through her hair. You-beauty! So you make it to their website, they have an attractive looking brand, they’ve got their logo, product photos, videos of how it works, hundreds of 5-star testimonials and videos of happy customers using their product. And you think, damn, this is exactly what I’ve been looking for, and in the heat of the moment, you also feel confident in who you’re buying from because of how they present themselves, their product, their own origin story and what their customers have said. So you hover over the ‘Add to cart’ button.
Now, I’m going to give you a little secret, the price for that hairbrush was $35, marked down from $50 and that sale is about to run out. But their promotion tactics are not the secret. The secret is that you can go to Amazon and buy the exact same hairbrush for $14, or Temu for $4. FOUR DOLLARS! A 775% difference in price for the same brush!
If you’ve not heard of this before, it’s a pretty common e-commerce practice called white-label dropshipping. Where a person will find a relatively inexpensive product they can buy at a low cost and has room for a high margin ceiling to mark up the price and make a healthy profit, even with free shipping. All the while developing and applying their branding on the product, or the packaging, or sometimes just their website and online social presence. So what they’re essentially making money on is the value of the brand they develop that captivates and connects with a potential buyer rather than the unit cost. Demonstrating the exact value of a brand. A 775% difference in this case. This is what we call brand equity and we set out to create it with a strategy.
Look I get it, some businesses are just in it to make their coin and dip out within 5-years to make a quick sale after setting up the business operationally. While some service businesses have such small pools of potential clients that they know exactly who they are and how to get in touch with them that branding and marketing are often felt like overkill in comparison to an old-school face-to-face sales meeting to build those relationships. Or even businesses that have more customers than they need from word-of-mouth and they don’t need to go out and proactively attract new customers themselves. Again, I get it. However, I'd be remiss not to say that in each of these cases, every single one of these businesses would benefit from better branding and marketing, with a clear strategy for success. No joke. Because there’s gonna be a day that someone else that has invested in developing a brand, is gonna come along and eat their lunch, then eat them for breakfast. Especially when we’re in a high-inflationary position at the moment in many markets and the tolerance for price hikes in products and services is diminishing if all we have to compare is price. A strategically developed brand could be the game changer that compliments what already works for your business.
What is involved in a strategy?
See, a strategy for your brand to succeed isn’t just about the benefit of attracting new customers. It also covers the benefits of nurturing existing customers. But how’s this? We also set out to define a strategy that benefits your existing team, new people that join your team and even external partners that form part of your success. Because without a team, partners and repeat customers that help you succeed, and without a compelling reason to keep them around and join your journey… Well, I reckon a brand sounds like just the ticket that we wouldn’t want to pass up, right?
So this is what every brand needs to do. And I’m gonna give you the steps because these steps are well documented across the internet and you can draw up your own strategy yourself. But from experience, that well known saying, “It’s hard to read the label from inside the jar” applies when you’re so close to your business. An objective lens can prove to be difficult when establishing a strategy for your brand success. It’s the same reason why we have psychologists, otherwise we’d be able to self-diagnose our problems and give ourselves solutions. What I’m getting at is that we often need an outsider to be the objective party, so you can always say g’day and I can help you with your brand strategy.
Ok here’s what you do:
1. Research and review
Gather info, identify what’s going on in the market and be a little bit honest about what is working, what could be better and what might we be blind to. If we’re skipping this step, we’ve got our heads in the sand and we may as well skip to designing the logo, packaging and business cards. You can do market research, you can do interviews, you can and should use hard quantitative and qualitative data. We don’t know what we don’t know and if for instance we think we have a completely new idea for a product or service like a service for people to host their houses for short term accommodation, and we happen to stumble upon an Airbnb-type competitor. Well, our strategy is gonna change, yeah? Same goes for knowing what our competitors are saying about their offer to customers, so that we know what not to do.
Well known strategist, Roger L. Martin defined strategy for business as an “Integrative set of choices that positions you on a playing field of your choice in a way that you win. It’s a theory you have that is both coherent and doable”. Knowing your playing field and where you stand is going to help define whether or not you play the completely differentiated game based on your offering, or play the game based on what makes you different and your distinctive qualities. So we’ve gotta know where you stand amongst others and what potential customers are looking for.
2. Define the need (Market Orientation)
Keep it simple, identify the top-line need or want that you're addressing. Not the product/service features you think they want, especially if it’s just to be innovative for innovation sake and call yourself differentiated.
As marketing guru Seth Godin is famously quoted for saying, “People don’t want a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole.” It’s the benefit, goal or pain point you’re addressing. Quenching thirst, selling a home fast to then be able to buy the home of their dreams, overcoming a fear of going to the dentist. This is what he’s talking about.
Keep it simple and as I said, top-line because you can always address it in many different ways when it comes to executing the strategy, and over time it might mean new products and/or a wider target market that helps grow your business. But of course to start out, you likely have a product or service to begin with, so define how their need aligns with your current offer based on your research from the first step.
3. Segment your market (Segmentation)
If you think of this process like a funnel, each step is getting us one step closer to clarity of what this strategy will help us achieve and this step is defining all the potential customers and their times of need that we can address and define into segments of viability to our business.
It’s best to get down as many as you can that you’ve identified in your research who you think would buy your offer, as well as those who buy the same or similar offers and the reason, time and place they buy them.
Categorise them into individual ‘segments’ and order them in terms of viability. Be it the size of the market, the ease with which you can sell to them, their average spend likelihood, or simply your preference of ideal buyers. Maybe even a combination of all things.
4. Get specific of who you're going to target (Targeting)
This is where you need to pick and choose who you want to captivate and connect with. It needs to be based on your capacity, be it time, effort and budget. As well as which is going to be the most viable from the list of segments you categorised.
Once you’ve taken your pick, define who they are so you start to get a sense of how to identify them out in the open and give yourself a scope of demographics and psychographic facts like when and where they need you, why you think they’d choose you over others and what it takes to make their purchasing decisions. This is what’s needed when you create new products, as much as what details you punch in when setting up a Meta ad for Facebook and Instagram.
Now to grow your brand, there’s been documented research by an Australian firm, the Ehrenberg Bass Institute of marketing science, that suggests a strong case for marketing your brand to the biggest market possible. Be it mass marketing to a broad scope of all people that could benefit from your offer. Or market to as many targets as possible.
This isn’t to say you need to do this all at once and from the beginning. You can niche based on your target (rather than your offering), especially as it can help you limit your reach based on your available capacity. While for some it might be an advantage where exclusivity is a key part of the strategy. See every business is different and it’s why we do a strategy to find our own playing field. But also, strategy is a cyclical process. Over time you revisit and realign your strategy to widen your target market and work on captivating and connecting with more market segments that can help you grow your business. Because maybe the most viable market in your segmentation was not realistically attainable due to your capacity, but over time as your business grows, that market could become a reality. So your targeting will shift over time.
5. What will your brand be remembered and chosen for over others? (Positioning)
Marketing professor of the MiniMBA, Mark Ritson often talks about strategy for brands, especially as he’s a strategist himself having worked for many notable BIG brands around the world. And I’ve often heard him remark that, “Positioning is not an end in and of itself”. Meaning that positioning as part of your brand’s strategy is not the final goal, it’s the means of achieving a bigger goal that you have, which in many cases is the purpose or mission that defines why the business was started in the first place and why it exists (which is also something that defines the inherent identity of the brand…we’ll get to that later).
In addition to this, he’s also said countless times that, “Positioning is a strategic tool, not a creative exercise…Its purpose is to drive commercial advantage and growth, not just nice brand statements”. But most importantly, he’s said “If positioning does not change customer choice or business outcomes, it is pointless”.
So the aim is simple, yet challenging, in that we need to define what is going to shift the needle in our direction for a customer to be compelled to choose us. And to choose us, we need them thinking about us. But what do we want them to think about us? That’s the question we need to answer and it should be what compelling reason our target market will think of and choose us, especially if they have to get to us rather than just selecting us out of convenience (which in itself, convenience could be the positioning strategy).
The simplest version of which is KitKat’s positioning strategy, which is also a favourite of Mr. Ritsons. It’s bloody simple, “We believe breaks are good”. If you think a little bit about how that shows up in the KitKat brand, you’ll see it’s defined in the breaking of their product when snapping off each strip of their classic chocolate bars. It’s also in their messaging “Have a break, have a KitKat”, implying the time to think of them and when to buy them. And I’d take a pretty educated guess that taking breaks is a big part of their company culture internally within their teams around the world. Makes total sense, yeah? It’s a great example of how a simple yet effective strategy can guide a business, team, partners and customers in their decision making.
6. How to measure strategy success (Objectives)
How do we know if a strategy is successful? We’ve gotta define where the goal posts are on this metaphorical playing field we’re on. We need to define what scoring looks like and hopefully not kick a few own-goals in the process.
So you might call these KPI’s or just a small handful of goals you can measure success by. Once again, I’ll call on Mark Ritson’s practice of setting what’s called S.M.A.R.T. objectives. It’s not a term he’s coined, but it’s fitting for this last exercise in defining the strategy for your brand’s success when it comes to setting the terms for what success actually looks like and how your team will achieve them. So each objective can be formulated S.M.A.R.T.:
S - Specific: The goal is clearly defined. No ambiguity about what success looks like so that everyone understands it.
M - Measurable: You can track progress with numbers or concrete criteria.
A - Achievable: The goal is realistic given your resources, time, and constraints.
R - Relevant: The goal aligns with broader business goals and/or personal priorities.
T - Time-bound: There is a clear deadline or timeframe, which usually is tied to the timeframe in which you revisit your brand strategy cyclically - eg. each calendar or financial year.
I may as well throw my hat in the ring here and give you an example of a big, hairy objective for my own G’day Frank business:
Objective: Grow G’day Frank revenue by 30% in the next 12 months by signing at least 6 new retained branding and marketing clients worth a minimum of $5,000 per month each.
OR to be less financially specific but still impact revenue:
Objective: Hire a full time account and project lead within 6 months to free up at least 20 hours per week of my time, enabling me to close an additional $300,000 in annual revenue within 12 months.
Now every business’ strategy objectives are going to be different as they relate to achieving awareness, consideration and conversion when it comes to getting customers. But success can also be attributed to internal business development like growing a great team to have extra capacity, or the more obvious of being able to enter into a new market or market category to then grow the business in that manner.
7. Tactics & Budget
These two are where the strategy ends and where the plan to execute the strategy begins. This is where MOST businesses start. This is the part we skip to, and again, I don’t blame you because this is obviously the fun stuff. But without a direction and goal for where we’re aiming, we can do as many ads and new products or services as we want, but they’re gonna lack a clear and defining strategy and brand that underpins every bit of decision making when it comes to a clear and compelling reason for people get amongst your brand. It’s like being a basketball coach and telling your players (your team) to just win the game for your fans (your customers), but your team is wearing blindfolds. They just pass the ball into a void, aim where they think they should, get tripped up by the opposition and completely miss the net goal to win. Side note: I think I'm getting close to running out of these analogies and metaphors.
But put simply, these last two steps are where you’re going to set out a plan of actionable steps that are going to move the needle in terms of hitting each of your objectives and align with the positioning you’ve defined. So these are your branding tactics like your internal brand identity that can define your purpose/mission, personality and values that can shape your team culture. It can be creating the visual look and sound of your brand like your logo, voice and message. And then it can be your marketing plan, based on product development, pricing, placement based on where it’s sold/found, and of course, the last of the 4 P’s of Marketing, which is promotion.
Once again you make them S.M.A.R.T. as well so it keeps you on track and on budget. Speaking of budget, you might have all these great things you can do to achieve your objectives, but your budget might dictate your capacity and priority for what can be done. So you might not be able to throw everything at it, including the kitchen sink, and instead be a bit more savvy about how your tactically go about achieving those goals based on your capacity at the time AND over time.
Where to next?
From here most will either set out to brand or rebrand the identity of what defines their brand as I mentioned in the Tactics and that is of course guided by the strategy that’s been established. While some may need to only focus on continued efforts with their marketing. It all depends on where your business and brand is at, and how it is adapting to your market at the time and over time.
But let’s say that you don’t go ahead with a strategy, what happens next?
Somewhere down the line, after you’ve made your product or had your service process all set up, you’re going to want to create something like a website, or ads, or content, or packaging. What should it look like, what should it say, what is the next step you want a customer to take? These aren’t rocket science questions but many teams and external agencies that help you develop these things end up getting stuck here and will ask you what the strategy is. So many will end up needing to make shit up on the fly for every context and touchpoint, rather than a repeatable, ingrained identity that follows a playbook for where, who, why and how it needs to be done.
The same goes for hiring someone. How do we find the right person for the job that is also a good fit for our team and our team is a good fit for them? How do we ensure we nurture our team to ensure we don’t end up with a revolving door of personnel that costs us extra time and money? Again, if we had a simple strategy and brand culture in place that guided the internal culture for our team and what the expectations are for engaging with customers and partners, we’d have a little more clarity and confidence going forward.
Look, it’s not going to be the solver of all problems. However, if it can be what architectural plans are for a house, as we at least have some kind of instructions for what NOT to do as much as what to do, that will make our brand, our brand. And to take a little bit of pressure off, your strategy doesn’t need to be airtight to begin with. After all, it’s a hypothesis for what you think is going to move the needle and prove if it was right or wrong. It will evolve over time, grow in some complexity and take time to get comfortable in those shoes. But if your strategy for brand success can be fundamentally simple and clear in how it is thought out, planned, and executed, the better it will be. Especially if everyone from the CEO, all the way down to the receptionist at the front desk can understand what is expected of them as a result, there’s your yardstick.
Now I reckon that’s a pretty hefty lay of the land for you to consider how it’s done, and also why it’s done. Every successful brand you know and buy from is right into this stuff like it’s their kind of religion. Because it’s their north star and the blueprint for their success to maintain course and keep growing based on the fundamentals of what makes their brand the best choice for their customers.
You might not have heard of it before as it has been more of a practice for bigger brands. Because at their size when growing at exceptional rates, a defined strategy is needed to maintain a clear direction without completely losing the plot.
However, in only the last 20 years maybe, smaller businesses are cottoning onto this practice of strategically developing a brand and not just a business. As creating a business has never been easier. What’s becoming harder is that the amount of competition out there has increased dramatically and businesses need an edge to compel customers to choose them over the plethora of options available. The dead giveaway of how valuable it can be at this early stage for startups is that a lot of venture capitalist seed money from early stage capital investment in startups goes towards developing the brand and marketing it. It’s like a kickstart to get them ahead of the game from the get go as they need to be able to communicate the value of the brand for both further investment and to start generating revenue for their investors to be happy by attracting customers and a great team.
To meet this challenge are independent strategists like myself who’ve come to understand that if we’re going to help a small business develop better branding and marketing outcomes, we need a solid strategy in place to begin with. Having something that acts as a kind of instruction manual for what needs to be done when we design your logo, or help you present your pricing subscription models, or create your packaging, signage, stationery, events, ads, etc, is so damn helpful. However, if you don’t have this in place, to help us do our job better as branding and marketing people and give you a better outcome, we’ve learnt to add strategy development and planning to our skillset.
So to give your brand a shot at better business success, even if this was all completely news to you when reading this, if you think this better brand of branding is what you need, consider it one of the best investments in your business, your team and your customers. And of course, if you need help from an outsider to give you that objective guidance, say g’day today to work with me.
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