What is Brand Strategy? Signaling the Shore

Let's go back about twenty years, to a time when social media looked very different than it does now. It was a landscape of garish colors, terrible typography, and cringy animated GIFs.

That landscape shaped my understanding of branding.

This was the MySpace era, and back then, social media was all about the profile. Millennials like me spent hours picking the right layout, the right photo, and the right song to autoplay the moment someone landed on your page. 

Your profile was your personal brand. It was a single, carefully constructed statement: this is who I am.

Then Facebook came along and changed everything.

When Facebook launched, I thought it was cool. Clean design. No GIFs. No ads. 

More importantly than its visual upgrade, Facebook shifted the way we thought about social media. Instead of the profile, we had the feed. 

Your identity wasn't a single page anymore. It was more like a body of work. Every post was a chapter in a longer story, woven into the stories of everyone around you.

At their core, those posts were doing the same thing your MySpace profile was doing. They were a signal. Carefully crafted to say: here's who I am, come find me if you're my kind of person.

That's what brand strategy is about, too. Helping brands send the right signal to find their people.

But before we can talk about brand strategy, we need to talk about maps.

The Coastline Paradox

In the 1950s, a mathematician named Lewis Fry Richardson noticed something strange. He was researching the recorded lengths of international borders when he found that Spain and Portugal had different measurements for their shared border. 

Not something you’d expect for there to be disagreement about.

This led him to what's now called the Coastline Paradox. 

The length of a coastline, it turns out, depends entirely on the length of your ruler. Measure it in miles, and you get one number. Convert that to inches and measure again, tracing every crag and inlet, and you get a much longer one. Keep shrinking your unit of measurement and the length of the coastline approaches infinity. The closer you look at reality, the more complex it becomes.

What this tells us is that a map can never be exactly accurate. It is, by definition, a simplification.

But here's the thing: if you're the captain of a ship, you don't need to know the length of the coastline in inches. You just need a map that works for your purposes.

A great example: the map of the London Underground. The actual routes those trains travel are neither straight nor simple. But the map doesn't try to represent that. It abstracts and simplifies. And in doing so, it becomes a useful and elegant piece of design. It’s not trying to tell you everything, only what you need to know.

A map is a useful abstraction.

Brand Strategy Makes Maps

Here's the thing about brands: they're a lot like coastlines.

The true reality of a brand isn't limited to a logo or a tagline. It emerges in the thousands of interactions between the company and its customers, between employees and each other, between what a brand says it is and what people experience it to be. Look close enough, and the complexity is staggering.

But you can't put that on a billboard. You can't communicate it in a two-second social media scroll. You need a map.

That's what brand strategy does. It takes the full, fractal complexity of a brand and creates useful abstractions and tools that help a brand locate itself in a crowded market and communicate quickly and clearly.

The central question brand strategy tries to answer is deceptively simple:

What does this brand do that no other brand does and who does it do that for?

That's a lot harder than it sounds. It requires honest self-examination. It requires setting things aside that might be true but aren't defining. Because a map that tries to show everything is just as useless as no map at all.

What a Brand Actually Is

It’s worth asking: what even is a brand?

It's a lot more than a logo. It's a lot more than fonts and colors.

A brand is the full system of meaning that surrounds an organization. The values it holds, the story it tells, the voice it speaks in, the promise it makes, the people it's for. The visual identity is real and important, but it sits on top of a much deeper foundation. And that foundation is where brand strategy lives.

Much of that foundation doesn't need to be invented. It just needs to be recognized. The core of a brand is often already there, lived out every day by the people inside the organization. Strategy is the work of surfacing that, shaping it, and turning it into something useful.

Into a map.

What This Looks Like in Practice

A few years ago, we worked with a brand that had a recognition problem. Their logo was everywhere, and data showed that the vast majority of people in their region recognized it. But when asked what it meant, most people only had a vague sense of what they did. 

They had great brand recognition. But their brand lacked understanding.

So we did the work of digging in. We examined their mission, their history, the people they served, and the people they were trying to reach. What emerged was a strategic shift not in what they did, but in how they told their story. 

People saw them as an authority figure giving a stamp of certification. We framed them as a guide, a curator, and as a storyteller pointing people toward something worth discovering.

That shift sounds abstract, but it had concrete consequences. It changed the way they talked about themselves. It changed the creative direction of their advertising. And the data backed it up. Campaigns that leaned into the new framing outperformed the old approach.

When the map changed, everything built atop it changed too.

Knowing Yourself

I said earlier that social media posts are signals. They’re broadcasts designed to help you find your people. Brands work the same way. 

But you can't send a clear signal if you don't know who you are.

Some brands struggle with this because they've never had to think about it. They've grown organically, accumulated meaning over time, and the question of “who we are” has always felt like something that could wait. 

It can't. Not in a world where someone makes a judgment about your brand in less time than it takes to read this sentence.

The best brands are the ones that know themselves clearly and communicate that with confidence. Brand strategy is the art of knowing yourself well enough to let the world know who you are.

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