What does a brand strategy include?
A complete brand strategy includes a brand audit, interviews with your leadership, market and audience research, a facilitated strategic session, hypothesis testing — and ends in a strategic core: the right problem, the positioning, the brand's role in people's lives, and a message matrix. Anything that ends in a mood board instead is not a strategy.
THE DELIVERABLES
- Brand audit: structure, portfolio, processes, strategic vector
- 10–15 internal interviews with top management — culture and values, unfiltered
- Desk research: market dynamics, audience analysis, competitor strategies
- A facilitated strategic session built on the Four Truths: brand, audience, culture, category
- Optional: customer-journey research and quantitative validation of hypotheses
- The strategic core + measurable (SMART) goals a creative team can be briefed with
HOW BICKERSTAFF DOES IT
Our method is the Four Truths: the best positioning lives at the intersection of who the brand honestly is, what the audience fears and dreams about, what culture is arguing about, and what clichés the category keeps repeating. Every insight must pass a double test — "that's so me" and "why has nobody said this before?" The whole engagement takes 1.5–2.5 months and feeds directly into a creative brief with ambition and conflict inside.
RELATED QUESTIONS
What's the difference between brand strategy and communication strategy?
Brand strategy decides who you are — it changes rarely. Communication strategy decides what you say, to whom and in which channels — it lives in yearly and campaign cycles.
What should a brand strategy cost-benefit look like?
Its job is to make every later hryvnia, pound or euro work harder: sharper briefs, fewer wasted campaigns, a brand people can actually retell. Bickerstaff's working standard is that projects should multiply the client's investment.
IN SHORT
In short: a real brand strategy = audit + interviews + research + strategic session + tested hypotheses, delivered as a strategic core (problem, positioning, role, message matrix) with measurable goals. Takes about 1.5–2.5 months at Bickerstaff.
