Brand Strategy: Building Blocks, Process and Common Mistakes
A brand strategy defines what a brand stands for, where it is anchored in the market and how it shows up at every touchpoint. It is the basis against which communication, product and design decisions are measured. This guide explains the building blocks of a brand strategy, how to choose a positioning, how to develop the strategy step by step and which mistakes cost the most, with a focus on Swiss companies. It is a guide, not a pitch: if you want a partner for the work, see our brand strategy agency page.
What is a brand strategy, and what is it not?
Start with what a brand is. Kevin Lane Keller defined customer-based brand equity in 1993 as the differential effect of brand knowledge on consumer response to the marketing of the brand. Brand knowledge, in his model, has two components: brand awareness, which consists of recognition and recall, and brand image, a set of associations held in memory. A brand strategy is the plan for building that knowledge on purpose, so that the right people know the brand and associate the right things with it.
A second point from the German-language research tradition matters just as much. Christoph Burmann and Philip Maloney describe in a 2004 working paper that the brand image cannot be steered directly, because the perception of customers cannot be controlled. A brand can only be led through its identity and the way that identity is anchored in the relevant market, which is the positioning. The strategy therefore works on identity and positioning, and the image follows.
In practice, a brand strategy is a short list of decisions that nobody has to reargue later:
Who is the brand for, and who is it explicitly not for?
What does it promise, and what proof backs the promise up?
What does it never do, even when a quick win is on the table?
Which three words should customers use when they describe it to someone else?
That also tells you what a brand strategy is not. It is not a logo, a campaign or a tagline, and it is not the marketing strategy, which plans channels, budgets and offers. Corporate design is how the strategy becomes visible, which we cover in our guide to the corporate design manual. The strategy sits upstream of all of it: it decides what the rest has to express.
What building blocks does a brand strategy consist of?
The identity-based brand management model of Burmann and Maloney breaks the brand identity into six components (LiM working paper no. 9, 2004). It is an academic model, but it gives you a checklist that works well in a workshop:
Brand vision: the future state the brand is working towards.
Brand origin: the geographic, cultural and institutional influences that define where a brand comes from. For many Swiss brands this is a strength that deserves a deliberate decision.
Organisational capabilities: what the organisation does better than others and can sustain.
Core offering: the products or services that carry the promise.
Brand values: the beliefs that guide how the organisation acts.
Brand personality: how the brand behaves and speaks, described in human terms.
Identity is the internal side. Positioning translates it to the market: for which audience, against which alternatives and with which promise the brand wants to be chosen. In practice, two inputs come before the workshop: a clear picture of the target audience and a view of how competitors position themselves. Without them, identity statements stay generic. Write the competitor view down as facts, not impressions: what each one promises, to whom and with what proof.
Burmann and Maloney also point to a common weakness. In their 2004 paper they note that leadership attention often concentrates on the vision while the other components are neglected, and that in many large companies the anchoring of the identity in employee behaviour is deficient. A strategy with six filled-in components and no internal adoption is a document, not a strategy.
In the long run, the competition for sales is one of mental and physical availability.
Byron Sharp, Director, Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, Mental and Physical Availability
How do you choose a positioning: differentiation or distinctiveness?
Classic positioning asks you to claim a difference that matters to customers. Byron Sharp of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute argues for a more sober view: building mental availability requires distinctiveness and clear branding, while brands seldom compete on meaningful differentiation. In his reading, the job of marketing is to make a brand easier to buy, for more people and in more buying situations.
You do not have to pick a camp. A practical way to use both ideas is to test a positioning against three questions:
Relevance: does a defined group of buyers care about the promise?
Credibility: can the organisation prove it with what it actually does, not with what it says?
Distinctiveness: can people recognise the brand without seeing the name, through colour, shape, voice or other assets that only you use?
Run every candidate position through it and drop the ones that fail any one of the three. This test is our working method and does not come from either source.
A one-sentence positioning statement forces the choice: for [audience], [brand] is the [category] that [promise], because [proof]. If you cannot fill every bracket in one sentence, the positioning is not finished. The format is a common working tool, not a quote from the research above.
Switzerland adds an option that few other markets have: origin. The Swiss Federal Institute of Intellectual Property reports that, according to studies of ETH Zurich and the University of St. Gallen, the added value of typically Swiss products and agricultural natural products reaches up to 20 per cent of the selling price, and up to 50 per cent for luxury goods (IGE, Swissness background paper, updated March 2026). The same paper cites a 112 per cent price premium that Japanese buyers pay for a Swiss steel watch against an identical watch without origin, compared with 42 per cent in Switzerland. Read these as upper bounds from older studies: the paper dates its sector estimate to 2008.
Origin is also regulated. The Swissness legislation has been in force since 1 January 2017 and sets precise rules for when Swiss origin may be claimed, so check them before you build a positioning on it. For the legal background, see our overview of intellectual property law in Switzerland.
How do you develop a brand strategy step by step?
A workable process has six steps:
Audit the current state: collect the self-image (interviews with leadership and staff) and the outside image (customer interviews, reviews, search data and what AI assistants answer when you ask about your brand).
Define the identity: work through the six components above and write each one in a sentence or two.
Choose the positioning: audience, alternatives, promise, proof and distinctive assets, tested against relevance, credibility and distinctiveness.
Translate it: core messages, tone of voice, the naming of offers and, where relevant, the brand architecture. Then the visual system, see our guide to the corporate design manual.
Anchor it internally: brief everyone who represents the brand, and build the rules into briefings, onboarding and approval steps.
Measure and adjust: track awareness (recognition and recall) and the associations people hold with the brand, following Keller's two components, and review the strategy when the market or the offer changes.
On step one: asking ChatGPT, Gemini and Google how they describe your company is a cheap first test of how consistent your outside image is. If the answers are outdated or contradictory, that is a reason to check which sources they draw on. How generative engines choose their sources is explained in our guide to generative engine optimization.
Who is in the room matters as much as the method. In our experience, the strategy holds when the person who decides, someone from sales or customer service and someone who represents the customer perspective all take part. A strategy written by a single department tends to describe that department.
The result should be short enough that people read it: the six identity components, the positioning statement, the core messages, rules for tone of voice and a plan for measurement. Everything else belongs in appendices.
What does a brand strategy cost, and which mistakes make it fail?
There is no reliable public price benchmark for brand strategy projects in Switzerland, so we do not quote a range. The same logic applies as for corporate design: ask for the work split by phase, with the hours and the hourly rate behind each phase, and compare offers on that basis. How that looks in practice is shown in the cost section of our guide to the corporate design manual.
In our experience, five mistakes cost the most:
Trying to be for everyone: a positioning that excludes nobody does not steer any decision.
Copying the claims of competitors: if three companies in a category promise quality, quality is not a position.
Mistaking the logo or the campaign for the strategy.
Stopping at the document: without internal adoption, the strategy never reaches customers.
Never revisiting it: markets, offers and audiences change, so set a review date.
One habit makes the strategy stick: add a single question to every brief, which part of the positioning does this piece express? A brief that cannot answer it is either off strategy or shows a gap in the strategy itself, and both are worth knowing before money is spent.
Swiss companies face one more practical question: how a positioning travels across language regions. A strategy that is only translated tends to lose its tone, and the multilingual market is one of the themes in our guide to marketing in Switzerland. For the identity side of the work, see our article on building a timeless brand.
Want to develop a brand strategy for your company?
Collective Agency develops brand strategies that translate into decisions teams can actually work with. Get in touch with our team for a no-obligation conversation about your brand.
Customer-based brand equity occurs when the consumer is aware of the brand and holds some favorable, strong, and unique brand associations in memory.
Kevin Lane Keller, Journal of Marketing, Vol. 57, No. 1, 1993, pp. 1-22
Summary
This guide explains what a brand strategy is and what it is not, using Keller's definition of brand equity and the identity-based model of Burmann and Maloney. It lists the six identity components, shows how to test a positioning for relevance, credibility and distinctiveness, and sets classic differentiation against Byron Sharp's view on distinctiveness. For Swiss companies it covers origin as a positioning element, with the price-premium figures and the legal frame from the Swiss Federal Institute of Intellectual Property. It closes with a six-step process, a measurement approach and the five mistakes that cost the most.
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