AI can be a brilliant support tool in brand strategy work. It can help you process interviews faster, spot themes and patterns in customer and employee research, summarise long documents, and pull insights together more efficiently.

But here’s the part many brand strategists overlook:

If you’re us...

 When a quarter is wobbly, there’s always one solution everyone feels comfortable suggesting:

“Let’s do a promo. Drop the price. We’ll hit the numbers that way.”

Short term, it looks like it “works”. The sales graph spikes, dashboards go green, nerves settle.

But if you listen to some of the peop...

Great brand strategy work often lives in notebook scribbles, messy Miro boards, and a hundred half-formed Post-its. Turning that into a clean, compelling case study is an art! The goal is to make the value obvious and to give the client you're presenting to confidence that you can run a brand strate...

At the Brand Builders Summit two live conversations revealed powerful lessons for all brand strategists. The first was with Marty Neumeier and Andy Starr, then with Debbie Millman and David Aaker.
Here’s where these four thought-leaders strongly agree—and where their perspectives differ—on four cruci...

When you write a book called Rebrand Right, you can guess which brands you get asked most about. Jaguar for the first half of 2025 and now - Cracker Barrel.  So what’s the difference? Why did Jaguar stay the course while Cracker Barrel reversed?

Cracker Barrel rebrand: why the logo change backfired...

As brand strategists the last thing we want to do is create confusion. We want to create clarity to help a client move forward. So avoid creating a standalone brand vision statement. Instead, embed visionary thinking into the Why (purpose/mission) statement to avoid internal confusion.

Here's why:

When you write a book called Rebrand Right, you can guess the first question every journalist throws at you: “So did Jaguar get their rebrand right?”

So here's my take on the question. 

It's easy to go along with the naysayers and the shock headlines. And last week’s headlines were loud: “Jaguar s...

USPs (Unique Selling Propositions) are an outdated concept for modern brand strategy. They originated in the 1940s to emphasize functional product benefits in advertising. While this made sense when brands had unique functional differences, today's market is crowded, and most functional differentiat...

What to do if your client doesn't like the brand strategy options you've presented

If a brand strategy doesn’t land with a client, don’t panic — in this video and blog we help you navigate the moment by digging into why it missed.  Common issues include:

• the idea being too ambitious (or not eno...

A brand strategy is a bridge between the goals of a business and why anyone is going to care. Trends give you a source of insight into things that matter, or are going to increasingly matter to those people you need to influence: your potential buyers.  Knowing what matters to them is important for ...