Brand Strategy: Building a System that Brings Your Story to Life

Brand strategy is the foundation of any impactful organization. It guides everything from messaging to design, ensuring your brand resonates with the right people. In this blog post, we’ll break down the key components of a strong brand strategy and how you can apply them.

But if you’re looking for a deeper dive, we’re hosting an interactive Brand Strategy Workshop where we’ll help you refine your brand’s positioning, voice, and impact. Save your seat now!

Think about your brand for a moment. No, not just your logo, not your colours, or your fonts or the surface things people can see. Think deeper. Think about the experiences your brand sparks. The emotional reactions it provokes. Think about the value you create in the world. 

Your brand is beautiful and powerful and in so many ways, intangible.

As Marty Neumeier, author of The Brand Gap, ZAG and The Brand Flip, says, “A brand is not a logo. A brand is not a corporate identity system. It’s a person’s gut feeling about a product, service, or company.” 

“Great,” thinks every marketing and communications professional reading this, “how do we recreate something intangible consistently?”

And that’s the question: how do you capture something so nebulous? How do you take this living, breathing thing — this combination of belief and action and impact — and give it structure so anybody at your organization can consistently bring it to life? How do you take something so complex and make it easy to recreate? 

Hello, brand strategy.

Brand strategy is a system – it’s a way of drawing a straight line through everything you believe, everything you do, and everything you say. It’s a framework, rooted in research and insight, that defines who you are, what you do and what sets you apart from everybody else. 

There’s a quote from Dolly Parton that strategist Alex M H highlights in his book No Bullsh*t Strategy, that simplifies the whole thing:

“Find out who you are, then do it on purpose.”

In this article, I’ll guide you through our brand strategy process that we use time and time again with our clients to help them articulate and define who they are, what makes them special, and why it matters, so they can show up in authentic ways across channels again and again.

I’ll also provide some questions for you to consider so you can take our process and apply it to your organization and start refining your brand strategy today. 

Because ultimately we want is for you to have the tools you need so you can better tell your story and amplify your impact.

At the centre of every purpose-driven organization beats a powerful truth. It’s why you show up every day. It’s what drives you to push through the hard days and it makes the good days unforgettable.

But here’s what happens so often: this truth gets fuzzy. Even for nonprofits. It gets buried under mission statements and vision documents. Employees start losing sight of it. New programs drift away from it. Teams get caught up in tactical problems – new audiences, new channels, new demands – and that bold, world-changing idea starts to fade.

“Very few people or companies can clearly articulate WHY they do WHAT they do. By WHY I mean your purpose, cause or belief—WHY does your company exist? WHY do you get out of bed every morning? And WHY should anyone care?”

Simon Sinek

For our client TransLash, that core truth is powerful and clear: they believe that the stories we tell shape our world. And therefore telling trans stories isn’t just important: it’s life saving. In a time when anti-trans violence and legislation threaten their community—our community, they recognize that sharing authentic stories of trans lives from trans people’s perspectives, in all their glory, beauty, and complexity,  is vital to building a different world, a world where trans people no longer have to fight to be seen, much less exist. 

Learn more about how we worked with TransLash to clarify their brand.

When your purpose is clear, it becomes the beating heart for your organization that drives your team, your voice, and your vision through the highs and the lows.

A lot of purpose-driven organizations stumble here. It’s not because they don’t know what they do, but because they haven’t articulated what makes them different.

Your “why” is universal. It pulls on the threads of human truth, on shared hopes and dreams. But your “how”? That’s where your organization becomes unique. It’s the path you see that others don’t. It’s the gap you’re uniquely positioned to fill. 

“Bad strategy: ‘We are the best X’

Good strategy: ‘We are the only X who do Y’”

– Alex MH Smith

Saying you’re the best at something is subjective (and probably a little biased, no matter what your impact numbers says). But worse than that, it’s surrendering what makes unique and instead implies that what you’re doing is what everybody else is doing.

Identifying what makes you unique is harder work. But when you find that space, that is when you can truly stand out.

When you recognize that what sets you apart is not being better than everyone else, but reconnecting to the unique way your organization is working to solve the problem, you will be better positioned to articulate it clearly and stand out like a shining beacon.

This is where you identify your day-to-day efforts. Your work is usually where you interact with your audience. Now you might be thinking, “We’re pretty in tune with what we offer. Can we skip this step?”

Respectfully, no.

Look, if you and your team are indeed on the same page and you get through all the questions in five minutes and everybody agrees, then congratulations! You’ve won at meetings.

But I’ve never seen that happen. In fact, it’s usually what seems obvious and straightforward that sparks the most complex discussions.

When your day-to-day work reflects your deeper purpose, and everybody can agree on that, your organization becomes more than functional — it becomes focused.

Further reading: The Key to Getting Clarity and Alignment

“Brands that position themselves as heroes unknowingly compete with their potential customers.”

– Donald Miller

What we’ve covered so far is the Why, How and What of your organization. Those function as a unit, a clear dialectic and progression. Now it’s time to spin the Rubik’s cube and look at a different dimension, one that’s going to intimately affect the Why, the How and the What—and in fact, everything you will do.

Your audience. 

Let’s start with a concept that’s quite old but popularized in Donald Miller’s Building a StoryBrand: you are not the hero of your brand story. Your audience is not the supporting character. This is not your story.

This is the story of how your audience woke up one day and went on a journey to change the world. And along the way, they encountered obstacles that were difficult to overcome, until they came across a guide that helped them overcome those obstacles and restore balance to the world. 

You can’t change the world on your own. You change it by building a movement. 

When you shift the focus from your organization to the people you’re trying to reach, everything starts to click. You stop speaking into the void and start speaking to real needs, real struggles, real hopes. That’s when your message begins to matter — and when your work starts to truly resonate.

While many brand elements focus on what you’re going to look like and what you’re going to say, brand personality is about how you say it. If your organization were a person, what kind of person would they be? The life of the party or the strong, silent type? Warm and nurturing or bold and direct?

These questions might seem playful, but their answers shape every interaction with your audience. They guide everything from word choice and sentence structure to visual elements like colour palette and typography. A warm, nurturing organization might use gentle colours and flowing fonts, while a bold, direct one might opt for strong contrasts and clean lines.

To make this concrete, we often create a brand archetype – an imaginary but vivid person who embodies the traits your organization wants to express in its communications. This isn’t just about making up a character. It’s about creating a consistent, relatable reference point that helps everyone in your organization understand how to show up in the world.

When you define your brand personality — through a clear voice, intentional tone and true visuals — you give your organization the tools to show up with consistency and clarity.

These insights form the foundation for your core brand elements:

Think of this as the essence of your organization captured in a single, powerful phrase. It’s both a north star for your team and, potentially, a compelling message for your audience. A strong brand idea feels inevitable – like finally finding the words for something you’ve always known to be true.

This is your organization’s story – a rallying cry that builds from your brand idea. It helps your team understand not just what you do, but why it matters and how you’re going to get there. A good narrative acknowledges current reality while painting a picture of the future you’re working to create.

Your purpose statement is why you exist, expressed in a way that’s both strategic and inspiring. It can serve as an internal compass or an external declaration – or both. This isn’t about listing activities; it’s about capturing the transformation you seek to create.

This internal tool helps your team understand exactly who you serve, what you do for them, and what makes your approach unique. It’s specific and practical, grounding your purpose in the real work you do every day.

These are the core truths that make your organization special – the fundamental beliefs and approaches that set you apart. Together, they create a framework for consistent decision-making and communication.

These elements form the foundation for everything else – from your visual identity (logo, colours, typography) to your day-to-day communications. When they work together, they create clarity that empowers everyone in your organization to tell your story consistently while adapting to different moments and audiences.

A strong brand strategy is not a cage, it’s clarity – it gives you the tools to express what you’ve always known to be true, and to do it over and over again. When every element aligns while maintaining its own purpose, you create something powerful: a framework that lets everyone in your organization bring your story to life consistently and authentically.

Because ultimately, that’s what brand strategy is about: taking something beautifully intangible and making it real.

Join us for a free workshop where we’ll walk through how to develop these essential elements of your brand. In this session, you’ll learn: 

Save your seat below and we’ll email you when we announce the date.