Brand

Brand strategy

Also known as: brand planning

Definition

Brand strategy is the set of decisions about who a brand is for, what it promises, how it differs from the alternatives and how it will be recognised, made before design starts. It should be specific enough to settle arguments about what to do next.

Most of it is choosing and excluding: the primary audience, the position against alternatives, the single promise, the personality and voice, and how the name, products and sub-brands relate. It is built from evidence, meaning customer conversations, competitor audits and the company's own sales data, and it ends as a short document people actually use, not a deck that fills a drawer.

In the UAE the first decision is which audience comes first, because language, imagery and channel follow from it. The UAE government portal says the expatriate community outnumbers UAE nationals but gives no percentage, and no official split was found, so audience claims should come from your own customer data, not a number quoted in an article. Decide the order of Arabic and English early, and check the name works in both scripts before anything is designed.

More in Brand

Brand architecture

Brand architecture is the structure describing how a company's brands, sub-brands and products relate to one another, commonly a branded house, a house of brands, or a hybrid endorsed model.

Brand equity

Brand equity is the commercial value a brand name adds beyond the functional value of the product, visible as pricing power, preference at parity, lower acquisition cost and higher retention.

Brand guidelines

Brand guidelines are the documented rules for how a brand looks, sounds and behaves, covering logo use, colour, typography, imagery and tone of voice. Their job is to let people who weren't in the design meeting make the same decisions the designers would.