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Brand strategy

Mindways — key visual of the identity

Brand strategy is the core that gives every later decision its meaning — from the name to the colour of the packaging. It brings together target audience analysis, competitive analysis and positioning into one answer to the question: what do you offer, to whom, and why is it valuable to them in particular? Without it, design stays beautiful but aimless — decoration with nothing memorable beyond it.

What a brand strategy contains

The result is a strategy document that sets out the key principles and messages the business's communication will stand on. It covers:

who the people your business matters most to are, and what worries them;
where the open space is relative to everyone else in the market — competitive analysis;
the positioning and the promise the brand takes on;
the personality the brand speaks and behaves with.

How we work on it at Embrand

In our experience this is the phase that gets skipped most often — by clients and designers alike. Unlike other design-focused studios, we start with conversations, audience and competitor research, and hypotheses about messages. All these tools serve one aim: to find the points where what the business offers meets what its audience really needs.

The strategy doesn't end with the document. Tactics without strategy are aimless, and strategy without tactics is useless — so every strategy ends with concrete next steps: what name we are looking for, what visual character, which channels come first.

What it looks like when it works

The test of whether a strategy works is not how thick the document is, but how fast the next decisions come. If the argument about the typeface, the price or the new product carries on exactly as before, it hasn't done its job.

At Mindways — a startup offering mental coaching to esports athletes — the work started there, not with the logo. As a new player in a new category, the brand first had to earn trust. The strategy subordinated every later decision to clarity and technical precision — from the logo to the website — and the identity became a key part of how Mindways went on to partner with Lausanne E-sports.

See it applied