Why brand strategy must come before brand identity design.
You have the company vision set, and you’ve done a deep dive to develop your brand strategy, with a crystal-clear image of the vibe and personality. You developed your ICP: you know the market, the problems it faces, and the unique solution you’ve built to help your customers solve them. Intrinsically, you’re set. Extrinsically, you’re set. Now it’s time to develop the visual representation of your brand—your brand identity design and system.
If you haven’t done all the thinking work listed above and hope to jump right into design, I wish you the best. But sadly, the best you can hope for is arts and crafts. Noby’s got time for arts and crafts when they need a real brand identity system designed to support growth.
If you have done that work, kudos for giving your brand the respect it deserves. If you’re unfamiliar with the thinking portion of building a brand and are curious, keep reading.
WEEO
Are you familiar with WEEO? Of course not. I made it up. It stands for Whim, Ego, Emotion, and Opinion. This is exactly why brand strategy must come before design. When you make crucial strategic decisions in business (and in life), you have to stay as objective and clear-minded as possible. In other words, eliminate whim, ego, emotion, and opinion from the process.
I’m not asking you to suddenly become something other than human, nor am I saying instincts are unwelcome. What I’m advocating for is objectivity. Here’s how I do that.
The Most Important Question
Many years ago, I grew fed up with the struggles of dealing with client WEEO. It prevented my team and me from doing the best possible work for them. So I set out on a journey to eliminate it from the dialogue once and for all.
Years of experimentation led me to develop a framework that today fits nicely under the term “brand strategy.” But in 2012, nobody used that term.
It solves a problem every brand faces, even if not every leader recognizes it. When people make decisions based on whim, ego, emotion, or opinion, they aren’t thinking about what’s best for the brand or the future customer. In fact, they have zero context to judge whether an option is good or bad—other than WEEO. And for me, that won’t do.
Is this what’s best for the brand and our future customers?
This is the most important question we must ask. It is the foundation of every strong brand identity system, marketing campaign, and overall business strategy.
I’ve found that many business leaders don’t like that question, mostly because they don’t have the insights or courage to ask it. Nor will they commit to developing the clarity required to answer it.
But you will. And the benefits are massive.
One benefit, in particular, reigns supreme: a unified shared vision.
With a crystal-clear brand strategy, everyone plays on the same team, works toward the same goal, and instinctively knows whether something serves the brand and the future customer. When that happens, you can build incredible things fast—including a powerful, ownable brand identity system that often precedes great success.
When I advise clients, I rarely present choices or options to “pick from.” That’s because I know them—intrinsically—and their customers—extrinsically—as well as or better than they do. And we’re all on the same page because we have the courage to ask, and the clarity to answer:
Yes. This is what’s best for the brand and future customers.
Now that is power.
Without the courage and clarity? It becomes an ill-informed popularity contest. Or just a fluffed ego.
Bonus: The Unknown Risk You Eliminate
If you don’t eliminate whim, ego, emotion, and opinion from your decision-making process, your designer or design team will instinctively appeal to your whims, ego, emotions, and opinions.
That’s the path of least resistance. Appealing to emotion is normal—and it’s also a fallacy in logic.
Appeal to emotion, or argumentum ad passiones, is an informal fallacy characterized by manipulating the recipient’s emotions to win an argument, especially in the absence of factual evidence.
Your brand strategy document is your factual evidence.
Without it, marketers and creatives (same thing) will use WEEO to get to “yes.” But that process rarely produces what’s best for the brand and the future customer. The mission stops being “do what’s best for the brand.” The mission becomes “get the client to say yes.”
Don’t get me wrong—most creatives aren’t secretly running nefarious schemes to win your business and take your money. Very few of them even think about why the things I’m telling you matter, let alone build an entire business or consultancy around this way of thinking.
But the ones who do—they win.
And now you know. You should probably tell more people.
It’s a very valuable insight, if I do say so myself.
