Let me say the thing most CEOs nod along to and then quietly ignore: brand strategy is business strategy. They’re the same thing. It’s not a department. It’s not a logo. It’s not something you hand off to an agency and forget about. And the moment you treat it like one of those, you’ve already started losing.

If you’ve been following me for some time, you hear me talk about this a lot. But it’s the pinnacle of your business success. 

I’ve worked with a lot of brands and a lot of CEOs and executives building them. The one thing the brands that win the most have in common is simple: they treat brand strategy the way it’s supposed to be treated. As the strategy of the whole business. Not as a preface to a rebrand. Not as the warm-up act for a launch. Not as a marketing project with a start date and an end date.

Where CEOs get it wrong

Here’s the mistake I see over and over. A company decides it’s time to “think strategically,” so they scope a project. Two months, maybe three. Somebody helps them think, solve problems, and evaluate the feedback they’re getting. The work makes progress. And then the project ends. The thinking partner walks out the door. The strategy gets cut into stone, printed on vinyl, and stuck on the wall at the office. This is it now, right?

Except it isn’t. You got some pieces right. But a lot of it was wrong, or it quickly turns wrong, because the market moves and the world moves. And because you treated strategy as a one-off, you never built in the part that actually matters: the experimentation, the testing, the learning, the refining, the pivoting. You can’t improve something you’ve already bolted to the wall.

Strategy, to me, is making choices. And I truly embrace the scientific method in marketing because why wouldn’t you? You’re not right 100% of the time. Nobody is. You’re hoping you’re close to correct. The scientific method sets you up to get there and to keep getting closer. The metric that matters most to me isn’t a vanity number. It’s progress. Are we making progress toward our goal? Where are we today, where do we want to be, and is the gap closing?

When you build a real brand/business strategy around that aspirational state, you can do the research and the thinking around which choices are the right choices today. The ones that move you toward the future you’re after. And then you get to test and evaluate them constantly. Every single day. Run ads with different messaging and see what resonates with which audiences. A/B test your website. The technology is all there. Leaning into the experimentation side of brand strategy is the whole point.

Marketing without a plan is arts and crafts. And nobody’s got time for arts and crafts- go do that on your own time.

What’s it costing the companies that get this wrong? More than they realize, and they usually figure it out too late. By the time they notice, they’ve burned a significant amount of time and resources building a brand they didn’t actually aspire to have. They weren’t connecting with their audience the right way. They weren’t making real progress. They were just “busy” running activities, mistaking motion for momentum.

I lived a version of this myself. Early March 2020. I still had the agency then, and I was about to launch a campaign. Right in the middle of a pivot toward putting strategy before the creative work. It was around St. Patrick’s Day when COVID hit Baltimore and they shut everything down. I woke up with the spidey sense tingling: don’t launch that campaign, wait a week. Two days later the entire state was shut down. If I’d launched, it would’ve cost me a lot of money and gotten me nothing. Or worse, done actual harm. And I watched so many companies not reassess. They doubled down on campaigns that no longer made any sense. Why? Because they had no real strategic thinker in the room to say, pause that. We’re hurting ourselves, we’re embarrassing ourselves, we’re hurting other people. None of that was in the best interest of the brand or the future customer. All of it got thrown out because the strategy had already ended.

Am I sometimes complicit? Not anymore.

I’ll be straight about the uncomfortable part. The whole industry has a move: a company says it wants to think strategically, and somehow it always collapses back into “so what’s the deliverable, what’s the project?” That keeps happening because the project is what’s easy to scope, easy to price, and easy to sell. Agencies are motivated to sell work and create income. That’s their job. So yes – the gravity of the business pulls everyone toward the thing that pays.

And, yeah, I’ve even been guilty of it myself early on in my career. That’s why I know this exists and that’s why I can speak to it. 

The difference is what you do about it now – going forward. I’d rather be the person in the room saying the strategy can’t end, because that’s the truth. The brand you have today isn’t the brand you’ll win with tomorrow. Your growth and trajectory will shift, and you’ll have to recognize what needs to be optimized, what new opportunities showed up that weren’t there yesterday. 

That’s not a project you can hand off. To borrow from Jim Collins “Good to Great”, that requires the right people on your bus. It’s not just where you’re going, it’s who you’re going with. You can’t outsource the thinking to one or two people, or to somebody who isn’t vested in the business. 

Because they don’t give a damn the way you do.