Branding Strategy Insider

The most consequential brand decisions are often made before anyone calls them brand decisions. Leadership chooses markets, customers, products, pricing, acquisitions, distribution, and growth priorities. Marketing is then asked to develop a brand strategy around those choices. At that point, the brand has already been substantially defined. Brand strategy should not follow business strategy. It should help form it. At The Blake Project, we use this guiding principle: business strategy, business model strategy, competitive strategy,...

Companies think of website performance as a technical KPI. It’s something developers measure after launch and marketers glance at when Core Web Vitals reports come in. That’s understandable, but it misses something important. This article is part of Branding Strategy Insider’s FREE newsletter. Join the world’s smartest marketers and subscribe here for actionable insights delivered directly to your inbox. For many B2B buyers, your website is the first real interaction they have with your business. Before...

Branding Strategy Insider helps marketing-oriented leaders and professionals build stronger brands and make better brand decisions. Over the years, BSI readers have brought us questions about positioning, differentiation, customer relevance, brand leadership, growth, and the changing role of marketing. Today’s question comes from Jennifer, a VP of Marketing in New York, New York, who is thinking about the future of brand management, the impact of AI, and which marketing conferences are truly worth her time....

Brands seem to fall victim to some of the clearest, most detectable, beyond-doubt brand-building principles. Netflix is our latest example. One cannot say this enough: adore your core. Focusing on gaining new customers at the expense of current customers is death-wish marketing. Yet, Netflix has for years wooed Wall Street with its acquisition numbers. Wall Street wants growth, and it has a habit of penalizing streaming brands when acquisition numbers are too low. But Netflix’s...

In the early 1990s, two Russian artists, Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid, took the unusual step of hiring a market research firm. Their brief was simple. Understand what Americans desire most in a work of art. Over 11 days, the researchers at Marttila & Kiley Inc. asked 1,001 US citizens a series of survey questions. What’s your favorite color? Do you prefer sharp angles or soft curves? Do you like smooth canvases or thick brushstrokes?...

AI can create content. It can analyze markets. It can generate ideas, optimize campaigns, personalize experiences, and increasingly act on behalf of customers. But it cannot decide what a brand should stand for. It cannot determine which opportunities are worth pursuing, which promises should remain non-negotiable, what customers should feel, or how a company can create meaning and value in a world where more and more work looks automated. That is the leadership challenge now....

The adage that history repeats itself is no more apparent than the current state of affairs at Nissan North America. The Wall Street Journal’s interview with Christian Meunier, head of Nissan NA, is so frighteningly similar to 1999 that I had to catch my breath. Yet, as with a lot of executives and marketers, the current plight of a troubled brand is a new situation, as if this state of affairs has never happened before,...

Jack Welch, renowned CEO of General Electric, used to say that your business should be #1 or #2 in your market. If not, get out. This belief was derived from the famous PIMS work begun in the 1960s. Initiated at General Electric, PIMS, Profit Impact of Marketing Strategy, focused on identifying factors that would impact economic success. ROI (Return on Investment) was the primary measure of success, alongside Return on Sales (ROS) and real (organic)...

The buzzword in marketing right now is AI. Well, acronym, that is. But either way, AI is all the rage. Every firm of every sort is working hard to incorporate AI into every process, every output and every pitch. It’s AI or bust. It’s not clear if it’s tulips or not, but interest in AI is unprecedented and shows no signs of abating anytime soon. There is no 21st-century business trend that looks like it....

Some of the most consequential decisions a brand makes never arrive looking consequential. They appear as cost decisions. Growth plans. New operating models. Policy changes. Shifts in KPIs. Over time, these choices accumulate into patterns that shape what is rewarded and what is overlooked; what receives protection when pressure rises; what is held firm and what is negotiable; and what employees, customers, partners, and communities are asked to accommodate. This article is part of Branding...

In 1967, the song “San Francisco” by Scott McKenzie described “a whole generation, with a new explanation.” The line still captures a central challenge for brands today. Customers continually redefine what they want from the products they choose: more health, less sugar, greater functionality, better value, or simply a better fit for the moments in which they consume them. For beverage brands, these changing expectations are reshaping what relevance means. The issue encompasses more than...

Alongside category design, messaging, storytelling, and thought leadership, positioning is where your company claims its strategic seat within the market’s mental map—and, when engineered deliberately, this seat is one competitors cannot easily take. When business leaders talk about winning a market, they often think first of their product—maybe its features, funding, or its first customers. All are necessary, of course. But the crucial, often invisible, vector that separates the market winners from all the rest...

With audience attention becoming increasingly fragmented across platforms and formats, visibility alone is no longer sufficient to ensure meaningful engagement. Brands continue to produce a high volume of content and activations, but the gap between output and audience response has widened. Exposure does not guarantee interaction, and interaction does not always translate into impact. This shift has introduced a structural challenge: expanding reach too quickly, without establishing a strong experiential foundation, can dilute the effectiveness...

Most leaders understand positioning. They know their brand needs to stand for something clear, relevant, and defensible in the minds of the people most important to its future. That is clear. However, problems arise when an organization drifts from its core strengths or when those strengths are now weaknesses. Over time, growth adds complexity. Leaders make reasonable decisions in isolation that, when taken together, make the brand harder to understand and choose. That is when...

Perhaps the most interesting thing about AI is that it is new yet nothing new. AI is certainly new to marketing, and bringing all sorts of new challenges with it, although it may not be as big as headlines would have us believe. Last year, the CMO Survey of the American Marketing Association, conducted in partnership with Duke and Deloitte, found a mere 17.2% of marketers reporting the use of AI to optimize or automate...

The president of Snacking Global at Mars, Andrew Clarke, recently spent some time chatting with The Wall Street Journal. Mr. Clarke articulated some important and exciting areas of innovation and interests that Mars continues to pursue for its snack brands. I listened to the interview with great interest, having consulted with Mars for decades. Some of the most intelligent, actionable, and creative research providing extraordinary directions came from Mars. The projects on food, from physiology...

Ferrari’s recent introduction of the Luce, its first fully electric four-door model, has sparked exactly the kind of controversy one might expect from an iconic brand. Just as the Jaguar rebrand did, and many others before it. Watching the debate unfold, I was reminded of the television game show Family Feud. Two camps emerge, each convinced they hold the correct answer. One side sees necessary innovation and progress. The other sees compromise and dilution of...

The criticism was predictable. A revered luxury watchmaker partners with Swatch, introduces a colorful US $400 pocket watch, and collectors immediately worry about dilution. But the Audemars Piguet x Swatch Royal Pop Collection is not simply a less expensive expression of Royal Oak codes. It is a brand architecture move. More specifically, it is co-branding: a brand with a brand, designed to create access without collapsing the distance that makes luxury desirable. The collaboration combines...

There is a moment in many employee-owned companies when the story sounds complete. “We are employee-owned.” It is a powerful statement. It signals commitment. It suggests accountability. It tells customers, partners, and prospective employees that the people inside the business have something personal at stake. But here is the hard truth: employee ownership is not a culture strategy. It is a structure. A powerful structure, yes. A meaningful structure, absolutely. But still a structure. And,...

Visual communication is now one of the primary ways buyers judge credibility, understand value, compare options, and decide whether a brand deserves attention. In a market crowded with claims, strong visual assets make value tangible. They reduce uncertainty. They show how a product works, how a service performs, how a brand behaves, and whether the promise feels believable. Today, the central question for brands is whether their visual assets are helping buyers move closer to...