Brand Strategy vs Brand Identity: Why the Order Matters

I get why people use the word branding to mean the logo and colours. They're the obvious bits, the ones you can point at and say you like or don't like. But the part that makes those designs commercially useful tends to happen before anybody opens a design program.

Brand strategy and brand identity do different jobs, even when the same person handles both. And if you're currently choosing between a dozen different visual directions with no clear reason to pick one, chances are there's a decision missing underneath.

The difference is more important than the terminology

Strategy is how a business chooses to position itself for a particular audience and communicate its value. Identity translates that direction into a visual system people can recognise. Neither replaces the other, and the difference isn't simply that one involves research and the other involves colours.

A brand can have an attractive identity without positioning that resonates. It can also have a clear proposition but a confusing or inconsistent visual presentation. The question is which problem you're actually trying to solve.

Kindred Pleasure: why the audience came before the design

Kindred Pleasure is a curated intimate wellness retailer. The category can feel tacky and overwhelming at one end, or coldly clinical at the other. Rachel wanted women to feel more comfortable while browsing thoughtfully selected products.

That was the strategic direction. The muted palette, custom wordmark and warmer approach to photography followed from it. A different positioning would have led to different design decisions, even for the very same products.

Work it through for your own business

A different problem demands a different identity

Talk Dirty Co works in household laundry. Its personality is deliberately more playful, and the concept acknowledges that real homes get messy. That thinking influenced the typography, graphics and packaging rather than a desire to be loud for its own sake.

There's no sensible reason to apply Kindred Pleasure's calm romantic identity to laundry, or Talk Dirty Co's expressive system to intimate wellness. The starting point isn't your designer's favourite style.

Breathation: strategy beyond the screen

Breathation's identity needed to speak to breathwork and community without falling into the same wellness cues as everyone else. The project considered how that visual world could also inform the creative direction of a physical space.

When I design the creative direction for fitouts, a specialist team executes the physical work. The brand thinking still needs to make sense in that environment, because people don't stop experiencing your brand when they step away from a website.

Breathation is a particularly good example of how a strategy decision changed the identity. The clients first imagined lots of nature-inspired greens, which makes sense on the surface for a wellness studio. But they described wanting the space to feel like a womb. I didn't think another olive-green wellness palette would express that. I recommended warm Australian-clay reds, deep browns and earthy tones instead, because the emotional experience they were describing needed warmth, not a generic reference to trees.

The colours weren't chosen because I happened to like them more. They were chosen because the client had given me a better insight into what the brand needed to feel like than the initial colour references did.

What if the identity already exists?

You don't necessarily need to throw away a good brand because nobody handed you a formal strategy PDF. I'd first look at where the business wants to go and whether the current identity helps people understand that direction.

The Designer Drinks Co shows that restraint can communicate expertise. Sam wanted an atelier-like quality rather than an overly technical appearance. The resulting restrained brand language makes sense because it reflects what the business wanted customers to perceive.

The next decision is yours

For a real example of the work, see the current ReWorded portfolio on the current ReWorded website.

If you're weighing up what your business needs, explore my current services or browse my recent projects.