Brand strategy
Brand strategy is not a marketing expense, but the foundation for growth. Why it becomes more urgent as soon as you take on staff.
No bank has ever refused a loan because brand strategy was lacking. Yet brand strategy for a growing company appears nowhere on the standard checklist of banks, accountants or subsidy offices. Banks ask for a business plan, a budget, a liquidity forecast. The accountant asks for figures, the subsidy office for a project plan. Nobody asks for the document that states why a customer chooses you and not those other three suppliers who promise the same thing.
Yet that is precisely the document that determines whether all those other papers will still matter in five years' time. In this article I show why brand strategy for a growing company is not a marketing expense, but a business foundation, what the hard evidence for this is, and why it becomes urgent the moment you take on staff.
Strong brands grow faster, withstand crises better and give their owners pricing power. That's not a feeling, but measurable, from Kantar to McKinsey. The tipping point lies not in your turnover, but in your workforce: as soon as more people tell your story, it dilutes. Unless you anchor it. Brand strategy for a growing company works precisely at that tipping point.
A business plan describes what you're going to do. The market, the offering, the forecasts, the risks. Useful, certainly for the bank. A brand strategy answers a different question: why does a customer choose you? And the question that entrepreneurs consistently skip: why do your best people stay working for you, whilst the competitor pays more?
The difference becomes visible in a research figure that I like to present to entrepreneurs. John Dawes of the Australian Ehrenberg-Bass Institute calculated that at any given moment only about five per cent of your potential customers are actively searching. The remaining ninety-five per cent buy later. In six months, in two years. And when they're ready, they choose the brand that's already in their head.
Your business plan organises the five per cent of today. Your brand strategy wins the ninety-five per cent of tomorrow. Those who only steer on the first buy in every customer anew with advertisements, discounts and quotation processes. Those who build on the second are found before the question is asked. That distinction makes brand strategy for a growing company an investment, not an expense.
For clarity: a brand strategy is not a logo and not a campaign. It's a set of choices that are on paper and that everyone in the company can retell. The first choice is positioning: who are you there for, and why does that matter? Not what you do, but why a customer gets that from you.
The second choice is structure: how do your services, product lines or branches relate to each other, and who communicates what? The third is language: how does your company sound, which promises do you make and which explicitly not? The fourth is form: what does the brand look like, and are those guidelines usable in daily practice or do they lie as a thick pdf in a drawer?
Four choices. None of the four appears in a business plan, and none of the four can you delegate to a marketing intern. Together they determine whether your company tells one story or twelve. They form the core of every brand strategy for a growing company that holds up.
For those who find this a soft word, there is hard evidence. Research agency Kantar has been following the world's strongest brands in the BrandZ study for twenty years. An investment portfolio of those brands grew by 435 per cent in stock market value between 2006 and 2025. The S&P 500, let's say the average of the American stock exchange, remained stuck at 353 per cent.
More interesting is what happened in the crisis years 2008 and 2020: the strongest brands fell less, recovered faster and ended higher. A strong brand is not decoration for good times. It's a buffer for bad ones.
Interbrand calculates annually which part of a purchase decision is driven purely by the brand, separate from price or functionality. If that share rises by one per cent, the stock market value of the company rises on average by 2.3 per cent. McKinsey additionally calculated that B2B companies with a strong brand deliver their shareholders twenty per cent more return than weakly branded competitors. So brand is not a consumer thing; particularly in business markets, where decision-makers avoid risks, a trusted name is decisive.
And then there's the effectiveness research by Les Binet and Peter Field, based on nearly a thousand campaigns over thirty years. Their conclusion: investing in brand building wins in the long term over individual sales promotions, on market share, on margin and especially on pricing power. Being able to charge more without losing customers: that's what a brand does financially.
I can already hear the objection: this is about stock-exchange-listed giants. Correct. But the mechanism is scale-independent. Preference arises before the purchase question exists, at Apple exactly as with an installation company with fifteen fitters. The giants are simply better documented.
In 2003 LEGO lost one million dollars per day. The company carried eight hundred million dollars of debt and analysts gave it another eighteen months. There was no shortage of figures, nor of plans. What was missing was an answer to the brand question.
The new chief executive Jørgen Vig Knudstorp therefore began not with a reorganisation diagram, but with that one question: what do people actually love about LEGO? The answer, creative building, became the knife with which he cut. The number of unique components went from thirteen thousand to seven thousand, the theme parks were sold, everything that didn't contribute to that one answer disappeared. More than ten years later LEGO was the largest toy company in the world; in 2024 it posted a record turnover of the equivalent of nearly eleven billion dollars.
The lesson lies not in the scale, but in the sequence. First the brand question, then the plan. That's the logic of brand strategy for a growing company: the spreadsheet follows the strategy, not the other way round.
Closer to home. Tony's Chocolonely began in 2005 as an action by journalists, without a factory, without distribution power, without a price advantage. What it did have: a mission (slave-free chocolate), packaging that screams on the shelf and a story that's consistent down to the unequally divided pieces of the bar.
Twenty years later Tony's has about fifteen per cent of the Dutch chocolate shelf and a turnover that grew past two hundred million euros. In the United States the bar now lies nationwide at Walmart and Costco. For completeness: Tony's runs at a loss, 6.8 million in the last financial year, because it's investing heavily in international growth. A strong brand is a foundation, not a magic wand. But as a newcomer without that foundation, just try conquering shelf space at Albert Heijn and Walmart simultaneously.
The third example comes from my own city. Voys, telecoms company from Groningen, founded in 2006, serves more than thirty thousand business customers with 250 employees and zero managers. In 2024 the founders added another layer: they donated their shares via steward ownership to the company itself. Voys can never be sold again; the profit henceforth serves the mission by statute.
I worked with my agency Fitbrand on Voys' international brand strategy and saw from the inside what the difference makes: the brand doesn't sit there in a marketing department. It sits in the structure. Ask a random employee why Voys exists and you get essentially the same answer, without a manager having pre-chewed it. There is, after all, no manager.
That's what brand strategy in a company with staff must do: take the story out of the founder's head and anchor it in the organisation itself. So that it remains standing, even when you're not there for a week.
With the sole trader, brand consistency is free. One head, one story. Every quotation, every customer conversation, every post comes from the same source and therefore automatically sounds the same.
Then you take on people. And every new colleague is a new interpretation of your story. Sales promises something slightly different from the website, the newest branch communicates differently from the first, and after the tenth employee you no longer recognise your own company in the quotations. That's not carelessness from your people. It's a structural problem: the brand has never moved out of your head. Brand strategy for a growing company solves precisely that.
That this is a matter for the chief is shown by Dario Amodei, chief executive of AI company Anthropic. He spends forty per cent of his working time on culture; I wrote about it earlier. Culture is brand direction inwards: ensuring that everyone not only knows the same story, but also believes it.
For that phase I developed the PACE model: brand direction for organisations with multiple teams, disciplines or branches. Four steps, from positioning via brand architecture and communication to expression, that take the brand out of individual heads and record it in working agreements. If you still work alone, then the Brand Course trajectory is the more logical route; this story is about the step after that.
A business plan keeps your company going. A brand strategy for a growing company keeps it chosen. And choosing, that's what your customers and your best people do anew every day.
Curious where your brand dilutes? Schedule a conversation.
Written by
Peter van der SteegePeter van der Steege is a brand strategist, designer and AI director. He builds brands for entrepreneurs and writes about what makes brands strong, from strategy to the role of AI and humanity. He lives and works in Groningen.
