Brand strategy
Brand strategy isn't a marketing expense, but the foundation for growth. Why it becomes urgent the moment you take on staff.
No bank has ever refused a loan because the brand strategy was missing. Yet brand strategy for a growing business doesn't appear on the standard checklist of banks, accountants or grant offices. Banks ask for a business plan, a budget, a cash flow forecast. The accountant asks for numbers, the grant office for a project plan. No one asks for the document that explains why a customer chooses you and not the other three suppliers who promise the same thing.
Yet that's precisely the document that determines whether all those other papers will still mean anything in five years' time. In this article I'll show why brand strategy for a growing business isn't a marketing cost, but a business foundation, what the hard evidence for that is, and why it becomes urgent the moment you take on staff.
Strong brands grow faster, weather crises better and give their owners pricing power. That's not a feeling, but measurable, from Kantar to McKinsey. The tipping point isn't your turnover, but your headcount: as soon as more people are telling your story, it dilutes. Unless you anchor it. Brand strategy for a growing business works precisely at that tipping point.
A business plan describes what you're going to do. The market, the offer, 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 entrepreneurs systematically skip: why do your best people stay working for you, whilst the competitor pays more?
The difference becomes visible in a research number I like to put to business owners. 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 looking. 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 today's five per cent. Your brand strategy wins tomorrow's ninety-five per cent. Those who only steer by the first buy in every customer afresh with adverts, discounts and tender processes. Those who build on the second are found before the question is asked. That distinction makes brand strategy for a growing business an investment, not a cost.
For clarity: a brand strategy isn't a logo and it isn't a campaign. It's a set of choices that's on paper and that everyone in the business 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 business sound, which promises do you make and which emphatically not? The fourth is form: what does the brand look like, and are those guidelines usable in daily practice or do they sit in a drawer as a fat PDF?
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 business tells one story or twelve. They form the core of every brand strategy for a growing business that holds.
For those who prefer soft words, there's hard evidence. Research agency Kantar has tracked the world's strongest brands in the BrandZ study for twenty years. An investment portfolio of those brands grew by 435 per cent in market value between 2006 and 2025. The S&P 500, roughly the average of the American stock market, got stuck at 353 per cent.
More interesting is what happened in the crisis years of 2008 and 2020: the strongest brands fell less, recovered faster and finished higher. A strong brand isn't decoration for good times. It's a buffer for bad ones.
Interbrand calculates annually what proportion of a purchase decision is driven purely by the brand, independent of price or functionality. If that share rises by one per cent, the market value of the company rises on average by 2.3 per cent. McKinsey also calculated that B2B companies with a strong brand deliver their shareholders twenty per cent more return than weakly branded competitors. So brand isn't a consumer thing; especially in business markets, where decision-makers avoid risks, a trusted name is decisive.
And then there's the effectiveness research of 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 actions, 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 listed giants. True. But the mechanism is scale-independent. Preference arises before the purchase question exists, at Apple just as at an installation business with fifteen fitters. The giants are simply better documented.
LEGO wasn't saved by a spreadsheet
In 2003 LEGO lost a million dollars a day. The company carried eight hundred million dollars of debt and analysts gave it eighteen months. No shortage of numbers, no shortage of plans either. What was missing was an answer to the brand question.
So the new chief executive Jørgen Vig Knudstorp didn't begin with a reorganisation scheme, 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 parts went from thirteen thousand to seven thousand, the theme parks were sold, everything that didn't contribute to that one answer disappeared. Well over ten years later LEGO was the biggest toy company in the world; in 2024 it posted a record turnover of nearly eleven billion dollars.
The lesson isn't in the scale, but in the sequence. First the brand question, then the plan. That's the logic of brand strategy for a growing business: the spreadsheet follows the strategy, not the other way round.
Closer to home. Tony's Chocolonely began in 2005 as a journalists' campaign, 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 is now stocked nationwide at Walmart and Costco. For completeness: Tony's is running 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 try as a newcomer without that foundation to capture 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 over thirty thousand business customers with 250 employees and zero managers. In 2024 the founders went one step further: they donated their shares via steward ownership to the company itself. Voys can never be sold; the profit now serves the mission by statute.
I worked with my agency Fitbrand on Voys's international brand strategy and saw from the inside what difference it makes: the brand doesn't sit there in a marketing department. It sits in the structure. Ask any employee why Voys exists and you get essentially the same answer, without a manager having pre-chewed it. There is no manager, after all.
That's what brand strategy in a business with staff has to do: take the story out of the founder's head and anchor it in the organisation itself. So that it stands, even when you're not there for a week.
For the sole trader, brand consistency is free. One head, one story. Every quote, every client conversation, every post comes from the same source and thus 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 business in the quotes. That's not sloppiness from your people. It's a structural problem: the brand never moved out of your head. Brand strategy for a growing business solves precisely that.
That this is a matter for the top is shown by Dario Amodei, CEO of AI company Anthropic. He spends forty per cent of his working time on culture; I wrote about it earlier. Culture is internal brand direction: making sure everyone not only knows the same story, but believes it too.
For that stage I developed the PACE model: brand direction for organisations with multiple teams, disciplines or locations. Four steps, from positioning through brand architecture and communication to expression, which take the brand out of people's heads and capture it in working agreements. If you're still working alone, the Brand Direction Programme is the more logical route; this story is about the step that follows.
A business plan keeps your company running. A brand strategy keeps a growing company chosen. And choosing — that's what your clients and your best people do afresh every day.
Curious where your brand is diluting? 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.
