brand-strategy

name	brand-strategy
description	Use when discovery must establish audience, positioning, differentiation, architecture, and a decision-ready brand brief before design or copy. Use `brand-storytelling` after the strategy exists and `agency-positioning` for the agency's own commercial offer.
metadata	{"portable":true,"compatible_with":["claude-code","codex"]}

Brand Strategy

Acknowledgement: Shared by Peter Bamuhigire, techguypeter.com, [phone].

Turn verified business, customer, category, and competitive evidence into a brand brief that downstream design, copy, and page work can use without guessing.

Use When

• A new or repositioned brand needs a shared strategic foundation.
• Design or content teams are making conflicting audience, promise, or tone assumptions.
• Brand architecture, category framing, differentiation, or naming direction requires a decision.

Do Not Use When

• The approved brief already exists and the task is narrative execution; use brand-storytelling.
• The task is the web agency's offer, fees, or qualification posture; use agency-positioning.
• The request is only visual styling; route the approved brief to the design-system engine.

Inputs

Artefact	Source	Required?	If absent
Business model, offer, constraints, and decision owner	Client brief and discovery	yes	Stop and issue a discovery gap list.
Audience evidence and buying context	Interviews, CRM, research, sales notes	yes	Mark hypotheses and prohibit unsupported audience claims.
Competitor and category evidence	Verified market sources	conditional	Produce provisional differentiation and request research.

Workflow

1. Confirm the strategic decision, audience, geography, and decision owner.
2. Separate verified facts, stakeholder opinions, and hypotheses.
3. Define category, primary audience, frame of reference, problem, value, proof, and exclusions.
4. Compare credible positioning territories and choose one with an explicit trade-off.
5. Decide brand architecture, personality, voice principles, and promise-to-proof boundaries.
6. Write docs/brand-brief.md and record unresolved tests and downstream implications.
7. Stop before design when the decision owner, core audience, or proof boundary is unresolved; recover with a narrowed provisional brief and validation plan.

Quality Standards

• Make one defensible positioning choice; do not combine incompatible territories.
• Trace claims to evidence and label hypotheses.
• State whom the brand is not for and what it will not claim.
• Give design and copy teams operational language, not adjective clouds.

Anti-Patterns

• Listing five audiences as equally primary. Fix: choose one buying audience and define secondary users.
• Calling generic virtues differentiators. Fix: tie differentiation to a capability, method, access, proof, or business model.
• Selecting an archetype before positioning. Fix: decide market meaning first, then use archetype only if it clarifies behaviour.
• Inventing customer insight. Fix: label the hypothesis and specify how to test it.
• Writing a mood-board brief. Fix: include category, audience, promise, proof, exclusions, and decision rationale.

Outputs

Artefact	Consumer	Acceptance condition
docs/brand-brief.md	Design system, storytelling, content, and page teams	Names audience, category, positioning, promise, proof, voice, architecture, exclusions, and unresolved hypotheses.
Positioning decision record	Client decision owner	Compares credible options and records why the selected territory wins.
Validation plan	Research and commercial owners	Every material hypothesis has an owner, method, and decision consequence.

Evidence Produced

Evidence	Format	Acceptance condition
Evidence register	Claim, source, status, limitation	Distinguishes facts, opinions, and hypotheses.
Approval record	Decision, owner, date, conditions	Downstream teams can identify the approved version.

Capability Contract

Default to read-only discovery and analysis. Editing the brief requires authority. Customer contact, research recruitment, publishing positioning, changing live brand assets, or claiming stakeholder approval requires explicit authority.

Degraded Mode

When customer research, competitor evidence, or stakeholder access is unavailable, return a provisional brief with confidence labels and validation questions. Mark market fit not assessed.

Decision Rules

Choice	Action	Failure or risk avoided
Evidence supports one distinct buying reason	Commit to that positioning territory	Generic compromise positioning
Evidence conflicts across segments	Choose a primary segment or split the offer	One brand promise serving incompatible needs
Proof cannot support the desired promise	Narrow the claim or build proof first	Credibility failure in copy and sales

Worked Example

A Kampala payroll firm wants to be "trusted, innovative, and professional". Interviews show SME owners value correction before statutory deadlines, while enterprise buyers require integration depth. Choose the SME compliance-recovery territory for the current offer, cite the response workflow as proof, and record enterprise integration as a separate future proposition.

References

• references/brand-discovery-questions.md - discovery prompts and evidence collection.
• references/positioning-frameworks.md - positioning, architecture, and differentiation choices.
• references/legacy-guidance.md - preserved CBBE, mantra, archetype, and brief guidance.
• Book-driven positioning, story, and proof - durable book synthesis with evidence and currentness boundaries.