The growth of brand strategy consulting is expected to reach $12.6B with a growth rate of 14.1% CAGR. Unlike a decade ago, where brand strategy was synonymous with a new logo, today’s company executives require measurable revenue-based returns instead.

The following guide breaks down the actual vendor capabilities, costs, and software frameworks needed to make a measurable shift in brand positioning.

Services or Software: Picking Your Brand Strategy Solutions

Currently, brand strategy solutions are extremely fragmented, with organizations either seeking to hire an external consultant or purchase a software solution to manage their own internal brand strategy. The projected total revenue of the market for brand strategy services will be $1.745B by 2034, with an annual growth rate of 6.6%.

Conversely, while the market for software solutions for managing brand strategy is growing at a faster rate (projected to reach $1.65B by 2034 and grow at a CAGR of 8.7%), alternate estimates have the market far exceeding $12.4B.

As a result, the executives of today do not purchase vague promises of improved brand recognition and awareness. They demand a tangible minimum baseline, clearly represented pricing tied to specific project scopes, and a guarantee of measurable results. A major contributing factor to the dramatic changes in how historically these metrics are delivered is the widespread implementation of artificial intelligence.

Presently, nearly 42% of all companies use AI to manage their overall general marketing departments and over 16% have begun using AI in their overall top-down brand strategy and planning efforts.

Most organizations have an expectation that a successful brand strategy engagement will yield measurable increases in revenue and market share within a standard financial year.

To achieve this, a brand strategy engagement must move away from subjective discussions on design and aesthetics and toward creating a competitive advantage within the marketplace through internal alignment of teams and a strict system of governance.

How Much Do Brand Strategy Solutions Cost?

Once again, we will focus on proposed pricing as it applies to the type of deliverables provided within the framework of the market demand pricing or pricing model.

In order to ensure successful service delivery and to successfully identify, develop, and implement brand strategy solutions that fit each client and the current market, pricing strategies should have clearly defined deliverables; they should not consist of vague or uncertain estimates, as this generally creates confusion and can lead to unexpected budget overruns if left unresolved.

The lowest pricing tier is for a brand audit. The price range for this lowest tier is between $5K - $15K, and typically it takes 2-3 weeks to complete. During this process, your existing market position is audited by an independent team who prepare a market position audit gap analysis on your service/brand and provide you with a diagnosis of your failed deliverables.

As you move through the pricing tier, you will find that the most commonly identified deliverables are core strategy, which will normally cost you between $15,000-$75,000. This tier of service typically takes 4-8 weeks to complete and consists of extensive market research, direct stakeholder interviews, and extensive multiple rounds of customer testing to validate the deliverables. When you complete this process, you will have a positioning statement, well defined target audiences, and an identified market position.

The highest pricing tier is a complete brand refresh/new brand launch. This pricing tier typically starts at $50K and easily exceeds $200K depending on the complexity of the business. The time required to complete this process is typically between 8-16 weeks. This pricing tier includes the core strategy pricing tier, plus the total overhaul of visual identity, creation of new guidelines, and the establishment of centralized asset management systems to manage your deliverables.

Paying by the Hour or on Retainer

Not all strategy work is priced in a fixed fee project model. Many businesses, agencies, or consultants offer hourly billing or monthly retainers in order to continue to provide support to their clients. Across the market, there is a significant disparity in hourly rates among agencies and consultants based on their seniority and best case outcomes. Typically, a junior brand consultant will bill you $75-$125 an hour, while someone who is more established in their career will bill you $100-$200 per hour.

Established strategists and highly skilled, experienced freelancers command upwards of $175-$350 per hour. The rarest, highest-caliber professionals can even bill $1,000 for specialized crisis meetings.

The benefit of having a retainer arrangement is you have predictable access to these experts without having to continue negotiating separate contracts for each small request. A typical brand governance retainer will cost anywhere from $2,000 to $10,000 per month. However, the price range can run from $1,000 for basic monthly check-ins, to as many as $25,000 per month for larger organizations needing extensive, ongoing support. In more specialized, global markets, like in India, rates vary widely, with actual hourly fees between ₹2,500 and ₹30,000, and substantial monthly retainers of up to ₹500,000 for complete, comprehensive external management.

Big Agencies Versus Small Specialists

Depending on the size of the company and the stage they are in currently, vendor selection will vary. Companies that are going through massive mergers, spin-offs, or a complete corporate transformation are generally looking for a global provider.

Agencies like Prophet are very good at getting their customers to grow through a "brand-led" business approach, with their large footprint of 16 offices globally.

Lippincott has great expertise in helping clients navigate the issues related to complex corporate transitions. Interbrand is the largest in the area of brand valuation and has built successful business cases through their financial analysis across 14 global offices on behalf of their clients. Siegel+Gale are viewed by clients as the best brand consulting company for simplifying complicated organizations that operate under stringent regulations.

Landor, Wolff Olins, Pentagram, Collins, and MetaDesign are all very good at creating and developing a "global brand architecture" at large scale.

Smaller growth-oriented business and software startups are generally looking for speed and category-specific knowledge. Red Antler specializes in developing challenger brands and supporting the launch of category-defining products. With extensive experience in B2B and SaaS identity, Focus Lab not only aligns internal technical teams effectively but also ensures that digital-first product designs are being created for quick-to-market or digital-first technology organizations.

For scaling businesses that want to become challenger brands, Ragged Edge creates challenger brand positioning, while Motto creates growth strategies using leadership.

In addition to a focus on strategy, many boutique firms provide specialized services in the post-strategy phase as well. Using embedded teams, Moonb provides an embedded senior team to assist video and motion as well as design production with a remote workforce located in Lisbon and London. Guilden & Grey serves as a strategic consulting organization linking brand positioning to hard sales metrics, making them very useful for executives focused on performance.

Step-by-Step Brand Strategy Solutions and Frameworks

Finding Your Core Pitch and What Customers Want

The purpose of the positioning formula is to provide a means to communicate and defend a strategy. The standard positioning formula requires clear inputs to eliminate ambiguity by prompting clarity for sales teams at the lowest level:

What is the "target audience"? What is the "need"? What is the "category" of product? What is the "benefit"? What is the "alternative"?

This statement will be an "absolute filter" for all future marketing decisions.

The primary reason for positioning failure is a lack of forced exclusion. If a company attempts to reach every possible buyer profile through the same general message, then the company's message becomes totally generic. To create a strong positioning statement, a statement must explicitly state who the product is not intended for; therefore, an executive must be willing to endure the discomfort of not selling to every potential lead in the short-term.

Along with a positioning statement, the JTBD framework clarifies the exact intent of the product that a buyer will purchase. Buyers do not purchase features of the software; rather, they purchase the operational result from the software. The entire exercise fails if the mapping of the strategy does not, therefore, demonstrate how the buyer's job is achieved.

Finding Open Spots in Your Market

To identify a competitive section of the market, actual data must be obtained through research rather than intuition. To map out the competitors on a price-quality positioning map based on their cost and perceived value to buyers, most companies will use this as a standard tool. By mapping each of his known competitors, he will see visually where the gap is for a product in that segment to dominate.

Advanced pricing strategies will use the Van Westendorp pricing model and Conjoint analysis to determine exactly what consumers are willing to pay for particular feature sets.

Positioning focuses on the "Unlike" factor for your product. Example: if three businesses focus on enterprise security, competing on enterprise security would be a waste of financial resources. The former gap may exist in the speed of implementation or ease of use of the product. As a result, a strategy must be based on a tangible differentiator that the market values, and that competitors will find challenging to replicate.

Using Simple Formulas to Get Fast Results

Typically, custom processes for strategy will result in wasting time and budget. Highly effective agencies utilize a very standardized framework to help facilitate the fast decision-making process.

For example, Elements Brand Management has developed a proprietary Unified Brand Framework, which includes a specialized Brand Power Assessment, allowing the company to reduce the extensive hours of consulting work into a defined three-week time frame known as a Unified Brand Sprint.

By standardizing the final output of the process, instead of a lengthy, cumbersome written document, standardized frameworks are outputting specific, usable artifacts that are far more beneficial and useful to clients. Most consulting firms use the 7S framework or the 7Ps framework to ensure that the senior executive team does not spend too much time distracted by minor visual aspects before they have developed a robust business rationale.

This use of a structured approach ensures that the executive team will understand the critical business elements that need to be developed first before they get caught up in the details of the design.

Building Your Strategy with Tech Tools

Tools for Visual Teamwork

The current state of strategy development is collaborative and digital. Gone are the days of writing and rewriting documents back and forth. The current best practice is to use a visual canvas to develop multiple aspects of a strategy simultaneously, as well as to create a visual document that allows multiple stakeholders to provide feedback and challenge assumptions in real-time.

Miro and Milanote are the primary tools used to develop the visual canvas for the initial stages of a brand. Remote teams who are building brand mood boards and competitor comparison matrices, as well as running workshops, use these platforms to develop the initial stages of their strategy without being physically present in the same location. Storyflow is an AI-based visual canvas tool designed specifically for the development and validation of brand strategy, offering instant algorithmic feedback on positioning concepts.

Tools for Writing Clear Rules

Notion and Lucidchart provide a structured environment for documenting and creating rules around messaging.

These platforms also serve as the "living" documents of the strategy and ensure that every member of the team is working on the same up-to-date version of the core messaging.

Tools for Storing Logos and Files

If a strategy is stored as a static PDF file, it will die. If a local marketing team doesn't have access to a centralized source for logos, fonts, and messaging guidelines, they will create their own versions of branding assets.

As a business moves beyond a single office, it is essential to have a digital asset management (DAM) system in place. Frontify offers the best solution to provide solutions for large corporations by offering dynamic guidelines that serve as a live expression layer of the brand. Bynder offers template automation to assist creative teams in producing larger volumes of work without compromising on design rules. Brandfolder was built to deliver assets quickly for large companies with active multi-channel marketing efforts.

Canto offers a highly secure cloud-based system for the needs of mid-sized businesses that utilize shared portals as a means of sharing materials with external partners.

Canva Enterprise has been adopted by many local content teams and continues to be an effective platform for providing brand-certified templates, preventing creative teams from making rogue design decisions while facilitating quick content creation on a daily basis.

Using AI to Build Brand Strategy Solutions

Artificial intelligence has shifted from an experimental phase to baseline technology. AI overviews now represent approximately one out of every two searches performed and comprise approximately 50% of the mobile-device viewable area when conducting a web search. Consequently, corporations have become required to optimize their core messaging for the algorithmic interpretation of their content.

ChatGPT, Jasper, and Copy.ai provide brand strategy solutions for the immense volume of content produced when employing an AI-based marketing strategy.

MarketMuse, SurferSEO, Ahrefs, and Clearscope ensure optimized content use keywords and phrases associated with highest probability of generating organic search traffic through natural search queries. Approximately 21% of marketing teams utilize ChatGPT on an ongoing basis, and 20% of all marketing teams rely on an SEO content optimization service provider.

The most significant benefit of AI is the ability to create and govern workflows. Companies can reduce the amount of time and effort to produce marketing content by as much as 40% by integrating AI into their dynamic brand guidelines. By employing brand-locked templates and prompt libraries, companies limit automated content generated by AI to their approved tone of voice, only requiring a quick review by a human before posting.

Tracking Customer Feelings and Market Feedback

To measure success in implementing strategies, constant monitoring of data is required. Social media listening will not suffice for most serious businesses. Companies are required to quickly adjust their market positions when there is a quick shift in public sentiment.

Brands are employing the use of Revuze for large businesses to obtain insights into both the brand and product insights in real time. Other media companies such as Brandwatch and Meltwater provide companies with a high level of media intelligence; with these two services, insight-driven companies can identify the exact share of voice they hold compared to the core competitors.

Brands that use Synthesio have access to a highly advanced form of AI-based sentiment analysis on more than 15 social media platforms. Marketing teams are able to recognize immediately when the marketplace has reacted negatively toward their product and have the ability to modify their messaging strategies within 24 hours. Sprinklr offers omnichannel unified customer experience management and extensive workflow automation for brands that are managing thousands of daily customer interactions.

Getting Your Team on the Same Page

Talking with Bosses and Leaders

The quickest way to destroy a strategy development engagement is to not get the internal executive team aligned. External consultants do not get hired just to create a positioning statement; they are hired to facilitate agreement among the CEO, the Head of Sales, and the Marketing Director.

Achieving this level of agreement necessitates conducting a stringent series of 90-minute stakeholder interviews. The interview sessions are not casual; their purpose is to expose the disparities between how executives perceive the product. If the sales division believes it is selling an inexpensive, quick-to-build tool and the product division believes it is building a complex, premium-level platform, the strategy cannot progress until this discrepancy is reconciled.

Agencies need to develop a highly structured interview agenda. They require leaders to answer challenging questions related to marketing segments and the critical limitations of marketing. Without this alignment internally, operational teams will not be able to successfully implement a new strategy because they believe that their feedback was not considered.

Teaching Your Team to Use New Templates

Developing a brand strategy is only 20% of the difficulty of the assignment; the other 80% is getting the organisation to use the new template. There is tremendous internal resistance against implementing new marketing templates and sales teams will resist new templates if they perceive them to be overly complex or difficult to use.

The delay in obtaining buy-in for a brand strategy or a new template results in an unseen cost which ultimately negates any potential return on investment from the original investment. For example, if an organisation invests $100,000 on a new identity and then chooses not to invest the necessary time in training their employees on how to use digital asset management (DAM) systems such as Bynder or Frontify, they will have lost all their investment.

Governance must be enforced with extreme rigidity when implementing a new brand strategy or a new template. Marketing directors must have the ability to physically prevent use of any old templates. They also must ensure that only approved fonts and colours are used in any presentations created with design tool software like Canva Enterprise. Allowing exceptions will cause the new brand strategy or new template to fail in a matter of weeks, if not days.

Real Growth and Sales Results to Expect

When developing a market strategy, the commercial outcomes must be the basis of measurement. The vanity metrics of social media impressions mean nothing to executive leadership. An achievable target for a new brand strategy will result in a 15% to 30% increase in revenue during the next 12 to 24 months.

Market share may improve more slowly, but is still a major benefit. In mature, very competitive markets a 5%-10% increase in the number of customers a business has will indicate that the brand is becoming more popular; an agency that claims they can achieve a 100% increase in a company's revenue with just a change to messaging is misleading at best.

While tracking brand awareness, the numbers that indicate brand awareness must also be tied back to a financial performance benchmark. For example, an increase will be quantified as significant if it is between 25-50% increase over the course of 6 months to 18 months and directly correlates with an increased number of wins in the sales pipeline or greater pricing power in the marketplace.

Real Examples That Prove What Works

The following case studies demonstrate the above baselines. Louis Vuitton was able to increase their total brand awareness by 18 points over a 2-year period in partnership with a strategic consulting firm, Guilden & Grey. Additionally, Guilden & Grey was involved with another client's product launch, which generated $1.4 million in total sales within 4 weeks of execution.

In a third example, the same firm led a significant repositioning effort that resulted in a 15-point increase in total brand awareness for a product and a 34% increase in the overall raw sales figure for that product when compared to the previous year. In the same timeframe, they were also able to increase consumer consideration for the brand by an additional 10 points.

In addition to utilizing the above principles, technology plays an important role in delivering these results. The DOOH advertising campaign that Perion executed for Lululemon resulted in a 640% improvement in its brand image, a 208% increase in brand interest, a 314% increase in foot traffic and over 4,296 modeled walk-ins into their brick-and-mortar stores. These stats demonstrate the hard data verification of how a disciplined approach to strategy creates actual financial results.

How to Choose Between In-House Staff and Outside Help

When to Keep Work Inside Your Company

Industries must consider whether they want to build their internal strategy teams, hire external agencies, or utilize a hybrid model supplemented with software. The key determining factor of this decision is the number of internal staff and the complexity of the marketplace.

For pre-revenue or early Series A stage companies, spending $75,000 on an external agency is typically a death sentence. These companies will want to develop their foundational positioning strategy via an internal founder working with tools such as Milanote and Notion.

When a company reaches mid-market and has multiple products across multiple regions, their internal strategy team will likely not be objective enough to make tough decisions about the direction of their company. That's when bringing in an external agency is critical, as they can cut through the internal politics and make the tough decisions for the team, and then hand back the finished strategy to the internal team for execution on a daily basis.

Using Software to Fill the Gaps

The hybrid model offers practical brand strategy solutions for modern-day organizations. Companies can hire an external agency for foundational work while purchasing enterprise software to execute it.

Combining a mid-level in-house graphic design team with either Frontify or Bynder allows companies to maintain strong brand visual guidelines while not paying $250 per hour for basic layout jobs.

Companies are able to leverage AI-powered tools for scaling raw content and using Brandwatch to monitor the marketplace's response to new product launches, while still enabling sales teams at a local level to produce approved material via Canva Enterprise. The hybrid model provides a direct link between the theoretical vision and the practical, operational execution of the original strategy investment and provides for a fixed-cost, predictable overhead structure.

Stop Paying for Unmeasured Work

There is no value in executing on a strategy without comprehensive tracking and measuring of the identifiable gains in market share. When you engage a partner for strategic development, do they use their foundational strategy to show the measurable results in terms of market share or are they only providing unmeasurable aesthetic design work?