Strategy

Before anything gets designed

Most brands aren’t unclear because nobody wrote the words down. They’re unclear because nobody decided. Strategy is where we make the decisions the design will have to carry — who this is for, what it stands against, and which good ideas we’re leaving out.

It runs three to five weeks and it is the shortest phase we do. It is also the one that makes every phase after it faster.

How it runs

1. Interviews. Six to ten conversations — founders, sales, and the customers who nearly didn’t buy. The last group is the useful one.
2. Landscape. We map what everyone in the category says, so we can find the sentence none of them can say back.
3. Positioning. One paragraph the whole company can repeat without reading it. Everything else hangs off it.
4. Messaging. The positioning turned into language for a homepage, a pitch deck and a job ad.

What you get

• A positioning statement, and the reasoning that produced it.
• A messaging framework: one line, one paragraph, one page.
• Naming, when the current one is the problem.
• A written record of what we ruled out and why — the part most studios skip, and the part you’ll want in eighteen months.

A strategy you can’t say out loud in a meeting isn’t a strategy. It’s a document.

Strategy is where most of our engagements start. It can be bought on its own, and roughly a third of our clients do exactly that, take the work in-house, and come back a year later for the identity.