Services / Brand Strategy
Brand Strategy Melbourne
Brand strategy is the work that happens before anyone opens a design file. It is the decision about what you stand for, who you are for, and why anyone should choose you over the business next door. Get it right and every decision afterwards is faster. Skip it and you will spend the next three years relitigating the same arguments in design reviews, because nobody agreed what the brand was supposed to do in the first place.
The numbers behind the work
20 years
agency-side across Tribal DDB, Blaze Advertising and Mediacom before founding The Animals.
4 to 8 weeks
is a typical strategy engagement, depending on how many people need to agree.
6 sectors
we work across regularly: finance, retail, health, property, education and not-for-profit.
What’s included
Positioning
What you stand for, and what you are deliberately not
Brand architecture
How your products, services and sub-brands relate to each other
Audience definition
Who you are actually talking to, and what moves them
Messaging framework
The things you say, in the order you say them
Tone of voice
How you sound, with enough worked examples to be usable
Competitive review
Where the category is crowded, and where nobody is standing
How it works
1 · Discovery
Interviews with your team, your customers, and sometimes the people who chose someone else. We are looking for the gap between what you think you are selling and what people think they are buying. That gap is usually where the strategy problem lives.
2 · Definition
Positioning, architecture and messaging drafted, pressure-tested and revised. This is where the arguments happen, which is the point. A positioning nobody argued about is usually one nobody will defend either.
3 · Articulation
The strategy written down in a form your team can actually use. Not a 90-page deck that gets opened twice, but a working document your marketing lead can hand to a new agency, a new hire, or a new campaign.
Work
Medibank
Employer brand playbook and EVP. Positioning and messaging framework for one of Australia’s largest health insurers, built to hold up across a workforce of thousands and a recruitment market that moves quickly.
Mantle Health
Brand strategy for a growing health business. Since acquired.
ReTHINK by Psychological Safety Australia
Naming, positioning and identity for a new product in a category that did not yet have language for itself. The strategy work was mostly about deciding what to call the problem before deciding what to call the product.
Frequently Asked Questions
How much does brand strategy cost?
It depends on scope and how many stakeholders need to be interviewed and aligned. A focused positioning project for a single business sits well below a full architecture exercise for a group with multiple sub-brands. We scope it properly before quoting rather than guessing.
Do we need strategy if we just want a new logo?
Sometimes no. If your positioning is clear and your team agrees on it, identity work can run on its own. The problem is that most businesses asking for a logo are actually describing a strategy problem, and a new logo will not touch it.
Can you work alongside our existing agency?
Yes, and often that is the cleanest arrangement. We do the strategy, your agency executes against it. We are happy to write it in a form another team can pick up and run with.
How do we know it worked?
Brand strategy shows up in commercial numbers rather than brand awareness surveys. Shortlist rate, conversion, retention, average contract value, and whether you can hold your price when someone cheaper turns up.