When Melbourne businesses decide it’s time to focus on their brand, it can be hard to know who to call. A designer? An agency? A consultant? Someone who does strategy?
If you’re thinking about strategy specifically, this is a good sign. It means you understand, at least intuitively, that the problem you’re trying to solve is bigger than just your old logo or your dated brand colours.
Read on to get clear on what a brand strategist does, how the role differs from other branding disciplines and what to look for when you’re trying to choose a brand strategist in Melbourne.
What does a brand strategist do?
A brand strategist’s core job is to work out where a business should stand in the market and how it should communicate that to the people it most wants to reach.
That sounds pretty straightforward, but the work behind it is not.
Getting clarity requires going beyond what the business tells you about itself. It means talking directly to customers and listening for what they actually value, which is often different from what the business assumes.
It means mapping competitive landscape honestly and finding a position that is both genuinely true and meaningfully distinctive. It means working with the leadership team to surface what the business believes, resolve the tensions in that and build something the whole organisation can commit to.
The output is a brand blueprint: a detailed strategic document that captures positioning, values, personality, target customer profiles and messaging. It’s a working tool that guides business decisions, hiring, communications and how the brand evolves over time.
A good brand strategist will also uncover insights that go beyond brand entirely. When you examine a business thoroughly, you find things that internal teams can’t see from the inside. Product architecture that has grown confusing over time. Processes that create friction for clients. Growth opportunities that haven’t been formally explored. These observations are part of the value.
How a brand strategist differs from other roles
Understanding the different terminology helps you choose the right person for the job.
The difference between a brand strategist and a brand designer
A brand designer creates the visual expression of a brand: logos, colour systems, typography, graphic layouts. It’s skilled, specialised work and it matters enormously.
But a designer’s training is in visual communication, not strategic positioning. Their job is to make a brand look and feel right. A strategist’s job is to determine what the brand should stand for before any of that begins.
Strategy comes first. Design expresses it. When this order is reversed, the result is often a brand that looks polished but doesn’t solve the underlying problem, because the underlying problem was never visual in the first place.
The difference between a brand strategist and a marketing consultant
A marketing consultant typically focuses on how to reach and acquire customers: channels, campaigns, content, advertising. Brand strategy works upstream of this. It defines the positioning and message that marketing then amplifies. Marketing without a clear brand strategy tends to be inconsistent, because there is no agreed foundation to execute against.
The difference between a brand strategist and a business consultant
A business consultant looks at operations, financials, growth strategy and organisational structure. A brand strategist focuses on how the business is perceived, positioned and communicated. In practice, the best brand strategy engagements incorporate genuine business thinking, because the two are deeply connected. But they serve different primary purposes and the distinction is worth maintaining.
The right questions to ask before you hire a brand strategist in Melbourne
Price, timeline and portfolio are reasonable starting points. But the questions that actually determine whether an engagement will produce lasting value tend not to get asked.
Do you interview our customers as part of the process?
This is the single most revealing question you can ask. Customer research is the foundation of any good brand strategy. If the answer is no, the strategy will be built on the business’s assumptions rather than evidence. The gap between those two things is often significant, and sometimes completely reframes the strategic direction.
What happens after the strategy is delivered?
A brand blueprint without an implementation plan is an expensive document. How does the strategist think about bringing the strategy to life? How does the design phase connect to the strategic work? What does an ongoing relationship look like? These questions reveal whether you are buying a project or beginning a partnership.
How do you handle situations where the evidence points somewhere unexpected?
The most valuable strategic insights are often the ones the business hadn’t expected. A strategist who only validates what the business already believes isn’t doing strategic work. How they handle tension or disagreement tells you a great deal about the quality of thinking you will receive.
What a thorough brand strategy process looks like from the inside
Understanding the process helps you evaluate whether what you are being offered is genuinely strategic work.
A thorough engagement starts with discovery and research: a detailed review of the business, its market, its competitive landscape and its existing brand. Critically, this includes direct research with customers and often with staff at different levels of the organisation.
From this, the strategist synthesises findings and develops the strategic direction in collaboration with the leadership team, typically through structured workshops that both inform the strategy and build internal alignment around it.
The output, the brand blueprint, documents every element of this strategic direction in a form that is specific, grounded in evidence and practical to use. It is not a generic template completed with the client’s details. It reflects genuine insight about that particular business in that particular market.
What separates great and average brand strategy work
A few things consistently distinguish brand strategy that produces lasting commercial impact from work that produces a polished document and limited change.
- It goes beyond what the business tells you. The brief is a starting point. Good strategy tests it against research rather than simply executing it.
- It asks business questions, not just brand questions. Where is the business going? What is the growth opportunity? Where is there friction in the client experience? The most useful strategic work is always entangled with business strategy, and a strategist who stays narrowly in the brand lane misses the most important insights.
- It creates internal alignment, not just external positioning. A brand that the leadership team and staff genuinely believe in performs differently from one that was developed and handed down. Great strategic work builds that internal conviction through the process itself.
- It produces measurable outcomes. Checking out brand strategy portfolios is useful, but you also want to see evidence that the strategic work produced real results for real businesses.
“Sue has done an excellent job of understanding our business and how we want to present ourselves to our market. Her insights and advice have also helped shape our broader marketing strategy. Sue’s come to feel like one of the team.”
— Michelle Nicholson, Director, Logicly
What Melbourne businesses tend to get wrong
Three decades of working with Melbourne businesses has shown us a few notable patterns. When you’re choosing a brand strategist, look out for these common traps:
- Mistaking a design engagement for a strategy engagement. A designer who asks good questions and develops a considered brief is doing their job well. But that is not a brand strategy engagement. If no one has interviewed your customers, mapped your competitive position or developed a brand blueprint, you have a visual identity. The strategic foundations are still to be built.
- Coming to the process with a fixed conclusion. The businesses that get the most from brand strategy come with genuine openness. Those who come looking for validation of decisions already made tend to get work that is technically competent but strategically thin, because the strategist was never given the latitude to challenge assumptions and follow the evidence.
- Separating strategy from design. Commissioning strategy from one party and design from another introduces a translation gap that weakens both. Something is always lost when a design team is briefed on a strategy they didn’t develop. An integrated practice, where strategy and design are developed by the same team, produces more coherent results.
- Underestimating how much the business has changed. Businesses evolve quickly and brands drift slowly. The gap between where a business actually is and what its brand communicates can widen over years without anyone formally noticing. By the time it becomes visible in the market, it has usually been felt internally for some time.
How Liquid’s brand strategists work
Liquid Creativity is a Melbourne-based boutique branding agency with over 30 years of experience working with established businesses across a wide range of industries.
Strategy is mandatory when you work with us. We don’t design without it and we don’t take shortcuts. The research phase, which includes direct customer interviews, competitive analysis and a thorough review of the business and its market, is where the most valuable insights emerge, and we give it the time it deserves.
We combine brand strategy with business strategy as a matter of course. When we examine a business properly, we find things that go well beyond brand positioning, and we share those observations as part of the engagement.
We work directly with founders and decision-makers across Melbourne and beyond, and several of our client relationships have continued for years because the strategic thinking keeps delivering value as the business grows and changes.
Our brand and business strategy service explains what an engagement with us involves in practice. If you’re not yet sure what level of work is needed, a brand audit is often a useful starting point. Or if you’d prefer to talk it through, get in touch for a free chat.
