Driving brand success in a crowded market

In today’s fiercely competitive landscape, no company can afford to overlook its brand strategy, especially during challenging times. The pressure to cut costs or follow fleeting trends often leads businesses to lose sight of their core brand values. Ignoring this can weaken customer loyalty, blur your differentiation and ultimately damage your brand’s relevance and growth. A strong brand strategy isn’t just nice to have - it’s what keeps you ahead of the game and helps your brand thrive in the long term.

What Makes a Good Strategy

Our strategists draw on Richard Rumelt’s approach, viewing strategy as a hands-on way to tackle challenges. So, what makes a good strategy? It’s more than just a plan - it’s a clear roadmap for navigating challenges and achieving success.

According to Rumelt, an effective strategy consists of three key elements:

1. a clear diagnosis that identifies the core issue
2. a guiding policy that provides a focused approach for tackling the problem
3. a set of coherent actions designed to implement that policy.

While this framework applies broadly, we’ve adapted it specifically for brand strategy at A Color Bright, tailoring it to guide our clients through their unique branding challenges.

Together, these elements create a strategic framework that not only addresses immediate challenges but also positions the brand for long-term success.

1 — Insights: What’s going on here?

The Insights phase allows us to get to the heart of the situation by deeply understanding the client and their industry. By the end of this phase, we simplify the complexity by identifying the most crucial aspects to focus on, offering a fresh and clear perspective on the challenges ahead.

In brand strategy, much of the insight phase is about understanding the brand’s current position in the marketplace. This involves identifying which areas are overcrowded and which have the greatest potential for growth. We look at both internal and external factors: from your history, product and customers to market and cultural trends and your competitors. This helps us define the core challenge your brand needs to address to move forward.

Learning from all aspects of your business and environment, we generate insights to support strategy.

How do we create insights?

First, we dive into where your brand currently stands, starting with a kickoff workshop to really get a sense of your challenges, goals, and the landscape you’re navigating. From there, we move into research and assessing the broader market, competition, and cultural shifts. Our Insights Reports keep us ahead of fast-growing industries, so we can uncover fresh opportunities for your brand.

In our Next-Gen Running Brands Insights Report, we analyzed over 20 running brands and identified how they carved out distinct identities in a competitive landscape. With tools like our Running Brand Map, we showcased how brands like Tracksmith leveraged their track heritage, Satisfy owned the technical-gorp niche, and District Vision positioned itself in the mindfulness space. These insights help brands understand the market, but also identify untapped gaps they can fill.

2 — Positioning: Which way to go?

The guiding policy is about setting an overall approach to tackling the challenge identified in the diagnosis. Good guiding policies are not goals, visions or images of desirable end states. Rather they define a method of grappling with the situation and ruling out a vast array of possible actions.

For brand strategy, the guiding policy is about crafting a unique brand positioning. It sets a clear direction for how to stand out in the market while addressing the diagnosed challenges.

How do we find the right positioning?

At A Color Bright, we help brands discover their winning zone—their unique space where they stand out from the competition while capitalizing on their strengths. Using the framework below, we guide brands to identify the ideal positioning to aim for. This winning zone is a blend of being unique to competitors, appealing to consumers and truly ownable by the brand.

This framework ensures that your unique value proposition is clearly defined and puts you in the winning zone.

For Haufe Akademie,we had the opportunity to rebrand Germany’s biggest learning and development provider. Before starting the creative process, we defined a clear positioning for the Haufe Akademie. In collaborative workshop sessions, we elaborated what clients expect from a modern L&D provider and what sets the brand apart from all other players on the market. We used the limbic map and the archetype framework to analyze the emotional drivers of the target audience and to ground Haufe Akademie’s brand personality.

Now you might think that you have a strategy there. But remember: a strategy is only effective when it leads to action. While the positioning provides a solid foundation, the next step is to bring it to life. This means identifying specific actions that align with the brand’s new direction, ensuring that every move—whether in communication, design, or product offering—translates the positioning into tangible results.

3 — Activation: What do we do to get there?

Actions are the critical final piece of a strong strategy - they are the concrete steps that move the brand towards its defined positioning. These actions need to be coherent and aligned, working together to achieve the desired outcomes and ensure that the strategy delivers real results. In brand strategy, this is where the brand really comes to life, through meaningful engagement and activation. It’s where strategy bridges the gap between your brand story and real-world interactions from your audience.

How do we take action?

We translate brand positioning into engaging experiences. We typically use a story-driven approach to re-connect brands with their communities day by day and provide lasting value to these communities. This approach guided our work with Spotify GSA on their social channels.

Together with Spotify’s consumer marketing and content teams, we repositioned the channels as a sort of music and podcast magazine for the social age – using the brand’s close ties with creative communities as a competitive advantage, while at the same time strengthening these ties through platforming key talent and their work. To achieve that for our client, we started from user wants and platform mechanics rather than predefined brand messaging. From exclusive release teasers, to owned social shows formats with music artists and podcasters, to memes about streaming culture through a distinctly Spotify lens, everything SpotifyDE does brings fans closer to what they love most. It’s this value and the interactions around it that keep Spotify top of mind when it comes to audio platforms amongst a new generation of listeners.

In summary, our approach to brand strategy is as simple as it is actionable. We start by digging deep to understand where your brand stands. From there, we help you carve out a unique space in the marketplace that's truly yours, where you can stand out and thrive. But we don’t stop there; we bring it to life through bold, meaningful actions that connect with your audience in a real way. Whether it’s design work, a new digital product offering or content – every move we make is designed to drive growth sustainably and create lasting impact.