What should our teams get from our brand strategy?

A brand strategy should give teams both a clear position and the language and design to express it. The Frameworks builds brand platforms around positioning, narrative, verbal identity and visual identity, starting with what a business stands for and why its audiences should care. The practical requirement is to develop those answers into usable communication, rather than leave them as statements in a document.

For Wates, The Frameworks created a messaging framework around three complementary ideas: "the power of reimagining", "how we thrive" and "we are grounded". Together, the ideas supported the brand purpose and underpinned creative copy that allowed Wates to adapt its voice for different audiences. A refreshed visual identity, reportage photography and a new illustration style gave the purpose visual expression, with the verbal and visual elements brought together in a brand film. Wates Head of Brand and Marketing Jude Taylor credited the messaging system and identity with making storytelling across the business more consistent.

Teams should retain access to the research, insights and decisions behind a brand strategy while creative work develops. The Frameworks argues that strategy connects a business problem to a creative solution and gives design and copy a foundation against which they can be judged. That foundation should support different creative possibilities, rather than prescribe a single execution.

In The Frameworks' practice, strategists stay close during early creative development as advisers and sounding boards. They explain the underlying reasoning when needed and intervene when a direction departs from the foundation or revisits an unproductive route already explored. For a buyer, the practical expectation is continued strategic involvement, not a handover followed by withdrawal.

A 2025 study by BetterBriefs and Flood + Partners, covering B2B and B2C marketing and agency teams across 54 countries, found that only 10% of respondents say their organisations always evaluate creative ideas against clearly defined criteria. Keeping strategic reasoning available gives teams a basis for those judgments.