Brand strategy and creative strategy get lumped together constantly, and it drives me bananas. They're not the same job. Brand strategy answers "who are we?" Creative strategy answers "how do we show up today, in front of this lot, with this message?" Mix them up and you get one of two disasters: gorgeous campaigns that don't add up to anything, or a beautifully argued positioning deck that never actually meets a customer.

Brand strategy comes first, and there's no getting round that. It's the sensible one. It asks the questions nobody enjoys sitting in a room for: what do we stand for, who's this actually for, who is it very much not for, and why should anyone believe us over the brand next to us on the shelf. The output isn't a nice graphic or a lovely bit of imagery. It's decisions. A positioning statement. A value proposition. A tone that's meant to still be true in three years, not three weeks. Nobody puts the foundations in the brand book. But everything else is standing on them, whether it gets a mention or not.

Creative strategy though, is where the fun starts, and honestly, it's the bit most people actually mean when they say "brand." If brand strategy is rational, creative strategy is proudly, deliberately not. Its job isn't to restate a truth, it's to make a stranger feel something before they've had time to think about it. It takes the sensible conclusion from brand strategy, we're reliable, we're the cheeky challenger, or whatever it is and asks the odd question: what's the idea that actually stops someone mid-scroll? That's not logic, it's taste, timing, and a fairly ruthless instinct for what's genuinely different versus what just sounds funny written down in a brief at 4pm on a Friday. Brand strategy hands over the permission slip. Creative strategy is the mischief that follows it.

With McKvr we created a brand strategy that understood who they were. A new position forged from legacy and engineered to empower the modern athlete, ‘Own Every Battle’. They also let us creatively express it through David Clifford’s ‘Never Once’ campaign. A path to greatness through resilient repetition. Together, they worked beautifully, cause and effect. Foundation and expression is the right way to think about it, because a foundation is supposed to disappear. You don't dig it up every season, and you certainly don't let whatever's trending on TikTok this week decide what it should be. Expression is the opposite. It's meant to move about, misbehave a little, look different in a thirty second film versus a scrappy organic post versus a print ad in a trade magazine nobody under sixty actually reads, while still being unmistakably the same brand underneath all of it.

Timescales split the same way, and it's worth saying plainly: brand strategy is slow on purpose. Perception shifts over years, not sprints. Creative strategy is the opposite, and that's not a flaw, it's the whole design. A campaign has a season. An idea has a shelf life. The moment it stops landing, or starts feeling a bit naff, it gets retired without much ceremony, and a new one takes its place. Disposable by design. That's fine. That's the job.

Where this actually goes wrong, in my experience, is almost always one of two ways. Teams skip the brand strategy bit entirely and go straight to "what's the fun idea", chasing whatever feels fresh this quarter, a bag of influencers and end up with a folder of ads that are each individually clever and collectively meaningless, since nothing's building towards a recognisable identity. Or, just as often, someone produces a genuinely excellent brand strategy that gets applauded in the boardroom and then sits there, because nobody did the messier, more irrational work of turning conviction into a story worth noticing. A watertight positioning statement has never once made anyone stop scrolling.

Neither one replaces the other, and pretending otherwise is how you end up with half a strategy, a crap one at that. Brand strategy earns the right to be believed. Creative strategy earns the right to be noticed. You genuinely need both, arguing the same case from opposite ends: one pouring the foundations, the other turning up afterwards to paint the thing a colour nobody can quite walk past.