The Brand
STRATEGY
When people hear the term ‹creative agency›, they usually think visuals: flashy designs, logos, elaborate websites—everything that makes a strong first impression.
At CRU, we believe great design only creates lasting impact when it’s built on clear strategy.Without it, even the most beautiful logo is just a collection of expensive pixels.
Why Do I Need A Brand Strategy?
A strong Brand Strategy can change everything – that’s why it’s the starting point of every creative project at CRU. Why is it essential? Because it provides answers. Sets direction. Makes decisions easier.
Here are just a few things a solid Brand Strategy can do for your business:
Clarity & Focus:
Ambition without direction is just noise. Ambition with a clear goal in mind? Now that is a recipe for success.
Positioning:
Your place in the market, defined. Including how, where, and to whom you speak—and why they should care.
Alignment:
Your entire team working toward the same purpose, for the same reason—which will make the work seem easier, better, and more efficient.
Decision Making:
With the fundamentals in place, the next move—the right move—becomes obvious: How you should invest in marketing, which buttons you need to push, and how to move the needle for your customers.
Brand Strategies That Actually Work: Clear. Actionable. Measurable.
Many brand strategies end up buried in a digital drawer after months of work—well-intentioned, but ultimately ineffective.
That’s why at CRU, we’ve developed a method to ensure your new strategy doesn’t just sound ambitious—or create a brief buzz—but actually drives real change.
Every Brand Strategy we deliver is: Clear. Actionable. Measurable.
Clear
What use is a Brand Strategy if your team doesn’t get it? For any Strategy to work, it must be clearly constructed and easy to understand—something your entire team can internalize and act on.
Actionable
Every company has goals. A strong Brand Strategy turns vision into movement—with clear steps, in the right order, ready to go.What use is a Brand Strategy if your team doesn’t get it? For any Strategy to work, it must be clearly constructed and easy to understand—something your entire team can internalize and act on.
Measurable
To be truly effective (and avoid the dreaded drawer), your strategy needs measurable goals. Brand Assets—design, story, and beyond—may be abstract things, but they achieve real results. By setting clear objectives within a timeframe, you can recalibrate your assets and approach until you achieve them.
How We Do It: Strategy That Starts with People and Ends with Impact
Download
Whether it’s a start-up or a global company—the starting point is always the same: a shift in perspective. That’s why we speak to as many relevant voices as possible—both inside and outside the organization. From leadership and new team members to clients and even direct competitors. The goal: a comprehensive, honest view of the company—and the context it operates in.
Through personal interviews, we gain deep insights in a short amount of time—laying the strategic foundation. Whether we focus on quantitative data, market research, or more qualitative perceptions of the brand depends entirely on the needs of the project.We tailor every download phase specifically to your company: making sure to add value to you first before tacking on unnecessary costs.
Alignment
The insights we gather from interviews and questionnaires reveal team alignments, points of tension, and opportunities to build on. Even the most aligned teams are surprised to find out that their customers might perceive them differently than they anticipated. After the download phase we synthesize and analyze what we’ve gathered—then derive our own interpretation of it.
We present these findings during what we call the Alignment Workshop. An all day workshop where we share and document key insights, helping companies see and position themselves more clearly than they ever could from the inside.
Brand Architecture
It’s at this stage that we can also support bigger companies with multiple entities structure their brands, products, or services more effectively. This allows them to neatly categorize the different companies that make up their organization as a whole and structure how they relate to one another in terms of design, communication, goals, and more.
This varies greatly depending on how your company is set up, but we’ll work with you to create a strategy that integrates all of your best parts—and clearly defines how to communicate them.
Branding
Armed with all of the findings from the Download Phase and Alignment Meeting, we can create a Brand Identity that feels uniquely yours and aligns perfectly with your Brand Strategy and goals.By taking the time to work with us on Strategy, it makes our creative work faster and sharper, which will only make for better business.
If you don’t plan on working with our creative team further, we can hand over your Brand Strategy in a nice package that is easy for your team to understand and integrate. You can then brief your own inhouse creatives, book another agency or freelancers—whatever your needs are, you’ll have a final product you can actually work with.
Creative Routes
If you want a full rebrand or new Brand Identity, we translate your business goals into an emotionally charged storyline and design direction. We call this approach Creative Routes: strategically grounded storylines shaped by a strong visual vision.
Each route is a focused, well-considered pathway that brings the brand to life even before execution begins—and makes key decisions easier along the way.You can learn more about our creative approaches on the Story and Design Pages.
Insight Mining
We take a close look at your company’s existing data. This gives us the insight we need. Who does your brand appeal to? Are these the customers you want to address? This information forms the basis for developing the strategy for your brand.
Brand Trust Measures
Reports of your current or newly designed brand assets, conducted by our independent research partner. Delivered as qualitative or quantitative studies that evaluate their effectiveness across multiple criteria.
Brand Architecture
For a clear external image, all of your organization’s brands must be well organized with clear distinctions between them. With separation comes clarity—for your customers and your team alike.
Positioning
Through market analysis and research, we determine the clearest path to success for your brand. We identify market gaps and opportunities that your brand is perfectly positioned to fill—with the right image and strategy to match.
Market Entry
Entering new markets takes more than just translation. We combine deep market insight with strategic positioning to develop an entry strategy that truly resonates.
Asset Assesment
Reports of your current or newly designed brand assets, conducted by our independent research partner. Delivered as qualitative or quantitative studies that evaluate their effectiveness across multiple criteria.
Brand Roadmap
Once we’ve developed your Brand Strategy, we help define the best path to execution—aligned with your goals and a realistic timeline. We can connect you with the right partners to bring the vision to life, and support you directly on any branding work we offer in-house.
Market Research
We assess the normal metrics like Brand Awareness, Popularity, Personality, and Recommendation rates, but also add our own: Brand Trust. This helps give you a full 3D picture of where your brand sits.
FAQ
How long does a Brand Strategy take?
This varies depending on the project scope, your availability, and other constraints—but typically, the process takes 2–4 weeks. That includes everything from initial conversations and research to the delivery of final, ready-to-use reports for your team.
Isn’t this a bit overengineered?
Most people have experienced a Brand Strategy that disappears into nowhere after months of work: too long, too complex, and far removed from real, everyday needs and pain points. That’s exactly why we rely on proven methods—clear, effective, and easy to understand.
Whether you prefer to work lean and fast or take more time, we guide you through the entire process—and make sure the result is both strategically relevant and practically usable.
Can’t I just do this myself?
We encourage people to try it themselves first! Brand Strategy helps you understand your business in a way that emphasizes real world effectiveness and perception. But the process is a tricky one. Where do you begin? How detailed is too detailed? What sort of data do you need to collect to make a decision? What do you do with the strategy when you’ve finished it? We have a methodology that makes the process a joy rather than a cascade of questions and uncertainty.
Why can't I start with Design without a Brand Strategy?
We get this question often, because some other agencies don’t place such a high value on Brand Strategy. In our time, we’ve found that the best, most effective Designs with the greatest business impact are also the most informed ones. When our designers know what your business goals are, they can help work towards you accomplishing them. In our team designers are not here to push pixels, they are indeed great problem solvers.
What if there is a lot of misalignment in our leadership?
Misalignment can happen in any company, at any size—with or without us there to spot it. But when we're part of the process, we don’t just uncover the disconnect—we help turn it into a path forward, realigning your team around shared goals and a clear direction. And imagine how much it can cost the company, if nobody addresses and solves that misalignment.
Where does it fit in between business strategy and marketing strategy?
Business strategy defines what you want to accomplish. (A good) Brand Strategy gives you a clear set of instructions of both how to accomplish that mission and why people should care about your product or service. Marketing strategy is where the two come together: turning your goals and positioning into actionable tactics that move the business forward. Done right, marketing becomes the execution engine of your strategy.
You have a glimpse about us and how we like to work and consult. In the end every business and situation is different. So tell us about yours.
