Brand strategy doesn’t move the needle
Build Mode™ Issue 10.2025
Hello and welcome to this issue of Build Mode, a monthly update with brand insights to help you level up your business. We have an ambitious group of professionals working in real estate, architecture, engineering, construction, marketing, design, and development. You all inspire me to keep sharing, so thank you for being here.
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You’ve been in this meeting before. Editing a slide deck to version 32b, debating for the third time whether you should consolidate territories 4 and 5 into a single one, and wordsmithing your mission statement until you’ve reached the max limit on your AI tool.
Many companies get stuck here: planning.
You know I’m an advocate of brand strategy. It’s critical. Defining the position, personality, purpose, and people of a brand are essential starting points and prerequisites for any kind of initiative. They define you.
But, strategy is internal. It’s all planning work. Behind-the-scenes.
You could spend months working on it before ever making a dent in your business (and there are firms that do). The thing is, you only get needle-moving activity for your business when you translate your brand strategy into action. When you turn ideas into tangible behaviors, visuals, communications, and experiences people actually feel.
And this is our topic for today.
How do you take strategy (which is internal) and turn it into execution (which is external)?
What is brand execution?
When I’m working on developing new brands or repositioning existing brands, in either case, I’m going through a linear process in four phases of work: Discovery, Definition, Development, and Delivery. The biggest transition is between Definition and Development. It’s when branding moves from the internal to the external, requiring a different skillset, from thinking and planning, to committing and executing.
Brand execution is the process of bringing your brand strategy to life, translating positioning, purpose, and personality into tangible actions, communications, and experiences.
It’s the bridge between what you say you are and how people actually experience your brand.
The more these two phases align, the closer your brand is to delivering on promises and perception.
Let’s look at some hypothetical brand position statements, which define the unique value a brand offers to a specific audience.
‘To transform the custom home design experience for ultra high net worth couples’
‘To develop communities with a sense of place where neighbors feel a sense of belonging’
Should execution on these two brands be anything unlike? No!
Even this one statement, built on a foundation of research and insights that reveal opportunities for your business, will change the execution drastically. Strategy influences three key areas in your brand and business:
Identity
your way of being and how you show up
Communications
your message and how you share it
Operations
the way you deliver your offering and how you create an experience
For example:
That home designer might be inspired by premium brands, the same kinds of brands their prospects are buying. And the experience of working with them might feel more like a hospitality experience than a design meeting.
The developer might establish an identity that feels warm and comforting, and bring on a community manager with experience in event planning. They’ll build a flexible clubhouse or outdoor space as a venue for a range of community-building activities.
This is what alignment looks like and how you translate strategy into action.
We can also learn from brands we already know:
Patagonia doesn’t just say they care about the planet. They run repair shops so they sell less stuff. Their position shows up in what they deliver.
Nike doesn’t just say they serve athletes. They prove it by endorsing the top athletics in the world and tell their stories to inspire others. Their position shows up in what and how they communicate.
Old Spice realized women, not men, were the primary buyers of men’s grooming products. Their execution became the popular ads featuring the ‘Old Spice Man,’ aimed directly at women.
How can you tell you’re delivering on your strategy?
When people on the outside your business can connect what they see in your brand, and hear through your message, and experience in your service, back to your internal positioning.
What you can do nextTurning vision into reality, plans into action
Now that you know what brand execution is and why it matters, here’s how to move from planning to action. First, you’ll need a brand strategy. Don’t have one yet? Start here with The 4P Framework.
Then, take a component of your strategy, like your position statement, and break it down into these three areas. Ask yourself:
To deliver on this promise, what would that mean for our identity, our communications, and our operations?
1. For your identity
If your position statement gives you a unique place in the market to occupy, visual and verbal identity needs to convey it.
Understand how other industry players present themselves and express your brand differently, through your logo, colors, typography, taglines, messaging, and other brand touchpoints. Being different makes you stand out. Standing out makes you more memorable. Memorability makes you more likely to attract your ideal audience and compel them to join your movement.
2. For your communications
Define your content pillars, the key themes to guide your communications strategy. Pillars are a way to take abstract ideas, like positioning, and translate them into topics.
Next, define your intended audience, the people you’re trying to reach with your message.
Then, produce the individual content that communicates the key themes directly to your intended audience in the format that will reach them and resonate with them.
Each piece of content should directly tie back to a pillar, which ties back to the brand strategy. Each piece has an objective, an audience, and always reinforces the strategic vision for the brand.
(For more on how to turn content into a systematic and repeatable process, check out last month’s issue of Build Mode: The System Behind Content That Works.)
3. For your operations
Audit your current operations and look for any gaps or misalignments between what you say you deliver to the market, and what you actually deliver. This will look different for every kind of firm, but the operational areas to consider are how you deliver your offer, how you package your offer, how you serve your clients, how you deliver an experience, how you charge for your offer, and how you operate as a company. Each is a potential area to realign operations with strategy.
The bottom line
Strong execution ensures that every touchpoint consistently delivers on your brand promise, reinforces your brand position, and compels people to join the movement you’re building with your brand.
That’s all for this edition of Build Mode! If this resonated with you and you think it might help others, feel free to forward it to a colleague. And if you want to discuss brand execution, get in touch — I’d love to hear from you.
Best.
Kenny Isidoro
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