Brand Strategy Consulting

Brand strategy consulting is the work of deciding what your brand stands for, which customers and demand spaces it should win, how your portfolio of brands fits together, and how all of that shows up in price, share and economic profit. Vivaldi has done this work since 1999, for companies including American Express, TrueBlue, SoundHound AI and McGraw Hill.

Most brands are underpriced, not underexposed. Awareness is high, customers say they prefer you, and very little of it reaches the P&L because nobody has built the link. Our Unrealized Value research tracked the strongest global brands from 2001 to 2024: as a portfolio they beat the S&P 500 by 3.7 percentage points a year for 24 years, and a dollar invested became $15.85 against $7.03 in the index. The companies that left that value on the table did not have weaker brands. They managed brand as a marketing cost instead of a capital asset. Brand strategy, done properly, is how you stop doing that. It is the core of our brand, innovation and experience practice.

Brand strategy clients include

• Since 1999brand strategy and identity
• 200+published case studies
• 10 officeson four continents
• 5xWirtschaftsWoche Best of Consulting, Strategy and Innovation
• Brand Leadershipco-authored by our founder

When companies bring us in

Brand strategy work rarely starts with a request for a brand strategy. It starts with a business problem that turns out to be a brand problem. These are the six we hear most often:

• The brand is famous and the price does not show it. High awareness, an ordinary preference premium and a discounted multiple, all at once. The equity exists and is not converting.
• You grew by acquisition and now run brands nobody can explain. Customers, candidates and investors see a collection, not a company. This was TrueBlue’s situation.
• Ask ten employees what the brand stands for and you get ten answers. Every team improvises its own story, and the market hears all of them.
• The business has moved and the brand has not. A new category, a new customer or a new business model, still described in the language of the old one. This was McGraw Hill’s situation as it became a digital education company.
• You need to choose between a refresh and a rebrand. And you want the financial case before you commit, not after.
• The brand has to carry an equity story. An IPO, a merger, a category launch or an investor narrative where the position will be priced by the market.

The people we work with are usually the CEO, CMO, chief strategy officer or CFO of an enterprise or growth-stage company, in B2B and consumer markets alike. The CFO matters more than most firms admit: a brand strategy that only marketing signs will not survive the next budget cycle.

What our brand strategy consulting services include

Five bodies of work. Most engagements need two or three, and the diagnostic phase decides which ones, depending on whether the constraint is meaning, structure, permission or proof.

1. Brand positioning

Positioning is a choice about who you are the obvious answer for, which means deciding who you are not for. You leave with a positioning statement that names its exclusions, the demand spaces you will win (mapped with our Demand Landscape method, in the customer’s language rather than your product catalog’s), the proof that makes the position believable, and a messaging architecture for each audience. See how we approach corporate brand positioning when the question is the whole company’s field of play.

2. Brand architecture and portfolio strategy

Brand architecture is a capital allocation decision expressed in names and logos. We test whether your brands reinforce each other in the data (shared customers, cross-purchase, shared demand) rather than on the org chart, then decide which brands earn investment, which should be folded in and which should be retired. Deliverables include the architecture model, the investment logic behind it and the naming rules for anything you launch next. Our brand architecture consulting goes deeper on portfolios built by acquisition.

3. Brand extension and growth permission

A company can be operationally capable of entering a market and have no permission to be there. We test what customers will accept your brand doing next, where it can stretch without diluting the parent, and where the honest answer is a new brand. When it is, our new brand development team builds it.

4. Brand measurement and the financial case

The link from brand to profit has to be built explicitly, or brand keeps being argued as a belief. We model the chain from equity to preference premium, from preference premium to realized price and share, and from there to economic profit, using the five levers of the Compound Economic Profit Loop. It is the same logic behind our argument on how to prove the financial value of brand spend, and it gives your CMO and CFO one investment case instead of two.

5. Identity, playbooks and activation

A strategy that never reaches an expression is a document. We carry the position into verbal and visual identity design, into brand playbooks and tools your teams can use week to week, and into a 360 degree branding strategy when consistency across many channels and markets is the constraint. Our Holistic Brand Model is what keeps strategy and design in one system.

How a brand strategy engagement works

1. Diagnose. Leadership interviews, customer and market research, and a review of your portfolio, pricing and tracking data. The output is a clear view of where your equity converts into price and preference, and where it does not.
2. Decide. Positioning and architecture options, tested with customers and stress-tested with finance. The output is a decision with the trade-offs written down, not a menu.
3. Build. The messaging architecture, the identity brief or system, naming where needed, and the business case that ties the strategy to economic profit.
4. Embed. Playbooks, training, governance and a measurement model, so your organization can run the strategy without us.

Settling a position and its architecture usually takes about a quarter, longer when the portfolio is large or primary research is needed. How fast it pays back depends less on the strategy than on how early finance is in the room.

Brand strategy results

TrueBlue: one brand architecture, a doubled stock price

TrueBlue had grown through five acquisitions into a set of independent brands that confused clients, candidates and investors. Vivaldi unified the five business units under one TrueBlue brand architecture, with a new positioning framework, naming architecture and an internal alignment program. Following the transformation, TrueBlue’s stock price doubled. Read the TrueBlue case study.

SoundHound AI: positioning priced by the market in ten weeks

SoundHound AI had strong voice technology and no clear position against the Big Tech platforms entering automotive voice. Vivaldi’s five-step brand and platform strategy positioned it as the independent, best-in-class alternative and aligned investor messaging, enterprise sales and product storytelling around one brand thesis. After the OEM launch and CES debut, SoundHound AI’s market cap rose by $8 billion in ten weeks. See how the SoundHound AI positioning was built.

American Express: a new segment without diluting the parent

American Express needed the Blue Card to reach a younger, less affluent segment than its premium base without weakening the halo of the parent brand. The positioning work defined both the segment proposition and Blue’s place in the portfolio, and drove a more than 25% increase in card usage and revenue per customer. Not awareness: revenue per customer, a number the CFO already tracks.

The same logic now runs at a larger scale. We are working with a global spirits leader to solve for $1.8 billion in economic profit.

Brand strategy by industry

Every case below is published with the client’s name, so you can read the situation, the work and the outcome in full. For a curated set, see our brand strategy case studies with real outcomes.

Why companies choose Vivaldi for brand strategy

• We measure brand in the CFO’s currency. Our Compound Economic Profit Loop, published in WARC in July 2026 by Erich Joachimsthaler, Lee Powney, Miguel Maal and Tracy Huser, connects brand investment to economic profit lever by lever.
• We start from demand, not from the product. The Demand Landscape method, set out in Hidden in Plain Sight by our founder Erich Joachimsthaler, finds the demand spaces your brand has permission to win before anyone writes a tagline.
• We helped write the discipline. Erich co-authored Brand Leadership with David Aaker, and Kevin Lane Keller sits on our advisory board.
• Strategy and expression in one team. Positioning, architecture, naming and identity are done by the same firm, so nothing is lost in the handoff.
• Independently recognized. WirtschaftsWoche has named Vivaldi a top consultancy for Strategy and Innovation in its Best of Consulting awards five times.

How to choose a brand strategy consulting firm

Including us. These are the questions we would ask if we were buying this work:

• What will they measure it in? If the answer stops at awareness and sentiment, you are buying brand health reporting. Ask how the work connects to price realization and return on invested capital, and for an example.
• Who in your company has to agree? If the CFO is not involved by the second month, the output will not survive the next budget cycle.
• What will they do with your portfolio? A firm that accepts your current architecture as given will produce a better-looking version of the same problem.
• What will they tell you not to do? Positioning is a set of exclusions. A position with no sacrifice in it describes your ambition, not your strategy.
• Who owns it afterward? Playbooks, guidelines and a decision record your next marketing leader can pick up are a capability. A deck is not.

Brand strategy consultancy, branding agency or management consultancy?

The three are often shortlisted together and do different jobs. The useful question is which decision you need made.

If you are comparing approaches as well as firms, our guide to five brand strategy frameworks compared sets out where each one works and where it breaks.

Brand strategy consulting in the US and worldwide

Vivaldi is headquartered in New York and has a second US office in Los Angeles. Outside the US, our teams work from London, Zürich, München, Hamburg, Düsseldorf, Singapore, Buenos Aires and Lima. We work with US companies nationwide from our two US offices; for city-specific information, see our pages for Chicago, Dallas and Houston. Read who Vivaldi Group is and how we work.