Need to level up your brand strategy? Here’s how

Your brand is a powerful asset and can accelerate business growth. But in my experience working with organisations around the world, decision-makers have very different ideas of what a brand is, what it can do and what it should do. And what’s clear is that while every organisation has a brand, only some deliberately reap the benefits.

So, what can you do? How can you go about leveraging your brand as a competitive asset?

Here’s what I’ve determined in my research: there are four clear levels of brand acceleration within organisations. Each of these levels comes with rewards for the business – some of them clear and tangible, others less so; but all of these benefits can translate, level by level, to increasingly positive impact on performance, alignment, revenue and sustainable growth. And the savviest organisations are those that understand the benefits of each level – and know how to level up.

Let’s get into it.

Brand strategy level one: Raise the Flag

At level one, your brand is essentially seen as a badge: a logo and maybe slogan that helps potential customers become familiar with your business. Good examples are Taiwainese tyre company Maxxis or AJAX cleaning products. You recognize the brand and know what it offers, but that’s it. They raise their flag, to signal they are here.

The next step for brands at level one is to make the step from a mere logo to a recognizable visual language and with added meaning: promoting the design to become the silent ambassador of the brand. Think ING Bank, a global online financial entity. ING uses the lion as the logo, but has also adopted the orange colour consistently, thereby, creating one more point of recognition. It is further supported by the pithy tagline: do your thing. The message here is that ING does the financial legwork on its customers’ behalf, freeing them of worry or effort in a way that is simple, clear and transparent. ING is a good example of a powerful Level One brand strategy. It’s a brand that people recognise globally, supported by campaigns that fuel familiarity with the brand, while the business has relative flexibility to introduce products and services, as they see fit – no alignment needed. And it works well. According to Statista, as recently as 2022, the ING brand was valued at $1bn.

At level one, do it right, and you’re going to get awareness with customers and build familiarity that can translate into preference; if faced with several options, people tend to choose the brand they recognize and are most familiar with. The majority of your branding efforts and strategy at this level will likely sit within your communications department, and possibly with your head of design – who may be your de facto head of brand. Some customers, however, may not know much more about these brands – what they stand for and what makes them different from the competition. Taking it from level one to level two, you are going to have to think more strategically about your brand and take it beyond the badge, in order to differentiate. You’re going to want to start fashioning your narrative.

Brand strategy level two: Tell the story

Levelling up your brand strategy begins with articulating what your brand stands for. At this level, you will be looking to carve out a more complex, strategic narrative next to your design, fleshing out what makes you different from other brands. Level two is no longer just identification, it’s differentiation; and this is probably where you’re handing your brand strategy over to your marketing department, and more specifically to your Head of Brand.

At level two, organisations typically balance, straightforward advertising with branded communication. The first features products and services in order to generate short-term business growth, while the latter makes a more emotional connection with its audience, by putting forward the brand, and what it stands for. Brand communication creates long-term business growth, as the campaign are more sticky, allowing the brand to surface, when the moment of purchase has arrived. Think MasterCard “Priceless” campaign: “There are somethings money can’t buy. For everything else, there’s MasterCard.” 

The genius of the Priceless campaign is that it shifts focus away from the granular features or functions of the product or service itself – the card in this case – and towards desirable end benefits for the customer: the unique and meaningful human experiences that the product facilitates. It’s a campaign that associates the MasterCard brand with emotional rewards for its consumers, positioning the organisation as one that understands, cares about and supports the goals, needs, wants and dreams of its client base. And while the slogan itself is sticky – a level one win that is geared to boost immediate sales – it’s the branded communication that helped drive growth for MasterCard over the longer run.

Since its launch in the late 90’s Priceless has evolved beyond TV commercials to encompass a wealth of digital content, real-life cardholder experiences and even programmes that support minority founders and fund-raising for cancer research – efforts that the brand say are function of "extending its “purpose.” This is the kind of evolution or levelling up that takes brands into the realm of experience – brand experience that touches not just products and services, but also organisational values and behaviour.

Level three: Create the brand experience

Some organisations are able to make a critical connection in their brand strategy between what you say and what you do as a business and as a culture. Like MasterCard, these organisations understand that reaching hearts as well as minds means talking the talk – but it also means walking the walk.

At level three, your branding strategy is going to touch more than what you say about your products and services and how you market them. It’s going to percolate across the way you engage with people internally as well as externally, and how you fashion behaviours and environments inside and outside of the organisation. Level three branding strategies are geared not only to encourage people to buy your brand, but to buy into your brand. And they will involve different functions – from marketing and communications, through to research and development and very likely human resources. Take Nike.

Since 1983 Nike’s slogan has been “Just do it.” Over the decades Nike has levelled up its branding strategy, linking a clear stance on inclusivity to the design and development of products such as sports hijabs and hands-free shoes for people with disabilities, garments for pregnant women and plus-sized store mannequins.

At the same time, they’ve created brand experiences such as the Nike Run Club – a free running app with GPS tracking, audio-guided routes and training plans. Levelling up for Nike has gone from just doing it, to empowering more people to just do it. And that extends to hiring, recruitment and development practices. Their GameOn strategy is a one-year job placement and athletic development scheme geared to develop the organization’s talent pipeline and targeting both paralympic and able-bodied athletes.

Level three is about fore-fronting brand values and forging deeper emotional connections to the brand. And it’s not easy. Brands need to navigate a whole slew of risks here, from diluting or straying too far from the brand, to loss of direction and alignment, to customer backlash, rejection or accusations of superficiality. And a lot of organisations have come unstuck in their efforts to create brand experience. Look no further than Colgate’s ill-judged efforts to launch a tooth-friendly frozen food range in the early 80s, to Burger King’s low-calorie “Satisfies”— an initiative that lost its way and was quickly panned when customers started dubbing them “saddest fries” in restaurants around the US.

So how do you hedge against backlash or damage to your brand as you level up? The key really is for organisations to become the brand: to integrate the brand into everything that your organisation thinks, believes and does across the fullest spectrum of business decisions. The key is to make your brand your identity.

Level four: Be the brand

At level four, you level up from having a brand to being the brand. At this stage, the brand permeates the whole of the organisation. It is understood and co-created by every employee, with the C-suite, marcom, R&D and HR departments leading the way. Level four hinges on absolute alignment where everyone in the organisation understands the brand and what it stands for – it hinges on building a tribe of committed and empowered employees and customers, engaged inside and outside the organisation and connected by a shared and authentic sense of purpose that informs choices and decisions. Inside the organisation, this manifests in employees knowing and understanding what to do and why they do it, even in the absence of managerial oversight. There’s a nice anecdote about the cleaner at NASA who when asked by President Kennedy what his role in the organisation was, responded: “I’m putting a man on the moon.” In other words, cleaning every space, removing hazardous materials was understood by this employee to be as mission critical as the work of engineers and astronauts.

At level four, it’s more than talking the talk and walking the walk, it is about embodying the brand and allowing the brand to create a clear, coherent and authentic direction for the organisation that aligns employees and customers alike. At this level, employees have a fully empowered stake in the brand, and customers become brand advocates. Take US outdoor company, Patagonia, long recognised as a champion in sustainable supply chains, renewable materials recycling, and environmental activism. In 2022, founder Yvon Choinard effectively donated the company to help fight climate change. Meanwhile, Patagonia actively closes its shops on Black Friday as a stance against the kind of consumerism that is at odds with its company values. And its legions of customers feel fierce loyalty to the brand. In 2025, this extraordinarily anti-consumerist organisation was valued at around $3bn.

The Patagonia “Don’t buy this jacket” campaign highlighted costs to the environment in manufacturing and urged customers to think twice before purchasing it. In spite or because of this, revenues grew 30% the year the ad came out. 

Patagonia and other level four brands enjoy an unfair advantage over their competitors because they have become one of a kind, all but impossible to copy, with truly integrated brand-thinking across all levels of the enterprise accelerating business growth. Employees are empowered and autonomous because they know why and how their work contributes to the brand mission. Customers are engaged and involved.

Levelling up your brand strategy comes with huge benefits to organisations – and to their customers. But making each shift requires commitment and involvement – and a willingness on the part of organisations to increasingly engage their operations, functions, employees and customers. Above all, perhaps, it requires deeply held and clearly articulated values. And a willingness to adhere to those values that transcends everything.

Questions you might want to ask yourself as you think about your own branding efforts today might include:

• At which level does my brand currently play?
• Are we fully leveraging our brand as an asset?
• What might we need to do to level up and truly unlock our brand advantage?

Please join me at LSE in November 3 – 7 November when I will kick off my programme Brand Strategy.

Together, we will explore what it takes and the lessons gleaned from brands that have built trust, nurtured a loyal and engaged customer base and secured long-term leadership in their markets.