On this page
Somebody has told you that you need a brand strategy, and you have never seen one. So when a document does arrive, you have no way of telling whether it is a strategy or a mood board with a font in it.
That is what makes published brand strategy examples useful. Read a few in full and the same three decisions show up in every one, and not one of the three is a colour.
Strategy is the argument. The wider work it sits inside is its own subject and its own piece, so this one stays on the argument and on what a written version of it looks like.
What every one of these brand strategy examples decides
Strip the design off any of them and the same short list is underneath. Three decisions, each of which closes something off.
- Who it is for, named narrowly enough that somebody is excluded.
- What it stands against, stated as a thing in the world rather than a feeling.
- What it will not do, in cases where the money is genuinely available.
A brand strategy framework is three questions, not thirty
Most of what gets sold as a brand strategy framework is a longer version of that list. More boxes do not make the answers better, and they usually make the document harder to check.
The Design Council's Double Diamond puts the pressure in the right place. Its second stage, define, exists so that insight from the discovery work is used to state the challenge differently, rather than to restate the assumption you started with.
That is the test to apply to any framework you are handed. If what comes out at the end says roughly what you already believed on the morning of the first workshop, no defining happened.
The decisions then have to survive contact with people. An account posting several times a week is where a strategy either holds or quietly turns back into taste.
Three brand strategy examples, in the businesses' own words
All three below publish their position on their own site, at length, where a customer can hold them to it. That is why they are here rather than the more famous ones.
Tony's Chocolonely: the strategy is a complaint
Tony's states the problem before it states itself. An unfair distribution of value and power in the chocolate industry, with a group of chocolate giants profiting from keeping the cocoa purchasing price low, and farmers driven into poverty as a result.
The opponent is named, and it is an industry practice rather than a competitor's advertising. The scale is published beside it: 2.5 million farms in Ghana and Côte d'Ivoire produce more than 60% of all cocoa worldwide. Everything else the business does, down to the uneven chunks in the bar, is downstream of that.
Who Gives A Crap: the strategy is arithmetic
Who Gives A Crap turns its position into a number that can be audited. It donates 50% of profits and reports the running total, £11,191,773 at the time of writing, against a stated problem of billions of people without access to clean water and toilets.
A figure that goes up in public is a harder promise than an adjective. It is also the part a competitor cannot copy in an afternoon.
Toast Brewing: the strategy is an ingredient
Toast brews with surplus loaves from bakeries and the heel ends from sandwich makers, and says so plainly: the bread replaces about 25% of the malted barley, which cuts the land, water and energy the beer needs.
The position is part of the recipe, so it cannot be dropped in a quiet quarter. That is unusual, and it is why the example is worth reading even if you sell something else entirely.
What these brand positioning examples have in common
None of the three describes itself. Each of these brand strategy examples describes a situation it objects to and then puts itself on one side of it, which is what makes the position checkable by somebody outside the company.
| Business | Who it is for | What it stands against | What it will not do |
|---|---|---|---|
| Tony's Chocolonely | Chocolate buyers who would rather know where the beans came from | Purchasing practices that keep the cocoa price low | Source outside its own five sourcing principles |
| Who Gives A Crap | Households happy to buy a dull product from a loud company | A world where billions have no toilet or clean water | Keep the other half of the profit |
| Toast Brewing | Beer drinkers who will try a lager on its footprint | An industrial food system that wastes a third of the food | Brew with barley alone while bread is going spare |
Read the middle column first. It is the one most documents are missing entirely.
The small-business version, or a brand strategy template on one page
None of those three is a small business now, and all of this can read as something for companies with a boardroom. The decisions are the same at any size. The document is simply shorter.
That matters here more than in most places. At the start of 2025 there were 5.7 million private sector businesses in the UK, and 5.64 million of them had between 0 and 49 employees.
So the useful brand strategy template is one page carrying three headings and a sentence under each: who it is for, what it stands against, and what it will not do.
Write it badly first. A rough answer you can argue with beats an elegant one that took a quarter and settles nothing.
Writing that page is part of the brand work we get hired for, which is worth declaring before any of this reads as disinterested. What it looks like finished is in the work itself rather than in a promise.
It is worth reading the case against paying anybody for it too, because the case exists and it is made by people who have done the job.
What the case against paying for one gets right
I've worked at multiple design and branding firms and a branding package should not be expensive and literally 1000's of companies can do it.
A UK commenter, r/smallbusinessuk, April 2026
He is right about supply, and the price of the artwork has genuinely collapsed. What has not got cheaper is somebody sitting with you while you decide what you will refuse, which is the part of the page nobody can do for you at volume.
What a brand strategy is not
Most documents that fail this test fail it the same way. They describe a tone and stop, so nothing in them can ever turn out to be wrong, which is exactly what the brand strategy examples above avoid.
- It is not a logo, and it is not a colour palette.
- It is not a list of adjectives. Friendly, professional and trusted are not decisions.
- It is not a competitor grid with your company typed into the flattering quadrant.
- It is not the design work. The identity is what the design hands over once the argument is settled.
So what is a brand strategy, in one sentence
It is the written answer to who you serve, what you are against, and which work you turn down. Everything visible comes after it, and reads as arbitrary without it.
If a document has landed in your inbox and you cannot tell which of those it settles, send it over and we will say which. That is a short read rather than a project.
Brand work rarely travels on its own and sits beside everything else a small business gets asked about. What the brand strategy examples above share is that the page came first, which is what makes the rest of it cheaper to decide.