The diagnosis problem
Here's a pattern I've seen across 11 years of communications work, from creative agencies in Lagos to the Big Four to multi-million dollar development portfolios: an organisation decides it needs a "rebrand." They hire an agency. The agency produces beautiful work — new logo, new colour palette, new tagline. Six months later, the same fundamental problems persist. The brand still doesn't resonate. The messaging still confuses people. The team still can't articulate what makes them different.
The work wasn't bad. The diagnosis was wrong.
This happens more often than the industry admits. And it happens because we've normalised skipping the hardest part of brand strategy: figuring out what's actually broken before we start fixing things.
What actually goes wrong
Most brand strategy processes jump straight to "what should the new brand look like?" — which is like a doctor prescribing medication before running tests. The symptoms are obvious (nobody engages with our content, our competitors are winning deals we should win, our team describes what we do differently every time), but symptoms aren't diagnoses.
The questions that matter aren't about aesthetics. They're about fundamentals:
- **Who are you actually trying to reach?** Not "millennials" or "business leaders" — specific people with specific problems who are currently choosing your competitor. If you can't name three real people in your target audience, your targeting is too vague to build strategy on.
- **What do those people currently believe about you?** Not what you hope they believe. Not what your brand deck says they should believe. What they actually think when they see your name. This is uncomfortable research. It's also the most valuable research you'll do.
- **Where is the gap between what you say and what they hear?** This gap is where brand strategy actually lives. Everything else — the logo, the colours, the website, the content calendar — is just the execution layer. If the gap analysis is wrong, the execution layer is irrelevant.
The brief is where strategy lives or dies
I've reviewed hundreds of creative briefs across every sector I've worked in. The bad ones all share the same trait: they describe what the brand wants to be without honestly assessing what the brand currently is. They're aspirational documents pretending to be strategic ones.
A good brief starts with an uncomfortable truth. "Our customers think we're expensive and slow. They're half right." That's the kind of honesty that leads to strategy that actually works — because it's built on reality, not aspiration.
The brief should make you slightly uncomfortable. If everyone in the room nods and smiles when they read it, it's not honest enough.
The best strategy doesn't just answer "what should we say?" It answers "why should anyone care?" — and then builds everything from that truth.
What good brand strategy actually looks like
Good brand strategy is rarely dramatic. It doesn't require throwing everything out and starting over. Usually, it means three things:
- **Finding the one thing you do that nobody else does the same way** — and making sure every piece of communication reinforces it. Not five things. Not your mission statement. One defensible, distinctive truth that your audience cares about.
- **Killing the messages that dilute your positioning** — which means saying no to things that feel important but aren't distinctive. This is the hardest part. Every stakeholder has a "must-include" message. Most of those messages are generic. Generic is invisible.
- **Aligning internal understanding with external perception** — because the biggest brand problems are usually internal clarity problems wearing external symptoms. If your own team can't consistently articulate what makes you different, your audience definitely can't.
The real cost of skipping the diagnosis
When you skip the diagnosis, you don't just waste the strategy budget. You waste the execution budget too. Every campaign, every piece of content, every stakeholder presentation built on a flawed strategy is money and time spent reinforcing the wrong message.
I've seen organisations spend six figures on campaigns that failed not because the creative was bad, but because the brief was built on assumptions nobody tested. The creative team delivered exactly what was asked for. What was asked for was wrong.
What to do instead
Before you invest in new visuals, new messaging, or a new agency — invest in an honest diagnosis. This doesn't require a massive research project. Start with three things:
Talk to your customers. Not a survey — actual conversations. Ask them why they chose you, what they'd say about you to a colleague, and what almost made them choose someone else. The answers will be different from what you expect.
Look at your competitors through your customer's eyes. Not a competitive matrix in a deck — actually experience their brand the way a prospect would. Where do they beat you? Where do you beat them? Is that visible in your communications?
Examine what you're actually saying versus what you think you're saying. Read your own website as if you've never heard of your company. Does it answer "why should I care?" within 10 seconds? If not, that's your first problem to solve.
The gap between what you say and what your audience hears is where the real strategy lives. Finding that gap — honestly, specifically, without flinching — is the work that makes everything else work.