What Is Brand Consulting and When Do You Need It?

You know what makes your brand different from the competition, but does your audience?

You might want to position your brand as elite, but the creative and messaging come across as down market. Maybe leadership ping-pongs from one strategy to the next in hopes of finally gaining market share. Or perhaps you’re not sure how to stand out among all the copycat brands cluttering up the marketplace. These are just a few scenarios that call for brand consulting.

Brand consultants help organizations bridge the gap between how they want to position themselves and how they’re actually showing up to consumers. By integrating strategic thinking with creative execution, they go beyond just presenting guidelines. Instead, they help brands build scalable systems that work across identity and product, platforms and communication.

Below, we explore what brand consulting entails, how consultants approach both strategy and execution, and when organizations can benefit most from working with brand strategy consultants.

What Is Brand Consulting?

Brand consulting can mean different things to different organizations. At its core, however, brand consulting is about helping companies define and communicate what differentiates them in the marketplace.

Brand consulting basics

Brand consulting draws upon research and competitive analysis to determine the best ways an organization can not only provide audiences with differentiated offerings but also communicate what makes these offerings unique.

After developing a brand strategy, consultants translate it into effective creative expression that demonstrates clarity, differentiation and cohesiveness across every touchpoint. And they do so while delivering a working system that the brand’s internal team can continue to use as it solidifies its position and builds its audience.

How brand consulting differs from traditional agency work

Traditional agency work is focused on projects and deliverables, but brand consulting takes a more integrated, systems-based approach in which the relationship between consultant and brand is a collaborative, educational one designed to support long-term growth.

A traditional marketing agency might produce campaigns for a brand but have no influence on long-term strategy. A creative or design agency might deliver eye-catching assets without ensuring they’re grounded in strategy or market intelligence. A management consultancy will help develop strategy but often lacks creative execution capabilities. Brand consultants sit at the intersection of all three.

What Does a Brand Consultant Do? 

A better question might be “What doesn’t a branding consultant do?” Brand consultants take on research, strategy, creative and implementation, integrating these disparate disciplines to create a holistic, efficient and productive whole.

Research and competitive intelligence

Research and analysis form the foundation on which strategy is built. Consultants study the market and all its players to identify trends, opportunities and threats. In addition to analyzing what competitors are doing, they’ll examine the needs, wants and decision drivers of the audience and conduct voice of customer research to better understand how consumers perceive the relevant brands. All of this, along with visual landscape analysis of the dominant creative tactics, reveals marketplace gaps that the brand can fill, and informs positioning and messaging.

Strategic positioning and architecture

With market intelligence in hand, consultants then solidify the brand’s positioning: what it stands for, who it serves and why it matters. This includes developing distinctive value propositions that the brand can deliver. Consultants also clarify the brand architecture, organizing sub-brands and product families for effective differentiation, targeting and growth. And since internal alignment is critical to success, consultants ensure that leadership and teams understand and support the positioning and frameworks.

Creative direction and system design

Now it’s time to translate the brand positioning into words and imagery. Brand consultants develop identity systems, including logos, color palettes, typography and motion behaviors, for use across all media and platforms. This goes hand in hand with creating voice and tone guidelines for copy. What’s delivered here goes beyond static rulebooks, however; consultants collaborate with brands to build systems and frameworks that can adapt over time.

Activation and implementation 

Brand consulting doesn’t stop with the development of positioning and creative systems. It includes planning the best way to introduce or reintroduce the brand, both internally and externally, and to maintain consistency as the organization scales. This includes creating toolkits and templates as well as training internal teams to carry on the strategy and tactics. It also includes developing systems and benchmarks so that the brand can measure awareness, perception and performance.

The Difference Between Brand Consultants and Brand Strategists 

Although many people use the terms interchangeably, brand strategists usually focus almost exclusively on positioning and planning, while brand consultants typically have a broader scope that also includes creative direction and implementation.

Both strategists and consultants will research and use analytics to solidify a brand’s core value proposition and identity. Consultants, however, go beyond formulating a roadmap and guidelines to also collaborate on creative and frameworks so that in-house teams can maintain, scale and measure the performance of the strategy long after the consultant is no longer involved. You could argue that while strategists give a man a fish, consultants teach them how to fish.

Many consultants call themselves strategists, and vice versa. When seeking a brand consultant, the title is less important than their approach, deliverables, and outcomes.

Why Companies Hire Brand Strategy Consultants

Companies typically hire brand strategy consultants when their business reaches an inflection point, such as a market disruption or declining performance, or when internal teams need outside perspective or specialized expertise to strengthen their position in the marketplace.

Competitive differentiation in saturated markets 

AI-generated content, templated design and copycat products have led to commoditization in many categories. This perceived interchangeability leads to brands competing primarily on price, which subsequently results in profit erosion and generally benefits only the largest players in the market. With their competitive analysis and fresh perspective, brand consultants can find strategic white spaces where businesses can stake claims and set themselves apart. What’s more, consultants can help brands effectively communicate their points of differentiation through creative across all relevant channels.

Navigating major change moments

Mergers and acquisitions, expansion into new markets, repositioning in the face of market shifts, economic instability altering consumption habits – all of these are moments that require the strategic clarity and creative reinvention that brand consulting excels at. By bringing an impartial point of view along with market knowledge and marketing expertise, brand strategy consultants can clarify what needs to be done to optimize the change and how to do it.

Building internal alignment

Change is difficult. So is building consensus on how to carry it out. External consultants provide the neutral perspective needed to get all teams on the same page. Also, by translating abstract strategy into concrete tactics and creative, they help brands establish a shared framework, process, and language for future decision-making.

How Brand Consultants Approach Creative Strategy

The best brand consultants believe creative works in tangent with strategy, not as an independent workstream. The same market intelligence that informs brand differentiation helps shape the brand’s creative, resulting in a cohesive, holistic approach to achieving strategic goals.

Understanding the creative landscape 

As part of their research and analysis, branding consultants map out how competitors visually and verbally communicate their benefits and features, assessing the dominant aesthetics, tones and formats within a category and identifying potential trends. They then use this landscape analysis not to copy what’s working for competitors but to take inspiration from it – and to determine when and how a brand should break from the pack.

Finding competitive white space

An effective consultant sees opportunity in competitors’ creative homogeneity. When most companies in a sector are sticking with lookalike palettes, typography and photography styles, a brand that takes a contrasting approach can quickly differentiate itself. However, the consultant also knows not to be different just for the sake of being different. The creative choices need to support the brand strategy and positioning – and to balance differentiation with enough familiarity to maintain audience credibility and trust.

Balancing data and creative intuition 

While data certainly helps guide creative direction, it should not dictate creative choices. Successful consultants use competitive intelligence to support creative risk-taking in a way that intuition alone can’t. In other words, they can help brands determine which rules are best broken. And, although market research shows what’s working now, brand consulting is about creating the future, and creative instincts help shape what will work next.

When to Bring in a Branding Consultant

Brand consultants aren’t meant to supplant internal teams. In fact, in-house professionals can undertake many of the incremental changes necessary for a brand’s evolution. Some situations, however, call for external expertise and a fresh, unbiased perspective.

Signs you need expert guidance

• Your brand feels indistinguishable from the competition. 

• Leadership can’t agree on brand direction or priorities. 

• Your organization is undergoing a merger, entering a new market or experiencing other significant change. 

• Your creative feels inconsistent across touchpoints. 

• You have a strong strategy on paper but the execution is weak. 

• Internal teams lack bandwidth or specialized expertise. 

• You want to accelerate rather than learn through trial and error. 

• Your brand investments aren’t yielding the expected returns. 

What to look for in branding and consulting partners 

First and foremost, your brand strategy services provider should offer both strategic and creative capabilities, not one or the other, with a focus on creating positive business outcomes. The consultancy should demonstrate market research and competitive analytics acumen along with expertise in multiple disciplines – including identity, product, digital and communication. When examining a consultancy’s portfolio, look beyond aesthetics for thoughtful brand differentiation. You also want to see evidence of measurement frameworks and systems development.   

Beyond these requirements, be sure your consultant favors a collaborative approach that builds internal capabilities and sets up the brand for continuing success. And of course, the ideal consultant will share your organization’s values and fit in with its culture. 

Partner with Material for Integrated Brand Consulting 

Brands grow revenue and gain customer loyalty only when positioning, identity and product tell a coherent, meaningful and distinctive story across every touchpoint. Achieving all that requires strategic rigor integrated with creative excellence — something only the very best brand consultants, such as Material, can deliver. 

Material combines market intelligence, marketing expertise, creative prowess and a systems-thinking approach to build brands that stand out. We don’t merely offer suggestions and guidelines. We get hands-on and collaborate with organizations to develop adaptive brand systems for continuing success. Contact us today to see how Material’s brand consulting can strengthen your brand now and into the future.