Legend has it that though shall judge a Marketer by how well they answer this one question: “How will what you are suggesting help us achieve our key business goal of _____?”
Overheard
"We plan to get back on track by making a viral video involving our brand, a dancing githeri man and cats that look like dictators."
It is not unusual for an agency or consultant to run together the brand strategy and the creative strategy in a presentation that explains this is where the brand needs to get to, as we see it, and here is how we intend to achieve that conceptually.
Brand Strategy: It envisages the future position of a brand in the marketplace, based on the company’s wider business aspirations and its ability to deliver and market brands that align with that desired position.
Purpose - to identify how far the brand must “travel” perceptually in order to be competitive, the benefits of getting there for the business, the purpose and values that the brand culture will need to adhere to in order to make that journey, and the competitive resistance that the brand may encounter getting to that end point. It’s the why and the where.
Brand Vs Creative Depiction
Creative Strategy: It’s more about approach than strategy, laying out the storytelling needed to make that journey happen. The creative strategy captures how the brand will tell that story, the personality and behaviors that the brand will need to adopt in order for that to happen successfully and, potentially, the communication themes that will hold the storytelling together.
Campaigns are the episodes - they are how the creative strategy gets expressed across a range of channels over time – from advertising to content marketing to social media to direct marketing and so on. The purpose of the campaigns is to animate the creative strategy into tangible story-lines for consumers. These may be linked together thematically or they may run independently of one another.
Why is this important?
When there is no true brand strategy, so the final goal for the brand remains unknown. Instead the brand’s agency or agencies jump from one creative strategy to another (calling it the brand strategy as they go), or even from one campaign idea to another, with no robust reason for doing so.
Masked Off
Effectively they rely on presence and media to get the brand noticed – but there is no holistic business goal, and because the end goal remains unstated and unquantified, it is impossible to truly judge progress or to establish metrics much beyond reach and engagement stats that seem impressive but ring hollow.
Confusion
The confusion arises because many of the terms above are used interchangeably as you say, and also because, under time and budget pressure, agencies and consultants consolidate the different parts under collective headings. Nothing wrong with this but in the wrong hands it can also separate the ideas driving the brand from the requirements and drivers of the business strategy.
