When your brand no longer reflects the value your business delivers, it becomes a liability.

At inflection points—scaling, repositioning, merging, or maturing—companies often find themselves misaligned. Internally, teams lack a shared language. Externally, customers misunderstand what the business does or why it matters. The result is stalled momentum, missed opportunities, and inconsistent execution.

Brand strategy services exist to solve this. They close the gap between business reality and brand perception—so your brand becomes an asset, not a barrier.

What Do Brand Strategy Services Deliver?

Brand strategy is a structured business process that aligns leadership, messaging, visual identity, and customer experience.

Effective brand strategy services do three things:

1. Clarify what your company stands for.
   
2. Establish how it should be expressed.
   
3. Ensure consistency across every team and touchpoint.

Without this clarity, even great products and teams can underperform.

A Proven Four-Phase Framework

At Backstory, we follow a practical framework designed to create alignment and drive performance. Each phase has a clear objective and a defined outcome.

Phase 1: Discovery

We begin by identifying brand misalignments. Through stakeholder interviews, brand audits, and customer research, we uncover how your brand is currently perceived—internally and externally.

This phase moves beyond assumptions. It establishes the baseline from which strategic decisions can be made.

Phase 2: Foundation

We define the brand’s strategic core:

• Brand Purpose
  
• Brand Position
  
• Brand Promise
  
• Brand Pillars
  
• Brand Personality
  

These elements serve as operational tools that guide messaging, design, recruitment, and leadership alignment.

Phase 3: Expression

With the foundation in place, we translate it into a cohesive identity:

• Messaging frameworks for audiences and offerings
  
• Naming and positioning statements
  
• Visual identity and design direction
  
• Style guides and communication standards

This ensures your brand is expressed with clarity and precision across all departments and channels.

Phase 4: Activation

Strategy only works if it’s implemented. We support rollout and training across teams to ensure adoption.

This includes go-to-market implementation and tools that empower employees to use the brand consistently.

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Note: Your brand will be ready to scale when all the elements of your Brand Wheel are green. Turning all the aspects of your brand from yellow and red to green requires collaborative input from multiple individuals, teams and departments. 

Teams that work together to accomplish this work create a shared sense of brand ownership, excitement, momentum, and alignment. You can celebrate your progress and prioritize the next steps as you turn all of your brand elements green.

The Cost of Misalignment

Brands that fail to align their message with value face real consequences:

• Inconsistent messaging across teams and platforms
  
• Sales cycles slowed by confusion or lack of clarity
  
• Marketing campaigns that underperform due to unclear positioning
  
• Difficulty attracting the right customers, partners, or talent

Closing the Gap: From Brand Reality to Brand Perception

Think of your brand as a bridge. On one side is your internal reality—your goals, values, and capabilities. On the other side is how your audience perceives you.

If there’s a gap in between, your brand can’t carry the weight of your growth.

Brand strategy services help close that gap by clarifying what’s true, communicating it clearly, and delivering it consistently. That’s how brands build trust—and trust is how brands scale.

Backstory’s Brand Wheel Assessment helps identify those gaps and prioritize what to fix first. 

From inconsistent messaging to outdated visuals to unclear value props, we make sure your brand is no longer the barrier; it’s the accelerator.

The OnMessage™ Advantage: Go Beyond Surface-Level Messaging

Most brand strategies break down in the handoff between leadership and execution. Why? Because no one knows what to say.

Backstory’s proprietary OnMessage™ process solves that.

It’s a structured messaging system that gives your entire team the words they need to describe your value, differentiate your offering, and drive alignment across departments.

Think of it as internal branding meets external impact. When everyone speaks the same language, customers start to listen.

Aligning Messaging, Visuals, and Experience

Brand perception is shaped by every interaction. A cohesive strategy addresses three dimensions simultaneously:

1. Messaging – What your brand says and how it says it
   
2. Visuals – How your brand looks and signals value
   
3. Experience – How your brand behaves at every touchpoint

A disconnect in any one of these undermines credibility. When all three are aligned, the brand builds trust—and trust drives growth.

What You Receive from Brand Strategy Services

Backstory engagements are structured, collaborative, and outcome-driven. A standard project includes:

Deliverables:

• Brand Purpose, Position, Promise
  
• Brand Pillars and Personality
  
• Messaging Framework and Brand Narrative
  
• ICPs and Customer Personas
  
• Tone of Voice and Language Guidelines
  
• Visual Style Guide
  

Outcomes:

• Alignment across leadership and departments
  
• Messaging clarity for all audiences
  
• Cohesive brand identity across platforms
  
• Tools and frameworks to scale consistently
  

Who This Work Is For

This process is designed for companies at critical growth stages:

• Scaling rapidly and needing to professionalize messaging
  
• Repositioning in response to market shifts
  
• Navigating M&A or brand consolidation
  
• Launching new products or entering new markets

If internal alignment is a challenge, or if external perception doesn’t reflect the full value of the business, a strategic brand engagement is appropriate.

Who It’s Not For

This is not the right fit for organizations looking for quick fixes or cosmetic changes.

If the goal is a logo refresh, a new tagline, or surface-level adjustments without addressing the underlying brand architecture, this process will not provide the intended return.

Strategic brand work requires executive involvement, cross-functional input, and a willingness to make decisions that guide long-term growth.

Real Results from Brand Strategy Services

Here’s what happens when the strategy is clear:

Grow (SaaS Business Intelligence Platform)

Impact: Strengthened message-market fit across 3 stages of growth.
Results:

• Helped Grow communicate the advantages of its BI tools to small/mid-size businesses as it scaled.
  
• Clarified its messaging for internal teams and external stakeholders during expansion and prior to sale.
  
• Positioned Grow to move beyond executive-only BI use to companywide, data-driven decision-making.
  

This brand strategy engagement sharpened Grow’s position, supporting both growth and acquisition readiness.

Nano-Yield (AgTech Startup)

Impact: Reframed a disruptive “less is more” fertilizer narrative.
Results:

• Clarified a complex nanoliquid technology story for a skeptical market.
  
• Enabled clearer conversations with distributors and growers.
  
• Improved customer acquisition by aligning message to audience skepticism and expectations.
  

The brand story allowed Nano-Yield to position itself as the leader in nanoliquid tech and bring its message consistently to market.

Crucial Learning (Post-Acquisition Brand Unification)

Impact: Unified legacy and new IP into a single, compelling narrative.
Results:

• Successfully rebranded from VitalSmarts to Crucial Learning.
  
• Enabled clear internal adoption and improved external market recognition.
  
• Strengthened perceived value of hybrid learning products by resolving confusion across classic and licensed content portfolios.
  

This case exemplifies how brand clarity directly influences internal alignment and customer understanding at scale.

Each transformation started the same way: with strategy first.

How to Know If You’re Ready for Brand Strategy Services

Ask yourself:

• Is your team aligned on what your brand stands for?
  
• Does the market know why you're different?
  
• Is your brand helping you scale, or holding you back?

If the answer is no, the next step is clear.

If you’re unsure, start with a free Brand Wheel™ Assessment. It’s the fastest way to see where your brand stands—and what’s missing.

Get Your Story Straight So You Can Scale

Quality brand strategy aligns your team, sharpens your message, and clarifies your value—so you can scale with confidence. Scaling means more than expanding your reach—it demands precision. You need to connect with the right people, deliver the right message, and do it at the right moment.

Backstory’s brand strategy services give you the structure, clarity, and language to do exactly that.

Start with the Brand Wheel™ Assessment

Backstory’s Brand Wheel™ Assessment offers a simple starting point to evaluate your brand’s readiness to scale. It identifies which areas of your brand are supporting your growth—and which are working against it.

Ready to close your brand gaps and prepare your business for scaling?

→ Take the free Brand Wheel™ Assessment