Brand strategy: five examples and what they get right

"Brand strategy" is one of those words that sounds better in a pitch than in a budget conversation. Ask five people what it is and you get five answers: the identity, the tone of voice, the colours, the campaign platform, the feeling. In practice it's a decision about three things: who you want to be known by, for what, and why anyone should believe you.

Mark Ritson describes positioning as exactly that: for whom, against which alternatives, why believe. Everything else, the logo, the tone, the values, is an expression of the decision, not the decision itself. And because decisions are hard to picture in the abstract, here are five brands that made the call, and what they actually get right.

1. Volvo, owning one word for sixty years

Volvo invented the three-point seatbelt in 1959 and gave the patent away, so every carmaker could use it. Since then the company has said essentially the same thing: safety. One word, sixty years, through changes of ownership, design language and powertrain. The point isn't that Volvos are the safest in every test. The point is that the word is taken, permanently, and no competitor can claim it without sounding like Volvo. That's how strategy compounds: every year of consistency makes the position more expensive to copy.

2. Oatly, tone of voice as an asset

Oatly prints ads on the packaging and talks to you like a person, even in the legal copy at the bottom. The tone isn't decoration; it's a distinctive asset as reliable as the logo. The company has also dared to stand for things that cost it shelf space. That's a prerequisite for this kind of brand: if the voice is to be an asset, you have to be allowed to sound like a person, and people have opinions. Most brands want the voice without the personality, which is why they end up sounding like everyone else.

3. ICA, the story that never ended

ICA's ads about Stig and his neighbours have run since the early 2000s. Twenty years of the same characters, in the same setting, with the same humour. How many campaign concepts are alive in year twenty? Stig is, and that's not luck, it's strategy. The story has been built into Swedes' shared frame of reference: a memory structure that puts ICA in people's heads at the weekly food shop without buying attention anew every week. Consistency is the most underrated strategic resource there is.

4. Spotify, Wrapped as a ritual

Every year, the same week, every feed floods with Spotify Wrapped. That's clever on three levels. It owns a seasonless buying window, the turn of the year, and turns it into a ritual. It converts owned data into material people share voluntarily. And it makes the brand something people talk about when Spotify isn't in the room. Every brand has a season or a moment that matters in its category. Most spread their budget across the year instead of owning their Wrapped.

5. Liquid Death, the dullest category, the sharpest position

Water in a can. Product-wise, about as close to the category as you can get, and yet it sells at several times the price, because the brand gives people something to stand for. Liquid Death took perhaps the most commoditised category there is and turned it into an expression: punk attitude, pitch-black humour, the can as icon. The lesson here is the most important one on the list: in a commodity category, the brand is the product. You don't need better water. You need a better reason to talk about the water.

What the five share: consistency builds memory

None of them changes their tagline every year. None of them chases every trend. All five have one thing they want to be known for, distinctive assets they don't touch, and the patience to let it work. That's more or less the whole secret, and it's why nobody sells it: brand strategy isn't magic. It's persistence with a direction.

Three questions if you want to test your own brand: which word do we want to own? Which distinctive assets do we never change? And what is our Wrapped, the moment we could own?

And if you're wondering where the line sits between this kind of persistence and inertia: it's the first time you consider changing your position because one quarter looked weak.