Brand Strategy Cheat Sheet

Strategy is what you do AND what you choose not to do.

Three words people use interchangeably. They are not the same.

Why every great brand fits one of 12 archetypes Jung identified a century ago.

The 3 to 5 promises your brand actually keeps.

Why Tesla beat Better Place. The architecture of memorable names.

Logos, colors, type, and the system that ties them together.

The doc that keeps your tweets and your TOS sounding like the same brand.

What goes in, what does not, and how to make it actually get used.

Byron Sharp's insight: brands grow by being recognizable, not by being different.

The empirical science of brand growth. Most of what you believe about marketing is wrong.

When a rebrand is the right move, and when it is corporate vanity.

Awareness, consideration, preference. The KPIs brand teams report to the board.

The under-taught discipline that decides who you can hire, and how to build it deliberately.

Master the art of building tight-knit communities that drive trust and advocacy at scale.

Some founders become the brand itself: Elon at Tesla, Warren at Berkshire. Learn when founder brand works, the risks it carries, and how to build it without killing your company.

60/40 split, Les Binet, the long and the short of it.

Putting a dollar value on brand.

Why B2B brand is now table stakes, not optional.

Why founders go viral on LinkedIn while their company accounts struggle.

The 24-hour playbook every brand needs, and will not use until it is too late.

Lego x Adidas, Spotify x Starbucks: the partnership math and what makes co-brands work.

How to build brand equity when discovery happens inside ChatGPT and Perplexity, not Google.

Cognitive mechanisms of brand storytelling: how narrative frameworks bypass consumer skepticism.

When brand consistency collides with local relevance, how do you decide? Learn the standardisation spectrum and the CAGE framework for choosing between global scale and local connection.

Why the sounds your brand makes, a chime, a jingle, a two-note sting, drive recall as hard as your logo, and how to design a sonic system instead of just commissioning a jingle.

The trademark basics every marketer needs before falling in love with a name, why 'TM' and 'R' mean very different things, and real brands that had to rebrand after getting this wrong.

Writing a brand book is the easy part. This lesson covers the harder problem: enforcing it once dozens of teams, freelancers, and agencies are producing content every week.

Geography is not the only axis a brand must adapt across. Learn what actually changes generation to generation and the early signals on Gen Alpha as they enter the market.