The Problem with Generic Brand Strategy

The Sameness Problem

I've read dozens of brand strategy documents from various consultancies and agencies. A remarkable number of them could be swapped between clients without changing a word. "We will be authentic, innovative, and human-centered, delivering premium quality with a focus on our customers." Which brand is this? It's every brand.

Generic brand strategy produces generic design briefs, which produce generic visual identities. The sameness starts upstream, long before a designer opens Illustrator.

Why Strategy Gets Generic

Generic strategy usually comes from one of three sources:

Aspirational positioning: the client describes what they'd like to be rather than what they actually are. Every brand wants to be authentic, innovative, and customer-centered. Almost no brand has the specific, differentiating version of any of those things.

Research without interpretation: strategy built from surveys and focus groups often averages the findings, removing the interesting edges where differentiation lives.

Category convention adoption: brands look at what their successful competitors communicate and try to communicate the same things. This produces parity with competitors rather than distinction from them.

What Makes Strategy Specific

Useful brand strategy is specific enough that you couldn't apply it to a competitor without it sounding wrong. "Honest and approachable" is not specific. "The financial advisor who speaks plainly to people who are intimidated by their own money" is specific. You can design toward that.

Specific strategy comes from finding the intersection of what makes this organization genuinely distinctive, what its best customers actually value about it, and where there's real competitive space.

Strategy as Design Constraint

For me as a designer, the most important quality of a strategy document is that it's actionable as a design brief. When I read it, I should know more about what the visual identity should feel like and be able to eliminate directions that don't fit.

Generic strategy eliminates nothing. "Authentic and innovative" doesn't tell me whether the mark should be geometric or organic, whether the color palette should be warm or cool, whether the typography should be classical or contemporary. Specific strategy answers these questions at least partially.

My Role in Strategy Development

I don't just receive strategy documents — I often help develop or refine them as part of the identity process. When a client comes with strategy that's too generic to be useful, I work with them to sharpen it before design begins.

This isn't overstepping. A designer who accepts a generic strategy document and designs against it anyway is accepting responsibility for a generic result. Getting the strategy right first is part of doing the design work well.