16:9
Brand strategy
Decide what to say before you spend money saying it.
What it is
Neon Frame Creative is a UK creative media studio whose strategy work exists to be produced from: positioning, messaging and campaign planning written so a shoot can be briefed off it the same week.
Most strategy fails by being unproducible.
A positioning document that a photographer cannot shoot and a designer cannot lay out has not finished the job. We write to the point where the next person can act: what the audience must believe, the one image that makes them believe it, and the sentence a salesperson can repeat without a deck open in front of them.
The cheapest edit is the one before production.
Deciding the argument is a conversation. Discovering it was wrong after a shoot day is a reshoot. Because the same studio does the strategy and the production, there is no incentive to keep the thinking vague and bill the correction. The person who agreed the message is in the room when the shot list is written.
Six messages is the same as none.
Most organisations arrive with everything true and nothing chosen. The work is subtraction: one proposition, ranked proof, and an honest note of what you are giving up by saying it. Sales teams stop improvising when there is a single line worth defending.
What you get
- Positioning and proposition
- Message architecture by audience
- Naming and verbal identity
- Campaign planning and sequencing
- Content strategy and channel plan
- Briefing documents production can work from
Where it leads
- In FrameProperty developersBuyers commit before the building exists. Everything they judge it on, you commission.
- In FrameFinancial servicesRegulation makes every firm sound the same. It says nothing about how you look.
- JournalSix disciplines, one point of viewWhy the studio launched with all six disciplines live rather than starting with one and adding the rest. The handoff is where the work gets worse.
One of six disciplines. See all of them · most briefs need more than one, and planning them together is what stops anything being made twice.
Strategy: straight answers
Asked and answered
- What is the difference between brand strategy and a marketing plan?
- Strategy decides what you stand for and what you will claim. The plan decides where and when you say it. We do both, in that order, because a channel plan built before the proposition is settled just distributes an argument nobody has finished having.
- How long does a positioning project take?
- Two to four weeks for a single organisation, longer where several practice areas or product lines each need their own message. Most of the elapsed time is stakeholder availability rather than our work, so the honest way to shorten it is to decide who signs off before we start.
- Do we have to buy production as well?
- No. Strategy is available on its own and plenty of clients take it that way, then brief their existing suppliers from it. It is written to be handed over rather than to lock you in. The briefing documents are the deliverable, not a hostage.
Brief us on strategy
Send the brief, the deadline and who has to believe it. You will get a scope, a price and the name of the person who would run it.