There’s a particular moment in every brand strategy project when something shifts.

I was sitting with a leadership team in Dublin recently. They’d been explaining that despite having many longstanding clients they were struggling to win new business – cheaper competitors, price-focused buyers, commoditised market. Classic story.

I asked them to walk me through their last three big wins.

What emerged was fascinating. In each case, the client had initially gone with a cheaper option, hit problems, then come to this company to sort it out. They weren’t winning on price or even on features – they were winning on what happened when things went wrong.

‘So you’re not really just selling a product’, I said. ‘You’re selling insurance against failure’.

A simple reframe. But it changed everything about how they positioned themselves.

They knew all of this, by the way. Every person in the room knew it. But they couldn’t see it – because they were too close.

The label and the bottle

The closer you are to something, the harder it becomes to see it clearly. You know every detail, every nuance, every internal discussion that led to each decision.

As an old colleague of mine used to say ‘it’s hard to read the label from inside the bottle’. A cliché, maybe? But true.

I worked with a tech company whose leadership spent twenty minutes explaining why their product was different from their main competitor. Complex technical distinctions, different architecture, superior performance metrics. All true. All important to them.

Then I interviewed their customers. What they said was: ‘All the companies seemed pretty similar, but these guys were people you’d want to work with. So easy to deal with. Easy to implement without disruption. And the product just works.’

The founders were obsessing over technical differentiation that their market couldn’t see or didn’t care about, whilst missing the human differentiation that was actually driving their success. (Of course! And without that technical brilliance they’d have nothing).

This is not unusual. It’s the norm. The closer you are to something, the harder it is to see clearly. You know every detail, every nuance, every internal discussion that led to every decision. Your customers see none of that context. They see what they see.

It’s why objectivity helps. Not because outsiders are smarter, but because they’re not trapped in your internal narrative.

The politics of internal brand work

There's another reason internal brand work is difficult, and it’s rarely talked about openly: politics.

I don’t mean backstabbing or power games (although they may exist). The natural, human kind. When you ask a leadership team to think strategically about what the company represents, whose version wins? Marketing’s customer-focused view? Sales’ competitive framing? The founder’s original vision? The board’s growth ambitions?

When I facilitate these conversations, something interesting happens. People are more honest. They challenge assumptions more freely. They listen differently when the ideas aren’t coming from a colleague they have to work with tomorrow.

And there’s a practical benefit that’s easy to underestimate: it removes the facilitation burden. Your marketing director can participate fully instead of trying to run the process. Your CEO can contribute ideas instead of managing personalities. Everyone’s in the room as a contributor, not a referee.

Pattern recognition

Here’s something you can’t replicate internally, no matter how good your team is: pattern recognition across industries and business models.

I’ve worked with manufacturers, consultancies, tech scale-ups, food brands, professional services firms, financial institutions. Every business thinks its challenges are unique. The underlying brand strategy principles can be remarkably consistent.

More usefully, the best solutions often come from unexpected places. The positioning approach that worked for a professional services firm might be exactly what a software company needs. But you’d never make that connection if you’ve only worked in software.

This cross-pollination – seeing how other businesses have solved similar problems in completely different contexts – is one of the most valuable things an external strategist brings. Not theory. Experience, applied with fresh eyes.

Specialist work needs specialist skills

Developing a brand strategy isn’t about having some good ideas in a workshop. It’s about knowing how to uncover genuine insight, identify real differentiation (not just what you think makes you different), translate strategic thinking into practical tools people can use, and make sure it actually sticks.

A very particular set of skills. (Liam Neeson voice). You wouldn’t expect your finance team to design your website. Brand strategy requires its own expertise and methodology.

I’ve spent years developing a pragmatic approach to this – customer research, competitive analysis, stakeholder alignment, messaging, implementation. Not because I have all the answers, but I do know the right questions. And because I’ve made enough mistakes over thirty years to know what works in the real world and what stays in the PowerPoint.

Time and focus

There’s a simple practical point too: this work takes sustained, focused attention over several weeks. Your team has a business to run, customers to serve, products to develop. Asking them to also become brand strategists – even temporarily – means either the brand work gets done poorly or their other responsibilities suffer.

An external strategist can dedicate the time this work deserves while your team stays focused on what they do best. They contribute their deep business knowledge at the right moments, without being pulled away from running the business.

What good looks like in practice

When I work with clients, here’s roughly what will typically happen:

In the first few weeks, I’m doing the heavy lifting – customer interviews, competitor analysis, internal stakeholder conversations. Your team provides access and context but doesn’t get pulled away from their core work.

Then we collaborate on strategy development. Your deep business knowledge meets external perspective and methodology. Everyone’s fully engaged – because they’re not trying to facilitate.

From there, I'm refining and articulating – your positioning, narrative, messaging, voice. The tools that make strategy usable. Your team can focus on their expertise while I handle the specialist work.

The result: a strategy that’s both externally informed and internally owned. Your people have been part of creating it, so they understand it and believe in it. But they haven't been distracted from running the business – or fallen into the trap of seeing only one vantage point.

The investment question

Yes, external help costs money. But consider the alternatives: months of internal time that could be spent on revenue-generating work. The risk of a strategy that misses the mark because it's too internally focused. Marketing and sales efforts launched without clear, differentiated messaging. The cost of doing it again because you didn’t get it right the first time.

(About 30% of my work is ‘do-overs’ – fixing half-baked strategy that didn’t land the first time. That’s the cost of getting it wrong.)

I’ve seen businesses spend more on a single trade show than they would on developing a clear brand strategy. No disrespect to trade shows – but if the people on your stand are telling different stories about what you do and why it matters, which investment is likely to have more lasting impact?

When it makes sense

External help isn't always the answer. If you’re a very early-stage business still figuring out product-market fit, you probably don’t need comprehensive brand strategy yet.

But if you’re struggling to differentiate from competitors, or your team has different views on what the company represents, or you’re entering new markets, or your marketing feels scattergun rather than strategic, or you're hiring people who need to understand ‘what we’re about’ – those are signs that the clarity isn’t there yet. And clarity is hard to find from the inside

It’s not about dependency

The goal isn’t to create an ongoing need for external support. It’s to get the foundations right – then equip your team to live and evolve the brand from there.

The best brand strategy projects end with your people feeling excited and confident about what the brand stands for, why it makes sense, and how to apply it. Not dependent on someone like me, but clear enough to move forward on their own terms.

Your brand is too important to be a side project. Getting it right takes the combination of internal knowledge and external perspective, business understanding and specialist methodology. That’s the work.

If you’d like to explore how this might work for your business, let’s have a conversation.

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