This London brand strategy guide is for SMEs who want to stop playing small.  

SMEs who understand that:

• Buyers are overstimulated, overscheduled, and over generic messaging.

• Attention spans last like a television remote with old batteries.

• Competitors outnumber coffee shops (almost)

Because if your brand strategy is all over the place instead of surgical and strategic, you’re basically rolling into Shoreditch wearing Crocs with a tuxedo.  

Iconic? Maybe. Effective? No.

So to stand out in a world of noise and achieve real business outcomes, this guide can be your playbook on building a brand strategy in London.  

‍

You may also want to...
‍
Talk to a brand strategy expert in London directly (it's free)

‍

A brand strategy is a long-term plan that defines how your brand will present itself, how it will differentiate, and how it will behave. It goes beyond short-term marketing tactics.

It is not aesthetics. The visuals come later, way later. There’s a lot of background work that goes into it before you can even spell ‘logo’.

Here are the ingredients you’ll typically find in a proper brand strategy:

• Vision & Mission: Where you’re going & why you exist.
• Purpose & Values: The deeper “why” beyond money.
• Audience & Customer Insight: Who you serve, what they really care about.
• Positioning & Differentiation: The space you own in their minds.
• Tone of Voice and Personality: How you act, talk, show up.
• Brand Architecture (for multi-offer businesses): How your offerings relate.
• Implementation & Experience: Making sure every touchpoint (digital, physical) aligns.

London is crowded and you need to stand out with relevance and nuance. The people value clarity and credibility. And with a strong brand strategy, London can be where you move from a local player to the globally recognised brand you want for your company.

‍

Read lesser-known facts about developing brand strategies

The first step is always research. Before a colour palette, before a logo, before even defining your vision and values, you need to know where you currently are.

Here’s how to start developing a brand strategy in London:

‍

Align your stakeholders

Your brand strategy project will go nowhere if there is disagreement among your company's decision-makers about three core issues:

• What business problem are we actually solving?

• What do we offer that no one else does?

• If we disappeared tomorrow, who would suffer, and why?

Every SME will have an assortment of characters, from those who have five conflicting visions about the brand, to those who think branding is just light marketing, to those who only want to add a logo to a presentation.

You can only begin to make progress with your brand strategy if everyone can come together on these three core questions.

‍

Audit your current business model

Take a really good look at your revenue breakdowns, unit economics, CAC, LTV, and other metrics. Investigate your most profitable product, because maybe it wasn’t the one you promoted the most. Investigate the leaks in your conversion funnel, because there’s something that’s turning the people who need you away.

‍

Research your competitors

London is crowded, competitive, and full of copycats. You need to build a real competitor map – one that’s not based on “we looked at 3 websites and guessed their strategy.” Look for

• Their positioning claim (What they think makes them special)

• Their tone of voice (Edgy? Corporate? Relatable?)

• Their pricing bands

• Their visual vibe

• Their weakness (Where can you poke holes)

We know your competitors’ brands are setting a standard for you. But your goal is not to imitate them. Your goal is to figure out how you can stand high above the rest.

‍

Research your customers

You have to talk to them. You can’t put that off. It might feel emotionally risky and you’re worried you’re going to hear insights about your business that will make you question everything.  

But that’s the point. You find the answers to everything only when you question everything. Here are some questions to guide you:

• “What made you look for a business like ours in the first place?”

• “What nearly stopped you from choosing us?”

• “What were you really trying to solve?”

• “What did you assume about us before you spoke to us?”

This is so important.

It may surprise you to know that some of the best brand strategies in London don’t come from an abundance of creativity, they come from recognising simple patterns that others overlook.  

Let's imagine the example of a luxurious coffee brand that decided to open a branch in a packed office district.  

They built a beautiful cafe with an inviting ambience, and served rich, sustainably sourced coffee to office workers. They had a lovely and eye-catching visual design comprised of logos, a colour palette, font, and patterns worthy of winning awards on Behance.  

But nobody came.  

Because a small coffee seller on the other side of the road actually spoke with the office workers, and they learnt that the workers didn’t have time to spend in a cafe. The workers were always in a rush to work and just needed a simple, quick hit of caffeine to grab and go in the morning.  

This seller had no logo, no font, no plush sofas in trademarked brand colours... just coffee and takeaway cups, and they captured the market just by listening.

The good news is your customers want to tell you exactly what they need from your brand.

You just need to make space to listen to them.

Take a look at the difference between these two statements:

• Statement 1: “We offer high-quality brand strategy services for all your needs.”

• Statement 2: “We help SMEs in London stop losing money because their messaging confuses buyers.”

The first is a sledgehammer. The second is a scalpel.  

And before you ask, the goal of narrowing down your positioning to a clear statement is not exclude other possible demographics or services you provide. If a fizzy drink brand generally markets to the youth, it doesn’t stop an old chap from cracking one open for himself.

‍

How to Create a Brand Positioning Statement

Great positioning answers five things:

• Category – What are you? Say it plainly, without the jargon.

• Target – Who exactly do you serve?

• Benefit – What desirable outcome do they get?

• Proof – Why should they believe you?

• Differentiator – What makes you not-like-everyone-else-who-claims-the-same-thing?

Put all these together and you have a powerful statement to guide your company, and you’ll have something a lot like:

“We’re an urban coffee bar serving downtown office workers who don’t have minutes to spare waiting in line, by giving them their morning caffeine while eliminating queue anxiety with our 90-second coffee service, built around the goal of saving maximum time.”

A good statement will instantly click with the right customer. There’s no room to guess what problem is being solved, for whom, and how.  

So, the next time you want to call yourself a “full-spectrum digital transformation enablement strategist for industry disruptors,” you'll probably connect more if you just said, "We set up and manage IT for startups."

‍

See how a brand strategy consultant helps brands stand out in London

Messaging is where positioning becomes language. It guides how your company speaks to the world and prevents inconsistency that we commonly see:

• A blog that sounds like a corporate manual

• A social media post that sounds like an overconfident teen

• A LinkedIn article that sounds like AI trained on LinkedIn

Instead, your brand starts sounding like a single voice with its own life and personality.  

When you develop the messaging based on your positioning statement, you’re developing one that will resonate with your audience, convey your ambition, and turn heads in your market category.  

This is the part most clients looking to create a brand strategy in London wait for. With the positioning and messaging, we built the foundation. Now, we build the house.

The visual identity is what gets you attention, when built strategically. Here are some components of very comprehensive visual identities:

• A colour ecosystem (primary palette, secondary palette, functional colours, accessibility-safe shades)

• A typographic hierarchy that prevents your intern from making your brand look like a GCSE PowerPoint

• A grid system (yes, a grid, you free-form spirit)

• A shape language - hard edges or soft curves? Sharp tension or organic flow?

• A UI library (buttons, inputs, tags, states, micro-states, hover micro-interactions... even if you think you “don’t need them yet”)

• An iconography style (geometric? expressive? monoline? abstract anthropomorphic blobs?)

• A photography direction (lighting, composition, subject rules, editing style, colour grading)

• A motion system (easings, transitions, speed curves, physics personality)

• And a brand expressions library: What your identity looks like in the wild

Creating the visual identity for a brand strategy in London is more than just drawing a logo.  

We said it before, your logo is not the brand.  

A brand is its layout rhythm, its tone, its typography and colour ratios, its motion behaviour and spatial balance.

‍

See examples of beautifully creative brand strategies

‍

Look at it this way - If you removed your logo from a design, but it still feels undeniably your brand? That’s when you finally have a brand strategy, not just a decorative sticker.

With your London company’s best brand strategy in place, it’s important to ensure that it is expressed the same in all your communication. While consistent tone of voice is an important factor, we’re referring to everything else.  

Every moment, in which your company may accidentally act in a way that contradicts the story you’re trying to tell. This could happen in your team’s emails, how your support rep explains a mistake, sales decks, onboarding, packaging, how you handle complaints, how you give customers bad news, and how you make it up to them.  

Ultimately, the final expression of your brand strategy will come from the people themselves, and what they’re perceiving and saying about you.  

With a brand strategy for your London company, everything snaps into coherence. Your brand becomes a force to be reckoned with when:

• Every touchpoint says the same thing

• Every behaviour reflects the same intention

• Every asset aligns with the same worldview

• Every team member communicates with the same clarity

• Every customer experience reinforces the same promise

And as you integrate everything, your brand becomes a living, breathing thing, not just a collection of colourful assets.  

The most efficient path to this level is the one that has professional and experienced brand strategy consultants doing the heavy lifting for you. We’ve done all of this and more for many incredible brands, and we’d love to help you get started with a free consultation.  

How long does a creative brand strategy take?

It can take 4–12 weeks depending on complexity, stakeholder count, research depth, and frequency of communication. Brand strategy agencies in London typically run a multi-stage process with discovery, research, positioning, messaging, and brand architecture.

Read how to choose the best brand strategy agency for your business

‍

What if my business is too early for brand strategy?

Without brand strategy, your marketing becomes inconsistent, expensive and directionless. Most London SMEs who think they have a “marketing problem” actually have a brand clarity problem. If you’re pre-product, go with a light strategic foundation. If you have customers or revenue, it’s time to craft your identity. Brand clarity isn’t a late-stage luxury; it’s an early-stage multiplier.

‍

What's the cost of brand strategy in London?

London pricing varies, but here’s a starting point:

• DIY or freelancer: £1k–£3k (low cost, high risk, often vanity-oriented results)
• Boutique London agency: £5k–£25k (typical SME range)
• Large brand consultancies: £50k+ (high cost, high expertise, deep strategy - like golden ratios on plastic bottle-level thinking)

But then there's us. Octogle. We offer the quality that large consultancies deliver at the cost of a boutique agency. Ask us how.

‍

Will a brand strategy actually help me get more customers?

Yes. Indirectly, but measurably. Brand strategy doesn’t magically print leads, but it increases trust, clarity, conversion and pricing power. Your ads work better. Your sales calls become easier. Your website converts at a higher rate. Essentially: strategy amplifies every pound you spend on marketing.

‍

What happens after the brand strategy is created?

A good agency doesn’t leave you holding a pretty PDF. You get:

• Implementation guidance
• Messaging for your channels
• Creative direction
• Rollout plan
• Internal brand guidelines
• Ongoing brand reviews (optional but smart)

We know you don’t want “one-and-done”. That's why we also offer executive support to bring your strategy to life.

‍
‍

Ready to stop blending in and start leading your category in London?

Book a strategy call and let’s build the best brand strategy.