If you run a relatively new company in London, you’ve probably heard the same recycled advice about brand strategy:

"Be consistent. Know your audience. Tell your story."

Lovely. Inspiring. And completely useless...

Unless you know how to turn those ideas into measurable business growth.

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At Octogle, we work with London-based startups and scaleups every day, and we’ve noticed something: Most of them think they have a brand strategy when, in reality, they have a logo, a colour palette, and a bunch of well-meaning buzzwords.

So, let’s avoid that.

Here’s what London founders, product teams, and CMOs need to know about brand strategy. The parts no one else tells you. The parts that separate forgettable companies from category leaders.

It's a byproduct.

If your brand process starts with colours and logos, you’re starting in the wrong place.

Your visual identity is like your outfit. But your brand is your personality, voice, energy, and beliefs - all the stuff that’s expressed by the outfit.

According to a UK design report by Sensation Creative, “branding doesn’t start with design; it starts with research.” It’s what defines what you do, who you are, who your audience is, what you value, how you appear, and where you go.  

In the London market, where every second startup is claiming to “innovate,” the real differentiation comes from brand clarity, not aesthetics.

Until you have a brand strategy, you can’t brief a designer without your brand purpose, promise, positioning, and audience persona. Otherwise, you’ll just end up polishing confusion.

For your customers and your team.

It doesn't just live in a shiny deck. A strong brand strategy helps your company decide everything faster: which features to prioritise, which partnerships to accept, which tone to use, even which investors to talk to.

Maybe you’ve experienced this – a kind of chaos when a simple choice about a marketing post turns into a never-ending email thread or Slack debate. That’s not a creative or subjective problem. It’s a strategy gap.

A clear brand strategy is a compass:

• If an idea fits your purpose and values, do it.

• If it doesn’t, don’t.

That clarity alone saves most startups thousands of pounds and months of confusion.

So don't try to copy Silicon Valley.

It’s pretty common - founders in London trying to sound like American conglomerates.

The UK audience reads differently. They’re more cynical and allergic to empty jargon. If your website says things like “revolutionising solutions through digital transformation,” your audience has already tuned out.

London’s market values clarity over hype, and confidence over ego.

The best brand strategy in London isn’t about sounding big... it’s about sounding real. Your customers aren’t impressed by buzzwords; they’re impressed by usefulness, credibility, and consistency.

Here’s something you should try: Build your messaging from interviews with 5-10 real customers. Listen to the exact phrases they use to describe your product’s value. Then mirror that language in your positioning. You’ll instantly sound more authentic and far more strategic.

We’ll say it plainly: a lot of companies are notorious for having brand promises that never touch the product.

They’ll say “We simplify complexity” ... but their onboarding takes 45 minutes.

They’ll say “We empower creators” ... but their pricing plan is inflexible.

A true brand strategy doesn’t just live in your marketing deck, it lives in your UX, your content, your support, and your release notes.

Every touchpoint is a brand experience. That means your developers, designers, salespeople, and founders all play a role in delivering your brand promise.

So, when we build a brand strategy for London companies, we also offer to build something most agencies skip - brand delivery systems. They’re like operating manuals that make sure every part of your company behaves like your brand even when you’re not in the room.

More importantly, it helps you scale without clutter.

Most London SMEs grow like wild ivy. One product turns into three, features become separate tools, and before long, nobody knows what’s what.

That’s where brand architecture comes in, the strategic blueprint for how your products, services, and sub-brands fit together.

Without it, you’ll confuse investors, dilute your message, and waste your marketing budget trying to promote five things that don’t look related. Worse, they can show an inconsistency in your values. Think of a high-end and sustainable coffee brand selling a line of disposable plastic cups.

With solid architecture built into your brand strategy, you’ll know:

• What your master brand owns (your reputation and trust)

• What your product brands own (specialised capabilities or audiences)

• How to name and position new offers without breaking your core identity

At Octogle, we consider this crucial for scaling your brand, and it’s one of the most underused tools in London’s SME industry. Get your architecture right early, and you’ll save yourself a small fortune in a future rebrand.

Every London founder dreams of having a brand strategy like Apple’s. It’s inspirational, sure, certainly a favourite of ours, but your brand shouldn't be benchmarked against a trillion-dollar company that’s solving a completely different problem.

Your real rivals aren’t the big aspirational brands, they’re the new, aggressive, funded brands down the road targeting your exact buyer.

That’s who you’re competing against.  

We benchmark you against that local competitive set, ignoring the international noise. By focussing on you, your audience, and your market alone, we avoid misaligned visuals and confusing messaging.  

It's not just a nice-to-have.

If you’re running a company in London, your brand isn’t just your product, it’s your thinking. Content is no longer about marketing. It’s how people measure credibility.

Your customers are reading your blog posts, your LinkedIn updates, your product announcements, everything... and making value judgements.

If your content doesn’t feel strategic, your brand doesn’t either.

That’s why one of our biggest brand strategy tips for London companies is thought-leadership positioning. We help founders and CMOs articulate their ideas in a way that positions them as trusted experts, not just vendors.

When people start quoting your blog posts in their pitch decks, that’s when you know your brand strategy is working.

London’s scene is always shifting, and the brands that survive will be the ones that have built a strategic identity system, not just a design system.

That means building adaptability into your brand DNA:

• Messaging frameworks that flex across channels

• Modular identities that evolve with your product

• Purpose statements that still feel true, three pivots later

At Octogle, we love to create a future-proof brand strategy. It’s how we make sure our clients’ brands evolve with their growth, not behind it.

Investors don’t fund products. They fund brands they can believe in.

When your brand strategy is strong, when your narrative, positioning, and purpose all align, you become more than a company. You become a vision.

That’s what gets talent excited. That’s what makes customers love you. That’s what turns funding rounds into long-term loyalty.

So, if you’re a company in London ready to stop winging it and start scaling, we’d love to help. If you book a consultation with us, we’ll pinpoint your hidden opportunities, your strategic blind spots, and your biggest growth levers.

Let’s get started!