Growing up, I wanted to be a poet. Funnily enough, I never saw that career on a jobs board. But to be fair, I didn’t know what a brand strategist was… until I became one. And what I couldn’t have understood at the time, is just how much my love of poetry and study of the craft, would manifest in the work I do as a brand strategist.
When worlds collide
I’ve spoken before about the brand discovery process and in my last blog, I explained how you go from those findings, to forming the brand proposition.
What I perhaps haven’t explained enough yet, is the blend between logical and emotional, head and heart, method and madness…
The magic that exists within the strategy.
When logic meets enlightenment
I can sit with weeks of research. Customer interviews. Competitor audits. Cultural analysis. I can map the market, name the tensions and present findings with complete confidence.
And still, sometimes, it won’t flow yet.
Not until something shifts.
It’s hard to describe precisely. The insight stops being information and starts being a feeling. I stop reading about the brand and start feeling what it should say. And that’s when the writing begins. Not before.
I literally fist-pumped the air when I wrote a mission statement a few weeks ago. Because it was just right. It flowed from my pen, landed on the page – and landed precisely within the strategy. Head and heart. Word perfect.
Because brand language written purely from the head reads like brand language. But brand language written from the gut (from whatever the professional equivalent of instinct is) reads like truth.
That’s poetry.
Shakespeare knew something we sometimes forget
Think about iambic pentameter…
Da-DUM, da-DUM, da-DUM, da-DUM, da-DUM.
Five stressed beats. Ten syllables. A rhythm so close to the human heartbeat that your body responds to it before your brain catches up.
That’s not an accident. That’s true craft. Shakespeare understood that emotion travels on rhythm, that the shape of language is just as powerful as the meaning of the words.
And the most incredible thing? Nobody needs to be taught iambic pentameter to feel its pull. The rhythm lands before the explanation does. You know it’s right because it moves you. Because it sits in the body differently to a sentence that doesn’t quite work.
Brand strategy, at its best, operates exactly the same way.
People know what good sounds like. Even when they can’t tell you why.
And that’s why, in that final brand presentation to the client, there should be fireworks. In the best possible way.
When it lands
Back in the early part of this year, I was crafting a brand strategy. There was no visual identity element; this was purely about core brand positioning and storytelling.
The client came in for a meeting.
The culmination of the project was the brand manifesto.
I had pored over every word and the poetry flowed from my mouth as I read aloud. The energy in the room was electric. And when the founder responded, there were tears in his eyes and raw emotion in his voice.
Not because it was sentimental. Not because it was flattering. But because it was true.
The manifesto was a pure and potent capture of everything he’d been living over the last twenty years.
And that is the poetry in brand strategy.
The science and the magic
Here’s what I keep coming back to.
The rigour… the research, the process, the frameworks… those things get you to the point of truth. But it’s the craft that makes it felt. The choice of word. The length of the sentence. The place where you let silence do the work.
Both matter, but neither is enough on its own.
And if you want to know what separates a brand strategy that stays stuck in a presentation, from one that changes how a business sees itself, it’s usually not the thinking – the thinking is usually excellent.
It is whether the people who have to live the strategy after launch actually believe in it — not just ‘that makes sense’ but ‘that’s exactly us.’
The next time you read something that resonates, not just in logic but in emotion – an ad, a line of copy, a manifesto – pay attention to that feeling. That’s not just good writing; that’s strategy and poetry doing the same job at the same time.
If you want to unleash the poetry in your brand strategy, we’re here to help you unlock that magic.
IT’S ALWAYS STRATEGY
Learn more about Head of Creative and Brand Louise and how she works with brands.