Brand vs comms strategy: 12 blunt questions answered by two honest strategists

Originally posted on the BrandStruck blog.

Fun things happen when you decide to have coffee with a fellow strategy person, and turns out you get along pretty well despite working on what often feel like competing sides of a project: brand and comms.

So that’s how I and Magda Adamska decided to do a little writing collaboration. She’s a brand strategist with over 20 years of experience, and the founder of BrandStruck, home to 250+ brand strategy case studies.

We asked ourselves 12 questions, from what annoys us most about the other discipline to whether AI will make us both redundant and answered them independently, without seeing each other’s responses first.

No diplomacy was promised. Here’s what came out.

1. What’s the most annoying part of working with brand strategists?

• Rob: Their obsession with seeing themselves as ‘big idea people’ who don’t like to get into the weeds of how a brand shows up. That said, I also understand that a brand thrives on singularity of thought and therefore this is probably an annoyance that’s ultimately necessary.

• Magda: Most brand strategists are very smart people who sometimes just can’t help themselves and over-intellectualise things that really aren’t that complicated. They use models and frameworks (pyramids, keys, houses, onions and so on) with so many boxes and layers of complexity that no one knows what to focus on afterwards. And some like to act more like poets than business people, polishing the language of brand manifestos instead of thinking about how the strategy will be implemented and whether it will deliver results. I say all this as a brand strategist myself, so consider it self-criticism too.

2. What’s the most annoying part of working with comms strategists?

• Rob: When the answer is a framework where everything is tidy and has a place, instead of forcing choices that will maximise impact instead.

• Magda: Comms strategists are usually more practical than brand strategists, but sometimes they focus on the wrong metrics, chasing engagement and reach rather than long-term business growth. Many of them also think in content calendars, which makes the work more tactical than strategic. And some treat brand strategy as a decoration, something they acknowledge exists but don’t seriously try to implement in comms.

3. What does a good brand strategy mean to you?

• Rob: A clear articulation of the category we’re in, who we’re serving in it, and why they should choose us over someone or something else. It’s the basic stuff, but it’s amazing how often these basic building blocks have not been clearly defined, and we end up with endline poetry.

• Magda: A good brand strategy needs to meet three criteria. It has to help drive the business, otherwise what’s the point. It has to be understood by employees, because they are the ones who will bring it to life. And it has to be easy to implement, which links back to my earlier point: over-intellectualised strategies might look impressive but rarely make it into reality.

4. What does a good comms strategy mean to you?

• Rob: It means we go beyond a superficial understanding of our audience and the media they consume, and actually can find new ways to think about people and environments that our competitors haven’t, instead of simply waging a war of attrition on people’s attention.

• Magda: A good comms strategy needs to be rooted in the brand strategy and help build the desired image of the brand. It should make the brand more distinctive and ideally famous. It also needs a flair of creativity, both in the messages and the choice of channels.

5. Examples of when cooperation between brand and comms strategists didn’t work

• Rob: This one time I worked on a brief where the entire brand strategy was based on not even a campaign idea, but a series of campaign executions that worked best in OOH. This made developing comms first thinking near impossible, because the starting point wasn’t a positioning or platform, but rather a headline that everyone loved.

• Magda: In my experience, cooperation breaks down most often when the brand strategy is not self-explanatory. It also helps a lot when both the brand strategist and the comms strategist are involved in the entire process from start to finish. A handover, however well-intentioned, is where most of the thinking gets lost.

6. One thing the other discipline could start doing on Monday that would make your job easier

• Rob: Learn the difference between a growth audience, a media buying audience and an overheard audience. They play separate roles.

• Magda: Start paying attention to brand and business KPIs, not just engagement and reach. If the campaign performs well, but the brand doesn’t grow, something is off.

7. Your favourite brand doing brand/comms strategy right

• Rob: Ramp, the B2B payments service. They have turned a very dull topic (expense management) into something that can feel both entertaining (through campaigns featuring Kevin from The Office) and credible (through proprietary data). It’s wonderful to see.

• Magda: IKEA. “To create a better everyday life for the many people” is one of the best brand strategies out there and the way it comes to life in their communications is simply beautiful.

8. What’s the biggest misconception about your discipline?

• Rob: That comms strategy isn’t a creative discipline, when in fact you need to think creatively about how to balance audience barriers, roles for communications and the channels in which you’ll live. It’s not a box ticking exercise, as much as it is a dorky three-sided puzzle.

• Magda: That brand strategy is just pretty words. To get to those words, you need to spend a lot of time with numbers: P&Ls, market data, brand trackers, customer research. The poetic part is the last step.

9. Do most brands need a brand strategist at all or could a sharp comms strategist cover 80% of it?

• Rob: I can only answer this if we assume that we’re talking about brand strategy through the lens of advertising specifically. If that’s the case, I think it comes down to two things: capabilities and cognitive load.A sharp comms strategist could theoretically have 80% of the capabilities to do a decent job at brand strategy when applied to advertising, even though I don’t think there are enough of these types of profiles available.
  We might find more of them emerge over the next few years out of necessity, but I’m not sure we’re there yet. But even if there are, I worry about the cognitive load of needing both to ensure brand consistency but also how you expand a brand into different media environments and audiences. It’s like trying to be a writer and editor at the same time. It’s easy to lose perspective.
  So, in summary, I think they should stay separate if you can afford it.

• Magda: If a sharp comms strategist understands the business metrics and market data, and has enough experience to know what can and can’t work, then yes. This combination is quite rare though.

10. Do most brands need a comms strategist at all or could a sharp brand strategist cover 80% of it?

• Rob: I want to say in principle yes, but only if the brand strategist has spent enough time in advertising to understand some of the basic nuances of different media. That said, because the media landscape is increasingly fragmented, this will get harder and harder to work out without relying on someone who, for lack of a better term, is an actual nerd of how people consume ideas.

• Magda: No, and probably less so than the other way round. Comms strategy requires deep knowledge of channels, media and how people actually consume content. Most brand strategists simply don’t have it, or more accurately, don’t want to have it, because it feels too tactical for them.

11. Is the brand book a useful tool or a graveyard? 

• Rob: Useful as a consulting artefact, not something you read end to end. Maybe we should stop calling them books and start calling them search engines, or at least give people more natural ways to search within a brand book for a particular topic or question. This is where a lot of the application of LLMs for brand alignment can be useful.

• Magda: In its old form, a 90-page PDF called “Brand_Book_FINAL_v46”, it deserves to die. It should be a live digital system where everyone can find what they need just by asking.

12. AI can now generate brand and comms strategies. Does that threaten one of our disciplines more than the other?

• Rob: It’s a close run, because both suffer from the threat of people thinking that there’s a single way to do either one of them. When in fact the best leaps come from knowing how to twist the rules a bit.
  Right now, I see a bigger threat among brand strategy, because the market is over-supplied with brand consultants who do what is essentially a job that a business does every few years. Whereas with comms strategy, it’s a higher frequency job because it can stretch into campaigns, and I’d argue even content and experiential work.
  But ask me again in 12 months and my bank account will tell you.

• Magda: Both are threatened, mostly because many people don’t know what a good strategy, brand or comms, actually looks like, so they will accept whatever AI generates for them. Right now I don’t think AI can create great strategies on its own, without a strategist’s support, but it’s a matter of a few years, maybe even months, before it can. So I wouldn’t recommend that any young person pursue a career as a strategist right now.

Overcoming the brand vs comms divide

We hope you had fun reading this, as much as we had writing it. The diplomatic drama between brand and comms is real, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be resolved through shared honesty and maybe 30% less ego from each side.

And here’s a little table that summarises our take on the above questions, should you want an artefact you can steal and apply to your next strategy resourcing meeting or something like that. Who doesn’t love a good table?

Question	Magda's POV (Brand Strategist)	Rob's POV (Comms Strategist)
Annoying traits of brand strategists?	Brand strategists over-intellectualise with complex frameworks and act like poets rather than focusing on business results.	Brand strategists see themselves as 'big idea people' and avoid implementation details, though singularity of thought is necessary.
Annoying traits of comms strategists?	They focus on tactical metrics like engagement and reach over business growth and treat brand strategy as decoration.	They rely on tidy frameworks and boxes instead of making tough choices that maximize impact.
Definition of a good brand strategy?	It must drive the business, be understood by employees, and be easy to implement in reality.	Clear definition of the category, target audience, and why consumers should choose the brand over others.
Definition of a good comms strategy?	Rooted in brand strategy, building distinctiveness/fame, and showing creativity in both messaging and channels.	Finding unique ways to think about people and environments that competitors haven't, rather than just fighting for attention.
Practical advice for collaboration?	Comms strategists should pay attention to brand and business KPIs, not just engagement and reach.	Brand strategists should learn the difference between growth, media buying, and overheard audiences.
Cooperation failures?	When brand strategy isn't self-explanatory or teams rely on handovers rather than end-to-end collaboration.	When brand strategy is based on specific campaign executions or headlines rather than a positioning platform.
Biggest misconceptions?	That brand strategy is just pretty words; it requires heavy data analysis, P&Ls, and research before the 'poetic' part.	That comms strategy isn't creative; it's actually a 'dorky three-sided puzzle' of barriers, roles, and channels.
Discipline overlap and necessity?	Sharp comms strategists can do it if they understand business metrics, but brand strategists lack the channel knowledge for the reverse.	Sharp comms strategists could do 80% but the cognitive load of managing consistency vs. media expansion makes separation better.
AI and the future of the industry?	Both are highly threatened because clients can't distinguish quality; she wouldn't recommend strategy as a career for young people.	Brand strategy is more threatened because it's a lower-frequency job; comms is higher-frequency and more campaign-tied.
Future of brand books?	The traditional long PDF should die and be replaced by live, digital, searchable systems.	They should be search engines or interactive LLM-based tools rather than books read end-to-end.