What 17 Years as a Brand Strategist Taught Me About Everything Else

After 17 years working with brands and companies, I've ended up knowing a genuinely absurd amount of random facts about almost everything. Here's why.

The job of a brand strategist starts with total immersion

The actual work of a brand strategist is to deeply understand the company they're working with, not just the brief, not just the brand guidelines, but the business itself. That means sitting down with owners, founders, and the teams who operate the product or service every single day.

Without a genuine understanding of how, when, and why a company was built, and the fine detail of how its product or service actually works, no strategic move is worth making. So to get there, a brand strategist essentially has to put on the company shirt: discover the details and the small secrets that end up making all the difference to the strategy.

The strange, wonderful side effect: you become full of useless-until-suddenly-useful facts

Did you know all wine grapes produce clear juice, red wine only gets its colour because the skins of red grapes stay in contact with the juice during fermentation? Have you ever wondered why fresh meat is sometimes aged on purpose before it's sold? Or why global car production keeps hitting shortages because of chip manufacturing issues in Asia?

These are the kinds of details that stay with you long after the specific project is finished. For me, this is one of the most admirable parts of the work: every client is a door into a completely different craft, and by extension, into the world itself.

Why this matters for the strategy itself

This isn't trivia for its own sake. A brand strategist who understands why a product is made the way it is can build positioning that's actually true to the product — not positioning borrowed from a template or a competitor. The fact about red wine fermentation, or car chip shortages, isn't the strategy. But the habit of digging until you find facts like that is exactly what makes the strategy hold up.