Why Brand Strategy Is Boring on Purpose
The strongest brand strategies are simple to the point of being almost dull. A sentence the founder, the head of sales, and a customer would all use to describe the company. A list of what the brand stands for that fits on a single page. A position the company has held for years without dressing up.
Most founders hate this. They want their strategy to feel exciting on first read, to surprise the leadership team, to justify the price they paid for the work. The instinct comes from a real place. You're investing serious time and money. The output should look like serious time and money was spent.
The problem is that strategies designed to feel exciting tend to be wrong. They reach for differentiation that nobody else can see. They use language nobody outside the room would use. They pile in too many ideas to look thorough. The brand ends up in a strategy document that gets opened twice and never holds up under the daily pressure of running the business.
The strategies that hold are the ones that look obvious in retrospect. They're boring on purpose. The work is in the discipline of saying less and meaning it.
What a Boring Brand Strategy Actually Looks Like
Mark Ritson, the marketing professor and consultant who has spent thirty years writing about brand strategy, has been making this argument with increasing force over the last two years. His view is that brand strategy isn't complicated. It's the systematic application of a few fundamentals, done carefully and held over time. Most companies fail at it not because the principles are hard to understand, but because the discipline of applying them is hard to sustain.
Writing in Marketing Week in June 2025, Ritson set out three questions that summarise the whole of brand strategy. What is the market and how is it segmented? Which segment are we targeting? What position do we want to hold in the mind of the customer? Three questions, answerable in three sentences if the work has been done. Most companies skip the first two and start with the third, which is why so many positioning statements are detached from what customers actually want.
Ritson points to Nestlé's KitKat as the cleanest example of a positioning document doing its job. The position boils down to four words: breaks are good. The tagline carries the position straight into the customer's life: "Have a break, have a KitKat." The brand has run on this for over fifty years. The strategy is so simple it sounds underwhelming on the page. The execution is so consistent that the words "have a break" now make people think of the product before they think of the literal action.
In a 2024 Cannes Lions keynote, Ritson made the related argument that creative work, the part most agencies sell hardest, matters at the very end of the strategy process. Diagnosis and strategy come first. If those are wrong, no amount of creative excellence rescues the work. Creativity is the smallest variable in the multiplicative chain that produces effective marketing.
Why Boring Strategies Outperform Exciting Ones
The companies whose brand strategies look obvious are usually the ones outperforming their categories.
Marks & Spencer was Marketing Week's Brand of the Year for 2024. Ritson's analysis of the turnaround pointed to the company rediscovering what he called its equilibrium as a brand that combines value and quality. Nothing in the strategy was clever. The work was in committing to the position and pushing every part of the business to express it consistently. By 2024, after a decade of decline, the brand was growing again.
Starbucks went the other direction in 2022 with a repositioning around what the company called "nurturing the limitless possibilities of human connection." The line read as nonsense to customers who came in for a coffee. Sales declined. By the time Brian Niccol took over as CEO in late 2024, the brand needed a return to the basics. Niccol's "Back to Starbucks" plan, announced in January 2025, simplified the menu by 30%, restored core experiential elements, and reframed the brand around its original promise. By Q1 fiscal 2026, comparable sales were up 4%, transactions up 3% (the first transaction growth in eight quarters), and revenue up 6% to $9.9 billion. The simpler, more obvious strategy was working where the imaginative one had failed.
Jaguar's 2024 rebrand is the cautionary example from the same period. The company threw out its visual heritage, repositioned the brand entirely, and launched a campaign that the marketing world spent weeks debating. Ritson's view was that the rebrand discarded everything Jaguar's customers recognised in pursuit of newness for its own sake. The argument that any attention is good attention assumed customers would forgive the reinvention. The early indications suggest most won't.
What Marks & Spencer, Starbucks under Niccol, and the brands Ritson holds up as positive examples share is that none of their current strategies sound clever on the page. The work is in execution and persistence, not in the elegance of the brief.
The Three Reasons Founders Reach for Exciting Strategies
The pull toward strategy that sounds new is consistent across founders. There are three reasons it happens.
The first is that founders are usually closer to the brand than anyone else and have heard the existing positioning so many times it sounds boring. The familiarity is mistaken for ineffectiveness. If the founder is bored of the message, the founder assumes customers must be too. This is almost never true. Customers see brand messages a tiny fraction as often as the founder does and need consistent repetition to remember anything.
The second is that strategy is often briefed against agency proposals. Agencies pitch by promising something different and surprising, because that's how you win the work. Founders evaluating multiple proposals subconsciously reward the most exciting deck. The exciting strategy then turns out to be hard to sustain because it was never grounded in what the brand actually stands for.
The third is that founders confuse personal taste with strategic clarity. A brand that looks like the founder's vision in the founder's head feels right to the founder. The test is whether it works in the customer's head. Most founders are not their own customers and underestimate how much customer-facing work the strategy needs to do.
How to Tell Whether Your Strategy Is Boring Enough
Three tests are useful for founders auditing their own strategy.
The first is the sentence test. Can the founder, the head of sales, the customer success lead, and a customer describe the company in roughly the same words? If those four people give four different descriptions, the strategy isn't simple yet. Most companies fail this test on the first attempt. The work of fixing it is what brand strategy actually is.
The second is the dullness test. Does the strategy document sound surprising on first read? If yes, that's a warning sign rather than a positive. Strategies that sound surprising are usually compensating for something. The strategies that hold over years tend to read as obvious in retrospect, with the surprise sitting in how rigorously simple the answer turned out to be.
The third is the holdability test. Will the company commit to the strategy for at least five years, regardless of what trends appear? If the answer is uncertain, the strategy isn't done. A brand strategy that gets revised every eighteen months is doing the work of a marketing campaign rather than a strategic position. The benefit of the strategy compounds with consistency, and resetting it resets the clock.
Where to Start
Mark Ritson's body of work is the clearest current statement of these principles. His Marketing Week columns are free to read and updated regularly. His MiniMBA in Brand Management goes deeper if a founder wants the underlying frameworks. The Cannes 2024 keynote on creativity versus diagnosis is a useful one-hour video for anyone wanting to understand why most marketing fails before the creative brief is written.
For the underlying academic foundation, Byron Sharp's How Brands Grow (the original 2010 book and the 2015 sequel) is the most influential current research on what actually drives brand growth. Sharp's findings are uncomfortable for many founders because they show that most of what brand strategy obsesses over (differentiation, deep emotional connection, target audience definition) matters less than mental availability and distinctive brand assets. The discomfort is part of why the book is worth reading.
If you're working on your own brand strategy and want a strategist who will resist the pull toward something exciting and instead help you find the boring strategy that holds, that's part of what the studio does. Engagements typically run six to ten weeks, with the strategy and the writing held by one person from first call through delivery.
Chelsea Blake is the founder of Chelsea Blake Studio. She works with businesses building to scale, leading every engagement personally across brand strategy, identity, and tone of voice.
