What Should Your Brand Strategy Include?

Brand strategy services should give you audience research, positioning, messaging, voice guidelines and practical applications. Agree on deliverables your team can use to brief creative work and communicate with customers.

If you’re comparing branding agencies in Nigeria, begin with the decisions your next stage requires. Entering a new customer segment calls for different research from clarifying an established offer.

READ MORE: What Is Cold Open Lab? Brand, Marketing and Communications

Start with evidence about your buyers

Ask how the branding agency will examine customer needs and competing offers. Share customer enquiries, reviews, sales patterns and existing materials. Agree who participates in interviews, how findings are documented and which assumptions still need testing.

Research depth affects the decisions you can make. List what you already know about your customers. Book a discovery call with Cold Open Lab to define the gaps.

What deliverables should your team receive?

Use this illustrative scope to assess a proposal. Cold Open Lab’s contractual deliverables are confirmed in your agreed proposal.

Area	Usable deliverable	How your team uses it
Audience research	Buyer priorities, objections and research findings	Choose whom a campaign addresses and what it answers.
Positioning	Audience, competitive difference and reasons to believe	Guide product launches and explain why buyers should choose you.
Messaging	Core promise, supporting messages and approved proof	Align website copy, packaging, emails and sales conversations.
Voice	Writing principles with examples for different situations	Keep communication recognisable across your team.
Practical applications	Sample creative brief, content themes and customer replies	Show how strategic choices guide everyday work.

How does brand strategy guide creative execution?

Ask the branding agency to demonstrate the decisions in a relevant brief or sample. Understanding the problem before developing and testing solutions is a useful design principle to apply here.

Illustrative example. A fashion label targets professionals seeking workwear they can wear repeatedly. Its campaigns demonstrate styling versatility, product pages explain fit and fabric care, and customer emails suggest outfit combinations. Research must support the audience choice and product claims.

Voice guidance should cover a consistent personality with tone adapted to the situation. A delivery complaint needs a different response from a collection launch.

Your brand voice appears in customer replies too. Compare one reply with a product caption. Follow Cold Open Lab on Instagram for more practical brand guidance.

What should you agree before signing?

Confirm research methods, review rounds, handover formats, team guidance, responsibilities and approval dates. Research depth, product range and stakeholder involvement shape cost and timing. Ask for a relevant, permissioned work sample showing how research informs messaging.

Clarify which design, production and ongoing marketing tasks are separately scoped. At handover, check that your team can brief a campaign and answer recurring customer questions using the materials.

At Cold Open Lab, our brand strategy and messaging work connects business priorities with the language your team uses across campaigns, content and customer communication.

A growing team needs shared brand decisions. List the questions your team keeps revisiting. Book a discovery call with Cold Open Lab to define your brand strategy needs and discuss the Independent Marketing Breakdown.