What Customers Search for When They Want Brand Strategy

When someone searches for brand strategy, they are rarely looking for a definition. They are looking for a solution to a business problem they cannot quite name yet. Understanding the specific searches people make around brand strategy in 2025 tells you something important: most brands are not being found at the moment their buyers are trying to figure out whether they even need one.

The gap between what marketers publish and what buyers search for is one of the most persistent inefficiencies in B2B content. Most brand strategy content is written for marketers. Most brand strategy searches are made by founders, commercial directors, and category heads who are not marketers at all.

Why Search Data Is One of the Sharpest Brand Diagnostics Available

Search data is a direct window into what people want before they have found anyone to help them. It is unfiltered, unsolicited, and commercially specific in a way that survey data rarely is. When I was growing the agency in London, we used search data not just to inform our SEO strategy but to understand where client categories were heading. If search volume for a particular problem was growing, that problem was becoming more urgent. That was a commercial signal, not just a content opportunity.

Brand strategy as a search category has matured significantly over the past three years. The searches are more specific, more commercially grounded, and more focused on outputs than they were even five years ago. That shift reflects a broader change in how organisations think about brand: less as a creative exercise and more as a business asset that needs to be built, measured, and defended.

If you want a broader view of how brand positioning fits into strategic planning, the work covered across brand strategy at The Marketing Juice gives useful context for how these search clusters connect to real commercial decisions.

What Are the Most Common Brand Strategy Searches in 2025?

The search landscape for brand strategy in 2025 organises itself into four broad intent clusters. Each one represents a different buyer moment, and each one demands a different type of content response.

The first cluster is definitional. Searches like “what is brand strategy”, “brand strategy meaning”, and “brand strategy vs marketing strategy” are high volume but low commercial intent. These searchers are orienting themselves. They are not yet buyers. Content targeting this cluster builds awareness but rarely converts directly.

The second cluster is evaluative. Searches like “brand strategy agency”, “brand strategy consultant”, “how much does brand strategy cost”, and “brand strategy examples” signal someone who has identified a need and is now assessing options. This is where most agencies focus their content, and it is competitive precisely because the commercial intent is obvious.

The third cluster is executional. Searches like “brand strategy template”, “brand strategy framework”, “brand positioning statement template”, and “brand architecture examples” come from people who have decided to do the work themselves or who want to understand the process before commissioning it. This cluster is often underserved by agencies who do not want to give away their methodology, which is a mistake. The people searching for templates are often the same people who later hire someone to do it properly.

The fourth cluster is measurement-focused. Searches like “how to measure brand awareness”, “brand equity metrics”, “brand tracking”, and “brand health metrics” have grown substantially. This reflects a real tension inside marketing teams: performance channels offer precise attribution, brand investment does not, and finance teams are increasingly demanding equivalence. Marketers are searching for ways to defend brand spend in a language that CFOs will accept.

Which Search Clusters Have Grown the Most?

Measurement-related searches have shown the steepest growth. The pressure to justify brand investment is not new, but it has intensified as performance marketing budgets have grown and attribution models have made short-term channels look more accountable. When I was judging the Effie Awards, one of the most consistent observations among the panel was how few entries could demonstrate the long-term commercial effect of brand investment in terms that a board would find credible. That gap has not closed. If anything, it has widened as the tools for measuring short-term performance have improved.

Tools like Semrush’s brand awareness measurement guide and resources from Sprout Social on brand awareness ROI reflect the demand for practical measurement frameworks. These are not academic resources. They are operational guides for marketers who need to report upward.

The second fastest-growing cluster is brand voice and consistency. Searches around “brand voice guidelines”, “brand consistency across channels”, and “how to maintain brand voice” have grown alongside the explosion of content channels and AI-assisted content production. When a team is producing content across ten channels, some of it written by AI, the question of how to maintain a coherent brand identity becomes urgent. HubSpot’s work on consistent brand voice captures some of the practical dimension of this challenge.

Brand positioning searches have remained stable in volume but have shifted in specificity. “Brand positioning statement” and “brand positioning framework” are searched more often than the generic “brand positioning”, which suggests that searchers have moved past the concept and want the tool.

Who Is Actually Searching for Brand Strategy?

This is the question most content strategies get wrong. The assumption is that brand strategy searches come from marketing professionals. The reality is more varied and commercially interesting.

Founders and CEOs of growth-stage businesses are a significant search segment. They are not searching because they have a marketing problem. They are searching because they have a growth problem and someone has told them that brand strategy might be part of the answer. Their searches tend to be practical and outcome-focused: “does brand strategy increase revenue”, “when do you need a brand strategy”, “brand strategy for small business”.

Commercial directors and category managers at larger organisations search differently. They tend to search for competitive context: “brand positioning examples”, “brand strategy in competitive markets”, “how to differentiate a brand”. They have the budget and the mandate. They want to understand what good looks like before they commission work.

Marketing managers who have been given a brand brief without the budget or support to commission an agency search for executional tools. Templates, frameworks, worked examples. This segment is large and largely ignored by agencies because it does not convert immediately. That is short-sighted. These are the people who brief agencies when they get promoted.

When I ran the agency, some of our best long-term client relationships started with someone who had found our content when they were a mid-level manager trying to figure something out. Three years later, they were running a budget and they called us first. Content that serves people before they are buyers is not a charity exercise. It is a long-cycle commercial strategy.

What Does the Search Data Reveal About Brand Perception Problems?

One of the more telling search clusters is around brand problems rather than brand strategy itself. Searches like “why is my brand not working”, “brand awareness not growing”, “how to fix brand perception”, and “brand differentiation problems” reveal organisations that are already experiencing the symptoms of a weak brand and are trying to diagnose the cause.

This matters for two reasons. First, it is a high-intent search cluster that is relatively underserved by content. Most brand strategy content is aspirational and forward-looking. Content that addresses specific brand failure modes is rarer and tends to rank well precisely because the competition is lower. Second, it tells you something about the state of brand health across the market. A lot of organisations are running brands that are not doing the job they need to do.

BCG’s research on brand advocacy and word-of-mouth is worth reading in this context. Their Brand Advocacy Index work makes a clear commercial case for why brand health translates into growth. The organisations searching for “why is my brand not working” are often organisations where advocacy has stalled, but they do not have the framework to diagnose it that way.

There is also a related cluster around brand loyalty, particularly at the local and regional level. Moz’s analysis of local brand loyalty highlights how brand trust operates differently at different scales, which is relevant for multi-location businesses and franchises where brand consistency is structurally harder to maintain.

How Should Agencies and Consultants Respond to These Search Patterns?

The honest answer is that most agencies are responding to the wrong part of the search landscape. They are creating content for the evaluative cluster, where competition is highest and differentiation is hardest, while ignoring the executional and diagnostic clusters where the competition is lower and the trust-building opportunity is greater.

When we were building the SEO practice at the agency, one of the clearest lessons was that the highest-margin work came from clients who had found us through educational content, not promotional content. They arrived with a higher level of trust and a clearer understanding of what they were buying. The sales cycle was shorter and the brief quality was better. That is not a coincidence. Content that helps people understand a problem positions you as the person who understands it most clearly.

For brand strategy specifically, this means creating content that serves the executional cluster without giving away the entire methodology. A template is not a replacement for strategic thinking. It is a demonstration that you understand the process well enough to codify it. Clients who download a brand positioning template and then try to complete it themselves often come back having realised that the hard part is not the template, it is the thinking that goes into it.

The measurement cluster is an even clearer opportunity. Most agencies are not creating content around brand measurement because it is technically complex and because it implicitly raises questions about how they measure the effectiveness of their own work. That discomfort is exactly why the content gap exists. Agencies willing to engage seriously with brand measurement are rare, and the search data shows that demand for this content is growing.

What Do B2B Brand Strategy Searches Look Like Compared to B2C?

B2B brand strategy searches tend to be more specific and more focused on credibility and differentiation. Searches like “B2B brand positioning”, “how to build brand in B2B”, and “B2B brand strategy examples” reflect a sector that has historically underinvested in brand and is now catching up. The case study from MarketingProfs on how a B2B company went from zero brand awareness to 190 leads is an older example but it captures a dynamic that is still common: B2B organisations treating brand as an afterthought until the lead pipeline forces the question.

B2C brand strategy searches are more fragmented across channels. Social media brand strategy, brand strategy for e-commerce, and brand strategy for product launches all appear as distinct search clusters with their own content ecosystems. The underlying brand strategy principles are similar, but the execution context is different enough that searchers want channel-specific answers.

One of the more interesting cross-sector patterns is the growth of brand equity searches. “Brand equity definition”, “how to build brand equity”, and “brand equity examples” have grown across both B2B and B2C. This reflects a broader shift toward thinking about brand as a financial asset rather than a marketing output. Moz’s analysis of brand equity offers a useful framework for understanding how brand equity is built and lost, which is increasingly the lens through which senior leadership is evaluating brand investment.

What Does Good Brand Strategy Content Look Like in 2025?

The search data gives you the demand signal. What it does not tell you is how to be the best answer to that demand. That requires a different kind of thinking.

The best brand strategy content in 2025 does three things that most content does not. It takes a clear point of view rather than presenting every perspective neutrally. It connects brand decisions to commercial outcomes rather than treating brand as an end in itself. And it is honest about the limits of brand strategy, including when it is not the right solution to the problem the organisation actually has.

That last point is worth dwelling on. One of the most consistent patterns I observed across the agencies I worked with and the clients I managed is that brand strategy is sometimes commissioned as a proxy for solving problems that are fundamentally operational. A company with a product quality problem does not need a better brand strategy. It needs a better product. A company with a sales process problem does not need stronger brand positioning. It needs a better sales process. Brand strategy that is commissioned to paper over those cracks will not hold, and the agency or consultant who takes that brief without flagging the underlying issue is not doing their job.

BCG’s broader work on what separates the best brands by country is relevant here. The strongest brands are not just well-positioned. They are backed by products and services that genuinely deliver on the brand promise. That alignment between brand and reality is what creates the advocacy that drives growth. Search data can tell you what people are looking for. Only honest strategic thinking can tell you whether brand strategy is actually what they need.

If you are working through how brand positioning fits into a wider strategic framework, the full range of brand strategy resources at The Marketing Juice brand strategy hub covers the practical and commercial dimensions in more depth.

About the Author

Keith Lacy is a marketing strategist and former agency CEO with 20+ years of experience across agency leadership, performance marketing, and commercial strategy. He writes The Marketing Juice to cut through the noise and share what works.

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