Brand Strategy on One Page: The Template Real Operators Actually Use

Most brand strategies are 60-slide decks. They get presented once, applauded politely, filed in a shared drive, and never opened again. That's not a strategy — that's a launch event. A real brand strategy fits on a single page. It's a document a new hire can read on day one and use to make the same decisions the founder would have made. Anything longer than that is a document people stop reading, which means a document that stops working.

This isn't a new idea. Kenichi Ohmae's classic The Mind of the Strategist (1982) argued that strategy is the discipline of making fewer, clearer choices — and that strategy documents fail when they accumulate decoration instead of decisions. Forty years later, that's still the diagnosis for most of what gets called brand strategy inside companies. The frameworks have proliferated; the discipline has not.

Below is the template we use with clients — seven sections, no filler, the whole thing fitting on one piece of paper. Every line has to earn its place. We'll walk through each section, show what good looks like, and end with the test for whether your strategy is real or decorative.

1. Who we're for (and who we're not)

One sentence each. The "for" sentence names a specific person — their role, their context, their constraint. The "not" sentence names who you'll consciously fail to serve. If your audience is "ambitious founders" you don't have an audience; you have a fantasy. If it's "venture-backed B2B SaaS founders between Series A and Series C who are trying to add a second growth channel," now we have something to work with.

The anti-audience matters because it forces a real choice. The legendary positioning work of Al Ries and Jack Trout in the 1970s made this concrete: a brand that tries to be relevant to everyone ends up being chosen by no one in particular. Volvo's seven decades of owning "safety" only worked because it consciously gave up the territory of "stylish" or "luxurious." We unpack the same trade-off in our brand positioning sub-topic.

2. What we believe (the conviction line)

One belief about your market or your customer that you hold and your competitors don't. Not a marketing claim — a genuine point of view that shapes what you build and what you refuse to build. Patagonia's conviction that "the most responsible thing to do is buy less" is a real conviction because it costs them sales. Liquid Death's conviction that "water can be culturally interesting" is a real conviction because most CPG strategists would call it madness. Both convictions produced strategies that competitors couldn't easily copy.

The test: read your conviction line out loud to a smart person in your category. If they nod along, you don't have a conviction — you have a platitude. Real convictions are uncomfortable to say because they're falsifiable. They cost you part of the market. That cost is the whole point.

3. Why we exist (the purpose line)

One sentence on what changes in the world if your company succeeds. Not "to deliver world-class X" — that's an output, not a purpose. Simon Sinek's Start With Why framework popularized this question for a reason: most companies can articulate what they do but not why the doing matters. The honest answer to "what would specifically be worse for our customers if we shut down tomorrow" is your purpose.

Purpose isn't about ESG or social impact, though those can be expressions of it. It's about what the company is trying to cause in the world its customers operate in. Mailchimp's purpose for years — "to empower the underdog" — explained product decisions, hiring decisions, and marketing decisions in a way that "to be the best email service" never could. Read more on how this connects to longer-term brand building in our long-term brand building sub-topic.

4. Where we play (the positioning line)

One sentence naming the specific place you occupy in the customer's mind. This is the strategic bet at the heart of the whole document — Ries and Trout argued that positioning is the single highest-leverage choice in marketing, and four decades of brand research has largely vindicated them.

FedEx's "when it absolutely, positively has to be there overnight" is positioning. "Premium logistics solutions" is not. Linear's "the issue tracker software engineers actually want to use" is positioning. "Project management for modern teams" is not. The hardest part of positioning isn't choosing it; it's defending it from the natural pressure to expand into adjacent territory once growth pressure builds. We cover the discipline in depth in our brand positioning sub-topic.

5. How we show up (the voice and behavior rules)

Three to five short rules that define how the brand acts. Not adjectives — rules. "We use specific numbers instead of adjectives" is a rule. "Confident" is an adjective and it makes no decisions for anyone. The test of a good rule: a new marketer who's never met the founder can read it and know whether their draft passes or fails.

This is where most strategy documents fall apart. The voice section becomes a list of adjectives ("warm, authoritative, witty, human") that every brand in the world could claim. The rule-based approach is harder to write but actually operational. Our brand voice guide walks through how to write rules that scale across writers without sounding like a corporate handbook.

6. What we'll never do (the disqualifiers)

Two or three behaviors that are off-limits regardless of short-term incentives. These are the lines you won't cross even when crossing them would be lucrative. Examples: "We don't run ads that wouldn't pass our own ethical advertising standards." "We don't compete on price below cost." "We don't make claims we can't verify."

Disqualifiers are the test of whether strategy has any teeth. Most strategy documents are entirely aspirational — what we are, what we believe, who we serve. The hardest and most useful sections name what you'll consciously not do, even when it's tempting. Without them, every quarter's pressure quietly re-litigates what the brand stands for. With them, the brand has structural protection against drift.

7. What success looks like in five years

One paragraph describing the brand at year five — not financials, but how people talk about it. Who recommends it, who works there, what category leadership looks like, what's different about the customer experience. This isn't a vision board. It's the test you'll use to evaluate every decision: does this move us toward that paragraph, or away from it?

This section is also where the strategy quietly becomes a hiring and culture document. The people you attract over five years are downstream of the brand you build. Stewart Brand's observation that "all institutions tend to corrupt to the values of those who fund them" applies to brands too — they corrupt toward the values of those who work in them. The five-year paragraph is the discipline that keeps that drift visible.

The test for whether your strategy is real

Take your current brand strategy document. Pick three decisions your team made in the last quarter — a new product feature, a campaign concept, a hiring choice. Could you have predicted those decisions by reading the strategy? If yes, the strategy is real. If you had to make the call by gut instead, the strategy is decoration.

This is the test David Aaker has emphasized for thirty years in his work on brand-driven decision making: a strategy that doesn't produce predictable downstream choices isn't doing the load-bearing work of a strategy. Kevin Lane Keller makes the same point in Strategic Brand Management — the value of the strategy is the consistency it produces, not the elegance of the document.

Why one page is the right length

The one-page constraint isn't arbitrary. It comes from two practical observations. First, documents that don't fit on one page tend not to get read; documents that don't get read can't make decisions. Second, anything that requires more than one page to articulate probably contains more than one strategy — and a brand with more than one strategy doesn't have a strategy.

The 40-page brand book has a place. It's downstream of the one-page strategy. It contains the visual guidelines, the verbal guidelines, the application examples, the do's and don'ts. But the strategic decisions all live on page one. Everything else is operational documentation of how those decisions get expressed. We cover the operational layer in our brand guidelines guide.

What to do with this template

Print it. Fill it in by hand first, before opening a slide deck or a Figma file. Show it to three people who don't work with you and see if they can predict what your company would say yes and no to. Edit. Show it to your team and watch what they push back on — those are the lines that aren't sharp enough yet. Edit again. Hang it on the wall.

A one-page brand strategy isn't a constraint. It's a force multiplier. It lets a team of fifty people make consistent decisions without checking in with leadership. The longer the strategy document, the less of that force multiplication you actually get.

For the full picture of how brand strategy fits into a broader branding discipline, read our Branding hub. For how it connects to values-driven, long-term brand work specifically, see our values-driven branding sub-topic. When you're ready to put one of these together for your business, our branding service is where to start.

References

• Ohmae, K. (1982). The Mind of the Strategist: The Art of Japanese Business. McGraw-Hill.
• Ries, A., & Trout, J. (2001). Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind. McGraw-Hill. Overview.
• Sinek, S. (2009). Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action. Portfolio. Overview.
• Keller, K. L. (2012). Strategic Brand Management: Building, Measuring, and Managing Brand Equity (4th ed.). Pearson.
• Aaker, D. (2014). Aaker on Branding: 20 Principles That Drive Success. Morgan James.
• Sharp, B. (2010). How Brands Grow: What Marketers Don't Know. Oxford University Press.
• Collins, J., & Porras, J. (1994). Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies. HarperBusiness.