Considering Brand Positioning and Strategy

In 2025, our culture is more connected than ever. Brands don't just observe culture, they create it. The brands that stand out do more than just sell products or services—they tell stories that connect with customers.

That's where brand positioning and strategy come in. It's not just about selling something. It's about having a clear, distinctive story that resonates with audiences on a human level. If you can harmonize your design and technology with an authentic, purpose-driven narrative, then you can create a genuine connection with your audience.

The Evolution of Brand Strategy

The static framework for traditional brand strategy is dead. Successful brands understand the need to constantly evaluate and refine their positioning and strategy. 

At Bear, this is a two-part process. First, we figure out what actually matters to customers, not just what we assume matters often achieved through User experience research. Simplify talking to your customers, or potential customers. Then, we use those insights to craft a story that communicates a brand’s authentic values and culture. Younger audiences want content that’s honest and real, and this approach can create genuine emotional connections with audiences.

Why Brands Overlook Strategic Recalibration

Brand positioning and strategy are the roots of a brand—every decision stems from them. But they are often overlooked during redesign or re-platforming efforts. This is usually because teams are either consumed by immediate technical hurdles or fixated on short-term acquisition and retention metrics. 

Quantitative data is essential, but it can sometimes lull brands into a false sense of security. This can blind them to consequential ebbs and flows in market dynamics and consumer behavior. That sort of oversight can leave brands out of touch and ill-prepared to navigate the ever-evolving currents of the marketplace. It’s like trying to navigate with a map from 2005—you’ll end up in some very strange places.

That blind spot is especially rampant among mid-sized brands with moderate Gross Merchandise Value (GMV). These brands often get stuck in a growth rut. Various factors contribute, from founder fatigue to new leadership influx to constant price and promotion battles. Over time, those dynamics can erode a brand’s core identity and relevance. It’s often only in the middle of an existential crisis that the need for a strategic overhaul becomes painfully evident.

Recognizing the red flags indicating the need for strategic intervention is crucial. When a brand continuously relies on redesigns or re-platforming efforts without addressing fundamental communication and relational challenges with its audience, it can indicate a deeper-rooted issue that design, CRO, and technology alone cannot solve.

Embracing Strategic Introspection 

New brands embarking on a redesign or re-platforming endeavor can often find themselves at a crossroads, where they have to choose between perpetual redesigns and devs on the one hand and a broader revaluation on the other. Founders often find themselves  having to ask tough questions. Will a technical overhaul suffice? Or is there a fundamental disconnect between the brand and its audience?

Understanding the interplay between content design and distribution is critical to that decision. Often, a misalignment between content strategy and distribution can lie at the root of a brand’s problems. Karen McGrane, one of the great UX thinkers, once compared this misalignment to gifting someone a beautiful box with no present inside. Elaborating on that idea, Jared Spool, the father of modern ux writing, observed, “ A lot of design work can fall into that trap where you're putting where you're creating this beautiful gift box but you're never you're never figuring out what the gift is and who it's for and whether it's a meaningful gift.” 

That insight—that content design and distribution channels are inseparable—is at the heart of everything we do at Bear. The story and the vehicle for delivering that story have to be in sync for users to connect with your brand.

1. Redesigners focus on emotional and aesthetic justifications for redesigning a site, such as it looking outdated or hoping to attract new traffic. Their emphasis is often on visual elements rather than addressing underlying issues.

2. Realigners on the other hand, base their redesign decisions on strategic objectives and user needs. They consider factors like market trends, evolving user requirements, the effectiveness of new content, and the overall impact on brand perception. 

In essence, Realigners prioritize addressing fundamental problems, whereas Redesigners emphasize aesthetics.

Let’s discuss the need for an inflection point.

If you are replatforming in a 1-to-1 manner and focusing on aesthetic cleanup to address technical debt for future iterations, that’s great. However, if you are both redesigning and replatforming, take a moment to reconsider your approach. Ask yourself a critical question: Is it time to realign to meet new market changes, trends and demographic we are seeking to connect with? If so, what does your agency team need to look like to achieve this? It’s unlikely that just UX and UI designers will suffice; your agency should also include a cross functional team of SME’s in research, brand strategy, and content strategy expertise to collaborate with UX/UI and engineering  teams to deliver material change in your experience .

Prioritizing Purpose-driven Design and Branding

As we venture further into 2025 and beyond, the role of brand strategy is only going to grow more pivotal. Brands need to listen, learn, and adapt. Everything they do must be in service of forging genuine emotional connections and telling a story that is real and authentic about their brand.

That’s what we help do at Bear: we guide brands through this journey. By placing purpose at the center of every strategy, we help brands not only survive but flourish. We embrace the challenge of creating brands that not only reflect the world we live in but also shape the world we want to see. By doing so, we build a legacy of trust, empathy, and positive change—one brand experience at a time.