How does a brand strategy become an actual brand?

Through a narrative that everyone writing, designing and selling can work from. Without one, a strategy stays abstract and each team interprets it differently, which is how brands drift apart across surfaces.

How should creative work be evaluated?

Against the strategic goal rather than personal taste. The question is whether the work does the job the strategy set, which is also what stops feedback rounds becoming a contest of preferences.

What went wrong with the Jaguar rebrand?

The episode’s critique centers on the disconnect between the existing customer base and the new target audience. The execution was competent, but a rebrand that alienates current buyers is a real commercial risk rather than a stylistic debate.

Can a rebrand safely target a new audience?

It can, but the cost to the existing base has to be a deliberate, named decision rather than an accident. The episode’s concern with Jaguar is the apparent size of that trade.

Brand Part 3: From Plan to Impact - The Journey of Turning Strategy into Branding Success

Phill Keaney-Bolland· Co-founder and Designer, YayaNovember 26, 20242 min read

With Adam Yaya-Durrant, Co-founder and Design Director, Yaya

Listen on Spotify Listen on Apple Podcasts

Key takeaways

A strategy that never becomes a narrative stays on the slide.
Creative should be judged against strategic goals, not personal preference.
Client feedback guides the creative process without dictating it.
Rebranding can alienate an existing customer base faster than it wins a new one.
Aesthetics and function have to be balanced, not traded off.

Turning strategy into narrative
Judging creative against goals
The Jaguar problem

Recorded in 2024, before the cybersecurity focus. Strategy on a slide is not a brand, and the gap between the two is where most rebrands quietly fail. For a security company this usually shows up at launch, when the deck says one thing and the website says another. Part three of three. The delivery side of it is what we build.

Turning strategy into narrative#

The transition from a strategy document to a brand people recognize is where most projects lose their way. A narrative is what carries strategy into the world, because it gives everyone writing, designing and selling a shared story to work from rather than a set of abstractions to interpret separately.

Judging creative against goals#

The recurring discipline here is refusing to evaluate creative on taste. The question is whether the work serves the strategic goal, not whether the people in the room like it. That is also what makes client feedback useful: it guides the process rather than replacing the judgment.

The Jaguar problem#

The episode closes on a critique of Jaguar’s rebrand, and the disconnect between the brand’s traditional customer base and its new target audience. It is a useful case precisely because the execution was competent. The question raised is not whether it was well made but whether a brand can abandon the people who currently buy from it in the hope of attracting people who do not yet.

The reason this matters for a smaller company is that the same trade is made constantly at a smaller scale, usually without anyone naming it as a decision.

Phill Keaney-Bolland

Co-founder and Designer, Yaya

Co-founder and designer at Yaya, and host of the Cult Products podcast. Fifteen years designing products, brands and UX across multiple industries before narrowing to cybersecurity, and lectures on design at Imperial. Works with cybersecurity founders on positioning, strategy and the website that has to carry a launch, across identity, cloud security, AI agents and software supply chain, including Twine out of stealth and Geordie AI, which won the RSA Innovation Sandbox in 2026.