Brand strategy
Brand strategy is the set of decisions that determine who a brand is for, what it claims, why that claim is credible and how it differs from the alternatives. It precedes design and content, and it is judged by whether it makes later choices easier to settle.
Brand strategy is not Brand positioning.
Positioning is one output of strategy: the single claim about where you sit relative to the alternatives a buyer is weighing. Strategy is the wider set of decisions that produces it, including who you serve, what makes the claim credible, and what you are choosing not to do.
In practice
Strategy is a small number of expensive decisions, made once and then held. Who is this for, and by implication who is it not for. What do we claim, in language a customer would actually use. What makes that claim believable. What do we do differently from the obvious alternative, and what will we deliberately not do. Four or five sentences, if they are genuinely decided, do more work than forty pages that hedge.
Two things get filed under brand strategy that are not it. The first is a plan: channels, cadence, campaigns, launches. That is execution, and it changes quarterly. The second is aspiration, a list of adjectives about being innovative and trusted that nobody would claim the opposite of. A statement no credible competitor would contradict has decided nothing. The test is whether it excludes something. If your positioning would be equally accepted by three rivals, you have described the category rather than your place in it.
In practice, strategy is used as a tie-breaker rather than as a document. It gets consulted at the moment of a small decision: whether to take a piece of work, which of two headlines to run, whether to add a feature, whether a photograph feels right. A strategy that never settles an argument is not being used, and a strategy that cannot settle one is not specific enough. The sheer volume of small decisions is what makes the upfront cost worth paying.
For a person rather than a company the shape is the same, but the inputs are more awkward, because the honest answers involve who you enjoy working with and what you want to be known for in five years, not only what sells this quarter. The temptation is to keep everything broad so that no opportunity is ruled out. Broad positioning does not capture more opportunities. It just makes each one arrive with less confidence attached, and leaves you competing on price.
Write it down in a form other people and other tools can read, because everything downstream inherits it: the visual identity, the voice, the content themes, and any system generating work on your behalf. In Repic that written form is the Brand Persona, a structured profile the Brand Kit and every generated post is derived from. Then revisit it slowly, once or twice a year or whenever the business moves underneath it. Strategy edited monthly is not strategy; strategy never edited becomes a description of a company you used to run.