What Do Brand Consultants Do to Strengthen Market Position

Branding decides whether people remember your company or simply recognise your logo. It shapes perception, signals value, and influences every buying decision. In competitive markets, that perception is your position.

Few Singapore brands understand this better than Charles & Keith. In January 2024, the homegrown fashion label unveiled a refreshed logo, emblem, and monogram. The new design was sleek, modern, and deliberate.

It was part of a broader push to project sophistication while staying true to its accessible roots. It told the world: this is not just another retail brand; this is a statement of Singaporean creativity on an international scale.

That is what effective brand consultancy achieves. It reshapes how people see your brand without changing the essence that made it valuable in the first place.

The Asia-Pacific strategic consulting services industry is already reflecting this shift. Growing at a CAGR of 6.30% through 2033, it shows how more companies across the region are investing in strategic brand guidance to secure long-term relevance.

In this guide, we look at what brand consultants actually do and how the right partnership can turn your brand from one of many to one that leads.

This is the short version:

• Brand consultants help companies see themselves clearly before the market does. They identify gaps between perception and performance, ensuring your brand communicates strength, not confusion, across audiences and markets.
• They turn research into strategy and strategy into systems. By aligning insights, positioning, and design, consultants create a brand framework that scales confidently as your business grows.
• Brand strategy is about structure. Consultants define how your purpose, identity, and messaging come together to build distinct, defensible market positions that endure beyond trends.
• Design makes that strategy visible and memorable. From identity to experience, design becomes the proof of your brand promise of what people see, trust, and return to.
• Working with Vantage Branding means your brand is built for performance and presentation. As a PMC-certified consultancy supporting the EDG Grant, Vantage integrates research, strategy, and design to create brands that compete, connect, and grow with purpose.

Who Exactly Is a Brand Consultant?

A brand consultant helps companies understand who they truly are and how that identity translates into market power. Their role goes beyond visuals or messaging. They diagnose perception, uncover what makes a brand different, and turn those truths into structured systems of communication, design, and behaviour.

In simple terms, a brand consultant is both analyst and architect.

They connect your business strategy to the way your market experiences it, from your logo and tone of voice to how your sales team talks to clients. When done well, the outcome is not just recognition for customers; it is a preference.

Market Position Is More Than Just Market Share

Brand consultants understand that market position is not a number. It is a feeling. It is how your audience ranks you in their minds, not just in their wallets.

Two companies can offer identical products, but the one that stands for something clearer will always lead. That is why brand consultants work at the intersection of insight and identity: they make businesses more understandable, memorable, and trusted.

When brands earn that kind of mental real estate, market share follows naturally.

Case in Point: CrimsonLogic

CrimsonLogic is a Singapore-based technology company shaping how governments and businesses connect through digital trade, government-to-government (G2G) systems, and smart city solutions. As the company expanded across industries and continents, its brand story needed to keep pace with its evolving vision.

Vantage Branding stepped in to define that story. Through focused research and stakeholder engagement, we identified CrimsonLogic’s core truth. The brand needed to communicate scale, confidence, and credibility across borders.

We developed a clear brand strategy and visual system that unified all communication, from enterprise platforms to investor presentations. The design language reflected precision and modernity. The messaging positioned CrimsonLogic as a trusted global partner powering national digital transformation.

The outcome was a sharper market position: CrimsonLogic became recognised as a strategic partner powering digital nations. The refreshed identity system provided the company with new traction among international clients and stronger internal alignment around a unified vision.

Your market position is built on how clearly your audience understands you. Book a 90-minute brand positioning consultation with Vantage Branding and uncover the strengths that set your company apart.

Suggested Read: Unveiling the Secret: Why Branding Matters to Businesses

The Core of What Brand Consultants Actually Do

Brand consultants are not hired to make things prettier. They are hired to make things clearer. Their work covers three essential pillars: Research, Strategy, and Design. Each builds on the other to create a brand that performs instead of just presenting.

Let us begin where every strong brand story starts: Research.

1. Research: Seeing the Brand Before You Change It

Imagine a healthcare firm rebranding without understanding what its patients actually trust it for. Marketing might emphasise “innovation,” while the real loyalty lies in “personal care.” That disconnect does not just waste resources; it fractures credibility.

Before any visual or verbal work begins, consultants dig deep into understanding what your brand means to customers, employees, and the broader market. Without that groundwork, everything that follows becomes guesswork.

This is what research involves:

• Conduct Market and Category Research
  Consultants study the market size, growth patterns, and cultural shifts to see where your brand truly fits. This helps identify opportunities your competitors have not seen and blind spots that could weaken your position.

• Analyse Voice-of-Customer Feedback
  Data tells you what customers do. Feedback reveals why they do it. Brand consultants analyse reviews, surveys, and interviews to uncover emotional drivers behind decisions. It is how they separate what customers say they want from what they actually value.

• Develop Buyer Personas
  Research turns into human understanding here. Consultants segment audiences into clear personas: primary, secondary, and emerging, capturing their motivations, pain points, and expectations. These personas guide everything from tone of voice to product strategy.

• Perform Competitive Brand Analysis
  Every market has noise. Competitive analysis filters that noise into insight. Consultants examine how rivals position themselves, what promises they make, and where they fall short. This reveals your white space, which is the position your brand can own uniquely and credibly.

• Conduct Brand and Perception Audits
  A detailed review of your website, sales materials, employee communication, and visual identity. The goal: to find gaps between what your brand says and what people actually experience. Those gaps often explain why strong companies lose traction.

When Love, Bonito, one of Singapore’s most recognisable fashion labels, revisited its branding in 2024, it did not begin with a logo. It began with listening.

Through extensive consumer research, the brand realised its audience was modern Asian women who wanted more than style. They wanted representation and confidence. That insight led to its refreshed identity and campaign “Ready to Live, Not Just Ready to Wear”, a repositioning that turned the brand from a retailer into a movement.

That is the power of research-led consultancy. When you understand the truth before you change the story, your brand becomes relatable.

2. Strategy: Turn Insight into Direction

Insight alone does not move markets. Strategy does.

Once the research phase reveals what people believe, expect, and misunderstand about your brand, consultants translate those findings into a framework that shapes every decision.

A strong brand strategy bridges two worlds: what your business stands for and what your audience values most. It becomes the lens through which design, marketing, and experience are built.

Here is what brand strategy involves:

• Define Positioning and Purpose
  Clarify your brand’s role in the market and why it matters. This means identifying the distinct problem your company solves and why your approach is different: not louder, but sharper.

• Craft a Messaging Framework
  Translate strategic thinking into clear language. A brand consultant defines your value proposition, proof points, and tone of voice. Strategy ensures that every stakeholder, from sales to leadership, speaks the same language.

• Design a Brand Architecture
  For organisations with multiple products or markets, structure matters. Consultants build a hierarchy that defines how sub-brands, services, and campaigns connect, avoiding internal confusion and market overlap.

• Create an Activation Roadmap
  Strategy is not static. It needs to be applied. Consultants outline a practical roadmap for rollout by aligning communication, design, and internal culture around the new positioning.

When a brand strategy is executed well, every message feels consistent, every touchpoint aligns, and every stakeholder understands the story they are part of.

3. Design: Make the Strategy Visible

Design is what turns strategy into something people can see, feel, and believe. It is the moment where thinking meets emotion. Where your purpose becomes presence. Many of the world’s most recognisable brands have proven this.

Recent examples include:

• Mastercard simplified its logo to a wordless icon, making it instantly recognisable in a digital-first world.
• Burberry reintroduced heritage and craft in its visual identity, moving away from minimalism to reconnect with its legacy.
• Grab refined its green and motion lines to communicate reliability and movement across digital and physical experiences.

Design is communication made visible. A brand consultant ensures that every visual decision supports the larger strategy rather than competing with it.

Here is what the design phase involves:

• Create a Cohesive Visual Identity
  From colour systems to typography, brand consultants define design principles that express your positioning and values. Every asset, logo, website, presentation, and product becomes an expression of the same idea.

• Develop a Brand System
  Beyond aesthetics, brand consultants develop adaptable design systems that function across various formats and geographies. A scalable system ensures consistency without restricting creativity.

• Shape Brand Experience
  Good design guides how customers feel across touchpoints, such as digital, environmental, or print. Consultants translate brand attributes into sensory experiences that build memory and trust.

• Establish Implementation Guidelines
  A strategy is only as strong as its execution. Consultants codify brand usage through playbooks and design toolkits, ensuring long-term consistency even as internal teams and agencies evolve.

Understanding what brand consultants do is only part of the equation. The real question is why and when companies should bring them in. Because while internal teams often know the brand’s history, consultants bring the clarity, systems, and outside perspective needed to shape its future.

Suggested Read: Mastering Brand Management: Best Practices for Success

Why Do Companies Engage Brand Consultants?

Most businesses call a brand consultant only when something goes wrong. This is usually when sales stagnate, perception blurs, or competitors start to close in.

But the most successful companies bring consultants in before those moments. They understand that brand strength is built proactively, not reactively.

Here is why leading companies across Singapore and Southeast Asia partner with brand consultants early:

• Sharper Market Positioning: Consultants detect subtle market shifts and competitive signals that internal teams often miss. They help companies define why they matter now  before the market decides for them.
• Unified Internal Alignment: A fragmented message costs more than marketing spend; it costs trust. Brand consultants align leadership, sales, and marketing under one brand truth, ensuring consistency across every decision.
• Scalable Brand Systems: As companies expand across markets, consultants build architecture frameworks that keep sub-brands and product lines cohesive, avoiding dilution while allowing flexibility.
• Measurable Business Impact: Modern consulting combines insight with analytics. Consultants track perception, trust, and performance metrics, ensuring that every branding initiative links back to quantifiable outcomes.
• Future-Proofed Identity: The strongest brands do not chase trends. Consultants develop adaptable systems that evolve naturally with technology, culture, and customer expectations. This keeps the brand relevant for years.

These aren’t just theoretical benefits. They are outcomes we have helped deliver.

Case Study: Reimagining the Singapore Symphony Orchestra

The Singapore Symphony Orchestra (SSO) is an excellent example of what brand consultants can achieve. This is an institution everyone in Singapore recognises, but recognition alone was not enough. Facing concerns over concert attendance, SSO needed to connect with a broader, younger audience while staying true to its classical heritage.

Instead of keeping the project in-house, the orchestra turned to Vantage Branding. Our team understood that this was not just a design exercise. It was about redefining cultural relevance.

We reimagined SSO’s identity from the ground up. The new brand system harmonised visual identity, messaging, and audience experience, transforming perception without losing legacy.

Today, SSO stands as a case study in how heritage institutions can stay modern and meaningful.

That is the difference a brand consultant makes: helping great brands sound like themselves to the next generation.

At Vantage Branding, we work with forward-looking organisations to define and sustain their leadership position through insight-led brand development.

See where your brand stands before your competitors do. Take our Brand Potential Quiz and discover the next step in strengthening your market position.

Signs Your Company Needs a Brand Consultant

Even the strongest brands can lose focus. The signs are subtle at first; mixed messages, inconsistent visuals, or an audience that no longer reacts the way it used to.

These moments do not mean failure. They signal that your brand has outgrown its old frame. Here are a few signs it may be time to bring in a brand consultant:

• Your Message Feels Fragmented: Different teams describe your company in different ways. Customers hear mixed signals instead of one consistent story.
• Growth Has Stalled Despite Good Performance: Your product or service is solid, but competitors keep winning attention. The issue is not capability, but perception.
• You Are Entering a New Market: Expansion without a refined brand framework can create confusion. Consultants ensure your message scales with your business.
• You Are Struggling to Attract or Retain Talent: A weak internal brand blurs purpose. Consultants help articulate the identity that employees believe in and want to be part of.
• Your Marketing Feels Busy but Ineffective: Campaigns keep running, but few drive results. That usually means the brand foundation beneath them needs strengthening.

Recognising the signs is only the first step. Acting on them requires a structured, insight-led process that goes beyond surface fixes and builds a brand system that scales. That’s where a full-stack brand development approach becomes essential.

Suggested Read: Branding Agencies vs. Creative Agencies: Unleashing the Power of Branding

Choose Vantage Branding for a Full-Stack Process

At Vantage Branding, we help organisations uncover what truly defines them and turn that insight into measurable growth. Our work bridges strategy, creativity, and execution, ensuring your brand is aligned across every touchpoint.

As a certified PMC consultant, Vantage Branding supports the Enterprise Development Grant (EDG), which covers up to 50% of qualifying brand transformation projects. This allows companies that qualify to strengthen their market presence with strategic branding backed by government support.

These are a few services we deliver:

• Brand Strategy and Positioning
  We help define what your organisation stands for and why it matters now by turning abstract ideas into a clear competitive stance. The result is a position that attracts the right customers, differentiates from competitors, and drives measurable business value.

• Brand Architecture
  As companies expand, complexity grows. We build structured frameworks that clarify how your products, services, and sub-brands connect to create coherence across markets. A clear brand architecture eliminates overlap, prevents internal confusion, and strengthens how your business is understood externally.

• Brand Identity
  In crowded markets, visibility must equal credibility. We translate strategy into a visual system, including logo, typography, colour, and design principles to signal professionalism and consistency instantly. Strong identity design reinforces your position every time someone sees your brand.

• Brand Tone of Voice and Messaging
  The words you use shape the trust you earn. We craft brand language that expresses your values and positioning with precision. A consistent tone ensures that, regardless of who speaks for your brand, it always sounds like one confident voice.

• Brand Workshops and Stakeholder Alignment
  Market position is sustained from within. Our workshops bring leadership and teams together to align around a single brand direction. When every department understands the story they are part of, execution becomes consistent and consistency builds authority.

• Environmental and Experience Design
  A strong position is one that people can feel. We extend your brand into physical and digital environments, from offices and events to websites and interfaces. Every space becomes a tangible expression of your identity, reinforcing trust and recognition at every interaction.

Your brand is not just how the world recognises you. It is how it remembers you. As a leading brand consultant serving Singapore and Southeast Asia, we help you own your story, align your teams around it, and turn it into your competitive advantage.

Ready to strengthen your market position with a brand that performs as confidently as it looks? Book a brand strategy session with our team today and discover how insight-driven branding can redefine your organisation’s future.

Frequently Asked Questions

1. How do brand consultants actually strengthen market position?

Brand consultants analyse where your company stands and identify the gaps between perception and performance. They build strategies that sharpen positioning, align internal teams, and ensure every communication reinforces your business objectives.

2. How long does a typical brand consulting engagement take?

The duration depends on the organisation’s size and scope, but most consulting programmes run for three to six months. This includes stakeholder interviews, strategy development, visual identity creation, and rollout support to ensure full adoption.

3. What is the difference between a branding agency and a brand consultant?

A branding agency focuses primarily on design and execution. A brand consultant, on the other hand, provides strategic direction for defining purpose, structure, and messaging before any creative work begins. At Vantage Branding, we integrate both, ensuring strategy and design work in sync.

4. Can established brands still benefit from consultants?

Absolutely. Even market leaders risk losing relevance if they do not evolve with audience expectations. Consultants provide fresh, data-driven perspectives that help mature brands stay competitive without losing their core identity.

5. Does the EDG Grant cover brand consulting work?

Yes. As a certified PMC consultant, Vantage Branding supports the Enterprise Development Grant (EDG), which covers up to 50% of qualifying brand transformation projects. This enables Singapore companies to invest confidently in strategic brand development with tangible business outcomes.