Field notes on
brand strategy.
An editorial publication from Kazzate. Long-form essays, the annual State of Brand Strategy report, and sharp opinion from our strategists — published for founders, CMOs, and category designers who'd rather read a thesis than a sales deck.
PLATE 01 — COVER STORY
Most "positioning decks" are posture. We measured 184 of them.
The sixth edition of the State of Brand Strategy report lands this autumn — built from forty customer interviews, a survey of 1,240 in-house marketers, and a forensic read of every brand book shipped by our studio since 2019. The finding growth-stage founders keep forwarding to their boards: clarity, not creativity, is the variable that most predicts post-launch pipeline lift.
- 01"The brands that broke out in 2024 didn't sound smarter. They sounded cleaner."
- 02Category creation is up. Category clarity is down 38% since 2021.
- 03A 6-week brand sprint now outperforms a 6-month agency engagement on every metric we tracked.
Essays & field notes.
Three pieces from the desk this quarter — written by the strategists who run our engagements, not the marketing team.
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Nº 01Positioning · 11 minRead essay →
Your category is crowded. Your contrast isn't.
Why most growth-stage brands lose the boardroom on "differentiation" — and the three diagnostic questions we use in week one of every engagement to surface the wedge they actually own.
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Nº 02Category Entry · 8 minRead essay →
Don't enter the market. Invent the room.
A field guide to category design for founders who can feel the incumbent narrative calcifying — drawn from the Lumen Skincare rebrand and eleven other entries we've shipped since 2022.
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Nº 03Brand-Led Growth · 13 minRead essay →
The 2.4x pipeline lift isn't magic. It's messaging hygiene.
We pulled apart the 47 relaunches that crossed the 2x pipeline mark in the last 18 months. The variable that separated them wasn't the website. It wasn't the deck. It was a single page most teams have never written.
An editorial channel that founders actually open.
Five years in, the State of Brand Strategy has become one of the most-circulated internal reports in the industry. The numbers behind that distribution.
Finished the report? Let's apply it to your brand.
The Strategy Intensive is a 60-minute working session with a senior strategist from our team — no deck, no juniors, no pitch theater. You leave with a written point of view on your positioning, the two or three narrative moves that would shift pipeline, and a clear recommendation on whether a six-week engagement is the right next step.
- Working session, not a sales call
- Led by a partner — no hand-offs
- You leave with a written diagnosis
- Q3 bookings open · 6 weeks out
Brooklyn, NY · 22 senior strategists · Currently booking Q4 2025