Brand strategy vs brand identity
Strategy is the argument. Identity is how the argument looks and sounds.
They get confused constantly, usually because agencies sell them together and clients cannot see the seam. The distinction matters because buying the wrong one is expensive and the symptoms take about a year to show up.
What a brand strategy contains
The decisions. Who you are for and who you are not. What you stand for in a way that rules something out. Where you sit against the competition. Which opportunities you are pursuing, in order. What you will do about it over the next few months.
A strategy is mostly sentences and mostly arguable. Someone can read it and say "I think you are wrong about the second one," and that is a useful conversation.
What a brand identity contains
The expression. The logo, the palette, the typefaces, the photography direction, the tone of voice, the layout system, the rules for how it all holds together.
An identity is mostly assets and mostly not arguable in the same way. You can dislike a colour, but you cannot fact-check it.
Which comes first
Strategy. Always, and the reason is boring but real: identity is a set of answers to questions strategy asks.
What should this feel like? Depends who it is for. Should the tone be warm or precise? Depends what tension you are speaking into. Should it look expensive? Depends whether the position is premium or accessible, and that is a strategic decision with pricing attached.
Design a brand without a strategy and you get something that looks good and means nothing in particular. It will be beautiful and it will be replaceable, because anyone could have made it and it could belong to anyone.
What it looks like when a company buys the wrong one
Buying identity when you needed strategy is common, because identity is easier to want. You can see it, show it to your board, and feel like something happened.
The symptoms show up six to twelve months later. The brand looks good and nobody can agree what to do with it. Every campaign starts from scratch. Marketing and product describe the company differently. Someone says "we need to get back to what the brand is about" and nobody can finish the sentence, because there was never anything to get back to.
Buying strategy when you needed identity is rarer and less damaging. You end up with a document everyone agrees with and a brand that looks like its competitors. That is a smaller problem and a cheaper fix.
Can you do both at once
Yes, and most agencies do, because it sells better as one project.
It works if the strategy genuinely leads. It fails when the two run in parallel to hit a deadline, which is what usually happens. Then the identity gets designed against a rough brief while the strategy is still being written, and the strategy quietly gets adjusted afterwards to fit the design that everyone has already fallen in love with.
If you are buying both, ask when the strategy will be signed off, and whether design starts before or after that date. The answer tells you which one you are actually getting.
MeldSignal produces the strategy, not the identity. The strategy is what your designers should be reading before they open anything. See the sample report.