Brand has a real branding problem in start-up land, and as a result it’s perhaps the most underused lever for growth that start-ups have.

Most start-ups probably couldn’t agree on a definition of brand, let alone share an understanding of how it can help them find the right customers, attract great people and partners, and build momentum. On the face of it, brand and start-ups are not a natural match. Start-ups run on metrics and data, while brand can feel fluffy, hard to measure and more likely to create fear than excitement for a founder.

This is what we’ve experienced at Previously Unavailable, working as brand partners to some of the most forward-thinking and fastest-growing companies. Most of the founders we’ve worked with are not brand or marketing specialists. Many haven’t even worked in companies that took these things seriously.

So over the years we’ve developed an approach that helps people agree on what they’re trying to do through brand, why it will help, and how they’ll make it true together. We’ve seen how well that can work and built up the proof points, case studies and principles that make the approach easier to understand and use.

Do that well and the company becomes more engaging, distinctive and emotionally resonant. People are more interested, more likely to buy and more likely to stay with you longer because they understand what you stand for and feel that it is for them.

Many of your future customers won’t be ready to buy today. Helping them understand what you do, what you stand for and why it’s for them builds future demand, so when the need arrives you have a better chance of being the company they already know and want to talk to.

A strong brand also provides air cover for everything else you do. It gives sales more familiarity to work with and can make hiring, fundraising and partnerships easier. Inside the company, it gives strategy a clear way to travel, so more people can make good decisions without everything having to come back to the founders.

This short book shares that approach. We’ll help you choose who you most want to be relevant to, what you want them to know you for and how to build that reputation. The examples and exercises bring those choices together into a Brand Set and a practical plan, then show how to bring them to life through design, action and the stories you put into the world.

Who this is for

This book is primarily for founders and operators building high-growth companies. It should also be useful for the investors and board members working alongside them. It’s a practical way to think about brand without having to become a traditional marketer.

This work is most useful once you’re commercialising and have enough contact with the market to know roughly who your customer is. If you’re still deep in research and don’t know who the eventual customer will be, you’re probably too early to activate brand through the methods and frameworks we’ll share here.

There’s no particular company size where brand suddenly becomes relevant. We’ve used the same basic principles with companies near the beginning and businesses doing tens of millions in annual recurring revenue. The trigger is usually simple: the company has decided it wants to take brand seriously. The earlier the better, we reckon, but at any stage bringing this thinking and shared understanding to a company can lift its trajectory.

Brand is not just work for the marketing team. The founder or CEO is usually the most important participant and champion. The choices in this book reach into who the company is for, what the product becomes, where you invest and the position you’re trying to earn. The founder or CEO is also best placed to give the team the confidence and safety to make new, distinctive and initially potentially uncomfortable work. Outside partners can bring process, objectivity and specialist expertise, but they cannot make or own those choices for you.

Where this approach comes from

The approach comes from our work at Previously Unavailable with founders and teams building ambitious companies. I first saw the impact brand can have in technical companies while leading brand and communications at Vend, helping build the retail software company as it grew from under $2m to over $20m in annual recurring revenue, before it sold for over $500m in 2020.

Since joining Previously, I’ve developed much of this work alongside James Hurman, our founder, Phoebe Devine, our Chief Design Officer, Hannah Small, our Design Director, and the wider team, through brands including Ideally, Appetise, Aglow, Ārepa, Timely, Re-Leased and Extraordinary.

We’ve brought together the ideas we’ve found most useful for high-growth companies and shaped them into an approach to brand that is more like product development than a traditional brand process. Set goals, make choices, put them into the world, learn from what happens, and build from what you learn.

This book is a companion to James Hurman’s Future Demand, which makes the case for why brand matters and how effective it can be. This is the practical side: how start-ups can define, craft and build their brand.

So let’s get to it.

First: what do we mean by brand?

Start-ups often think of brand as the logo and the T-shirt colour. At the other end of the spectrum, people describe it as the sum of everything a company does. Neither definition is much help when you’re trying to decide what work to do.

We think of your brand as what people know you for: the associations and reputation you’ve built in their minds. The opportunity is to be intentional about that, choosing what you want to become known for and doing the work to make it true.

Building your brand involves work across three connected areas.

1. Brand is your strategy and positioning.

This sets out who you’re for, what problem you solve, the unique value you provide and what you want to become known for. Before any other work, you need to define these things. They’re the foundation everything else is built on.

2. Brand is how you look and feel.

This is your distinctive visual identity and the assets that carry it into the world: your logo, colours, typography, photography, website, product, presentations and social posts. The best visual brands communicate the key ideas in the strategy clearly and simply, sometimes explicitly and sometimes more subtly. They also help people recognise and remember you.

3. Brand is what you do and how you tell the world about it.

This is the part people often miss. Brand is your actions, behaviours and proof points. It’s how the product functions and makes people feel. It’s the customers you champion, the people you hire, the events you run and the subjects you speak about. It’s also the way your founders behave, the values your workplace demonstrates and the care people experience when they deal with your team. People learn what you’re about from what they repeatedly see you do. Sharing the stories of that work helps more of the right people see it.

Breaking brand into these three areas makes it easier to understand and gives the company tangible work to do. This book concentrates mainly on strategy, behaviour and communications. It also shares how we approach visual identity and naming, with plenty of examples along the way.

What we’re trying to do

People make brand too complicated. For it to work, it needs to be simple. The work comes back to four questions:

• Who do you want to be relevant to?
• What do you want to be known for?
• How will you build those associations?
• How will you let people know about them?

You’re probably already doing a lot of this without thinking of it as brand building. You may have a useful product, a particular expertise, strong customer relationships and plenty of worthwhile activity. Being intentional about what you want people to know you for helps you bring that work together, make more of it visible, and decide what to do more of, what to start and what to stop.

The brand job is not to explain everything at once. It’s to create enough interest and confidence that the right people lean in and want to know more. Without a clear idea and strategy to anchor to, companies fall back on whatever looks like best practice for their category, talk mainly about features and benefits, and end up looking and sounding like everyone else. This work is to help you move past this.

The chapters ahead build this piece by piece. We’ll start with the biggest posture change available to many start-ups: moving from presenting what you’ve built to becoming a brand in the world of the customer you most want to serve.

Why brand feels strange in start-up land

There is a pretty understandable reason brand often gets put in the do-later basket. The early teams in start-ups often come from product, engineering, research, science and operations. These are disciplines where whether the thing works is what matters. The code runs, the patent is accepted, the hardware performs, the calculation is right. Choosing a more distinctive font for your PhD is not going to help you outcompete other PhD students. Building a company is different. You are competing for customers, partners, talent and attention, and eventually having the better product isn't enough on its own. People have to know you exist, understand why you're relevant to them, trust you and remember you. That is where brand starts to matter. But if it isn't clear what to work on or what you're trying to achieve, it is hard to prioritise. Once founders see brand as another part of building the company, rather than a mysterious layer on top, it becomes much easier to work with. You can make choices, test them with customers and build from what you learn. There is one central move at the heart of this book: going from being a product about yourself to becoming a brand in the world of your customer. We'll spend most of this chapter explaining that move, then introduce four supporting principles that make it easier to put into practice.

The biggest startup opportunity

The choice to be a brand for your customer, not a product about yourself

What do we mean by product and brand?

We use these two words in a particular way in this section. By product, we mean a company talking to the world mainly about itself - the research it emerged from, the problem it solves, and the features and benefits of its solution. A brand, on the other hand, increasingly presents itself through the world, needs and ambitions of its customer. Most start-ups begin as products. You've got a solution. It's new and interesting. Early adopters find you because you can say: 'we have this new thing that solves a problem you really need solved'. Your solution might not yet be perfect, and it's not always designed around the user's exact needs, but it is much, much better than not having the solution at all. Then competitors arrive. They might duplicate your offering and your messaging, say the same things you do and make the same promises. Whether they're good or bad, they sound like you and they probably look like you. Pull up five leading AI note-takers right now and they all look exactly the same, because they all look like tech products and present as best practice for what an AI tech company looks, feels and behaves like. But some serve medicine, some serve finance, some serve school boards, and it becomes very hard for a prospective customer to tell which one is actually most concerned with solving their particular problem. This is the normal way categories develop. The next stage of evolution for these undifferentiated companies is when they stop presenting primarily as tech products and start becoming brands in the world of their customer. That's the work we focus on at Previously, and it's perhaps the biggest opportunity for the average tech or software company: to move from being a product about yourself to being a brand about your customer.

A product talks about itself: its features, benefits and what it does. It might show customer types, but it isn't truly in the world of its customer.

A brand talks about its customer: what they want to do, how their work could be better, and the goals that matter to them that the brand will help them achieve.

The question to ask is simple: are we turning up as part of our industry, or as part of the world of our customer?

Being a brand in the world of your customer

A good example is our work with Timely, the first project after I came to Previously. Timely was a booking platform for everyone. Their software let physios, psychologists, podiatrists or anyone else take calendar appointment bookings for their business. Their homepage was a very typical product homepage of the time. It featured the tech: the product on iPad, iMac and iPhone screens, little icons and messages about being in the cloud, always on, accessible everywhere, and at least six different customer types.

It was a very standard software look, and this isn't a criticism. Companies tend to follow the design and messaging conventions of the technology industry they're in, and in doing so they unwittingly work hard to blend in with the competition.

If you look like your competitors and signal that you serve six different customer types, it's very hard for a buyer to land on your website and feel it's relevant to them. Most companies think they're expanding their market by appealing to everyone. In practice, narrow and deep beats wide and shallow. Going wide means funding, resourcing and fighting battles across many industries, building product for many use cases, and running many marketing strategies at once. It feels counter-intuitive. Narrowing focus seems like narrowing opportunity. But becoming a real part of one customer's world is the path to a more defensible business, and an easier one to grow. In short, if you're for everyone, you're really for no one. Often the customer you're best suited to serve is already clear. They're likely your hero customer in strategy, in marketing, and the biggest vote in product choices. Making them your hero brand customer makes all of those decisions easier. And as in other parts of your business, you can still serve multiple customer types even when one is the centre of gravity. This choice doesn't mean you stop selling to other customers entirely. It means you put most of your effort into the hero customer and make them the number one priority. They're the people you show most prominently on the homepage, the industry events you attend, the users you make the most content for, and the niche where you can become the leading brand. Timely was a textbook case. Hair and beauty clinics and salons were about 70% of their business. They had the best product-market fit there, and it was the segment with the biggest opportunity for new customers. Even so, going from being for all businesses with booking needs to being clearly in the world of hair and beauty was a big strategic decision, and one that felt uncomfortable and odd. For one thing, what does moving into a customer's world even mean? Ryan Baker, Timely's CEO and founder, and Jo Blundell, the CMO, were driving the project. For a founder-led business, having the founder in the process is vital. Brand is what a business does, and if a founder isn't completely behind a brand change, it is unlikely to work. Ryan immediately understood what being a brand serving the industry would require to be authentic. He looked around the meeting and said, "I go to a $20 barber and most of our directors are bald guys. If we're going to become a hair and beauty brand, we need people from the industry on the board." They recruited Tabatha Coffey, a well-known hair and beauty industry expert and television personality who fronted big US shows transforming struggling salons and worked to lift the professionalism and ambition of the industry. As a leader with a view on making things better for salon owners, Tabatha was the perfect figure to signal that Timely was serious about being a real player in its industry. A brand is what you do, and changing your board is a very big thing to do. But as is most often the case, there weren't many other immediate changes needed to make the positioning true enough to land and launch. The business was already attending hair events, their content was already aimed at helping salon owners grow, their community was already made up of hair and beauty professionals. The job was to make what they were doing clear to the outside world. We worked with them to do that, and to chart what they'd do more of in future. They kept engaging the industry, understanding its biggest jobs to do, and solving them through product, content, events and other brand activity. The positioning change then let them feel comfortable making the visual change, to look and feel like they belonged in the beauty world. They went from white-and-blue HubSpot-template tech norms to pinks and corals, and the app was no longer on a cut-out screen but on a beauty counter, just like you'd see in a salon, right down to the flowers. In that one moment, anyone in hair and beauty could land on their site and immediately know it was for them.

Design by Alan Beauchamp, in-house at Timely.

It wasn't long before they proved they were more than a product selling software. When Covid hit, salon and clinic owners were among the most affected. Businesses closed, many for months, across all their major markets, with customer revenues going to zero. Timely paused plan payments for the periods of closure and created a huge content series where industry leaders guided people through the disruption. They helped customers use the time on the work that's hard to find time for when you're busy: marketing, administration, digital transformation. Jo Blundell led this, and word spread about how they turned up for their community. Almost unbelievably, although their users were among the most disrupted, Timely emerged from a global pandemic bigger, stronger and with more customers. A few years later, Timely was acquired by a large industry player for over $100m. The acquirer was buying more than revenue and product. They were buying Timely's reputation and standing in its community. They were buying the brand Timely built, a process that began with the decision to stop being a product selling to a customer and start being a brand in its customer's world.

When the product is scientific, research-led or deeply technical

The move from product to brand can be particularly difficult for scientific, research-led and highly technical companies.

Almost everything that helps these businesses get started encourages them to talk about the problem and the technology. To win research funding, grants, accelerator places and investment, the team has to demonstrate the scale of the problem, the novelty of the science and the potential impact of the solution.

If you're building carbon-capture technology, you show emissions and smokestacks. If you're reducing waste, you show the waste. If you've invented a new material, you explain its properties, how it works and why it performs better than the alternatives. You become very good at talking about the problem.

This is the right posture for getting through the early stage gates of science and technology. It is rarely the right posture for winning customers beyond the early adopters who feel the problem most acutely.

As the company moves towards commercialisation, the audience changes. A customer is usually less interested in the problem in the abstract than in what solving it will allow them to do. They want more yield, more revenue, lower operating costs, less risk, a simpler process or a better-performing business.

A clean-technology company naturally wants to show the pollution it exists to reduce. But its customer probably doesn't want to be presented as the dirty company your clever technology has arrived to fix. They want to see themselves as a sophisticated operator running a cleaner, more productive and more profitable business.

The visual change can be as simple as moving from the dirty smokestack to the cleanest, best-run version of the customer's facility.

The strategic change underneath it is more important: from presenting yourself as a science company with a solution to presenting yourself as a partner helping the customer achieve a better outcome.

The science does not disappear. It drops down the messaging hierarchy and becomes the proof underneath the customer promise. The customer leans in because the company appears to understand their world and what they want. The technical detail then gives them confidence that the company can deliver it.

This does not mean hiding the science or simplifying it until it becomes meaningless. The company may have spent years developing something difficult to reproduce and meaningfully better than what came before.

The challenge is to present that achievement at the right time. First, win the customer's interest by showing that you understand their world and what they want to achieve. Then use the technical detail to prove you can help them achieve it.

Hot Lime Labs and Aplenty

Hot Lime Labs developed a platform technology using its patented Hot Lime material to capture and release carbon dioxide at high temperatures. The underlying technology has potential applications across horticulture, hydrogen production, gas cleaning and other industries.

The technology may ultimately create several products for several markets, and the Hot Lime Labs brand gives the science, intellectual property and wider platform a home. But this potential breadth makes it difficult to build a customer brand.

Their clearest commercial opportunity was greenhouse growing operations. Commercial greenhouses need carbon dioxide to improve crop growth, as well as heat to maintain the right growing environment. Existing sources can be expensive, difficult to access and dependent on fossil fuels.

The grower does not go searching for a high-temperature carbon-capture scientific breakthrough. They want healthier crops, greater yield, more control over energy costs and a more resilient greenhouse operation.

To be able to truly serve that need we created Aplenty as a customer-facing brand for that use-case.

The difference between the two brands is clear.

Hot Lime Labs is the home of the technical achievement. It can explain the material, the process, the research and the wider range of applications the technology may serve.

Aplenty is a brand for greenhouse growers. It leads with green carbon dioxide and heat for greenhouses, then talks about increasing crop yields, controlling energy costs and reducing dependence on fossil fuels. The technology sits underneath as the reason those outcomes are possible.

Even the name changes the point of view.

Hot Lime Labs belongs to the world of the technology and the company or lab that developed it.

Aplenty belongs to the better future the customer wants: more growth, more yield and more of the resources their greenhouse needs.

The visual world followed the same logic. Rather than concentrating on laboratories, carbon emissions or the internal mechanics of the technology, Aplenty could show large, sophisticated greenhouses and abundant produce. It could look like a contemporary of the international horticulture businesses it wanted to serve.

This was not about hiding the science or making a serious industrial product feel less credible. It was about making the relevance of the science immediately obvious to one particular customer.

Sometimes this change can happen within the existing brand. The company can choose a hero customer, lead with that customer's outcome, create clear paths for secondary markets and keep the detailed science further down the page.

But when the underlying technology has many possible applications, a customer-facing sub-brand can make the change easier. Hot Lime Labs could remain broad enough to hold the platform technology. Aplenty could turn completely towards greenhouse growers and the better way of operating that the technology made possible for them.

Creating another brand is not automatically the answer. Every additional brand creates more work: another name to establish, another website to maintain and another story the team has to tell consistently.

The important choice is not whether there are one or two names. It is whether the commercial customer can immediately see that the company understands their world.

This is especially powerful in highly technical industries. Many of the competitors will present themselves through similar diagrams, scientific terminology, abstract imagery and claims about technical performance. The customers themselves may also be highly technical, but that does not mean they stop being people.

They still notice which company understands their operation, speaks their language and appears to be on their side. In a market full of technology-led companies, moving even a little closer to the customer can create a large advantage.

The idea is not to become less technical. It is to become more relevant.

If your company is moving from research and development towards commercialisation, ask:

• Who is the most important customer for the next stage of the company?
• What are they trying to produce, improve or achieve more of?
• Are we leading with that outcome, or asking them to begin by understanding our technology?
• Does our visual world show the problem, or the customer's better future?
• Can the existing brand make that customer promise clear, or would a focused application brand help it move faster?

The company began by proving that the science could work.

The next job is to show the customer what it can do for them.

Four principles for making the move

While moving from product-centricity to being a brand there for the customer is often the most important posture change, there are other concepts that help make brand practical for start-ups. Keep the idea simple, build around what the customer wants more of, turn the idea into action, and treat the brand as something you will keep making more true over time.

1. The power of simplicity

The biggest brand mistake is making things too complicated. There's a natural fear that if you make something simple it will look too obvious, or that if you leave things out you'll lose something important. But the simple, obvious thing is usually the strong one. In fact, the things you leave out are what let the idea land. A brand is really just shorthand in people's heads. What sticks is a bit blurry. It's the few ideas or concepts you seem most interested in and expert in, not your full positioning statement or list of features. Apple is a good example. If asked what they're about, most people would probably say design, simplicity, a slick experience. Clinical and white, lots of empty space, products that feel a bit epic, maybe. That's still pretty vague for one of the most disciplined and heavily marketed brands in the world, and it certainly isn't exactly what's written in their brand strategy. If that's what Apple can land after thousands of consistent decisions over decades, the average tech company has no hope of cutting through with multiple messages at once. Yet that's what most companies try to do. To make brand feel serious, they make it complicated. They use big words nobody uses, smush five ideas into one line to keep everyone in the room happy, and throw in every benefit. James Hurman loves a line that captures it well. If you throw someone one tennis ball, they'll catch it. Throw three and they'll catch none. Most tech companies are throwing about ten. The job of your top-level brand is much narrower than that. It's to create enough interest and confidence that the right customer leans in and wants to know more. You're not losing the detail, you're staging it in the right order. Perhaps the biggest reason we are able to create strong brands at Previously Unavailable is that people now trust us enough we can keep things simple. That is important because the strongest answer can often feel too obvious at first. That's normally when teams start adding things back in, trying to make everyone happy, or finding the small holes in a big win. You have to hold your nerve. If the idea isn't almost uncomfortably simple, it probably won't land. The design, language and activity can then make that simple idea feel interesting, distinctive and credible. We'll get to more of the how on that, but the first decision is to be clear about the one thing you want people to catch.

One of the ways we try to create this simplicity is through a framework we call the Brand Set.

It puts the core choices onto one page: what brand needs to achieve for your business, who you're for, what's broken in their world, the unique value you provide, the associations you want to build and the Brand Idea that connects them.

There is plenty of thinking underneath each of those lines, but the output should be simple enough that the people running the company can actually remember it and use it. We'll build the Brand Set properly in Chapter 3. For now, the important point is that a useful brand strategy should get shorter and simpler as the thinking gets better.

2. Build your brand around more, not less

One of the great advantages of being a start-up is that there is usually lots of valuable brand territory sitting there unclaimed. Timely could differentiate from every other booking platform selling to salons simply by being more interested in what hair and beauty owners actually cared about. Nobody else had really planted a flag there, so the ground was theirs to take. That gets much harder in established industries. I got my start working in big advertising and brand agencies on banks, telcos, power companies, beer and cars. These sit at the brand-heavy end partly because their products are barely differentiated and most of the obvious territory has already been taken. Mini SUVs from every major car brand look much the same. Power companies mostly differ only by colour. Every telco has had some version of a positioning about connection. Start-ups are in a much better position. The product is usually actually different and new, the industry is changing, and there are useful ideas nobody owns yet. The mistake is that most start-ups pass up that opportunity and instead talk about less. Less admin. Less time. Less cost. Less effort. Less risk. These things matter. Often they're exactly why someone buys the product. But they're very hard to build a brand around because almost every technology company can make the same claims. It is hard to build a brand on less. Instead, ask what all that saving lets your customer do more of. What part of their work do they actually care about? What are they proud of? What would they like to spend more time doing? What do they want to become better at? What does their industry need more of? A new start-up we recently worked with, Prove, is a good example. Prove brings together a number of disconnected tools structural engineers use to check calculations, compliance and safety into one platform. The obvious product story is less checking, less repetition and less time spent moving information between systems. All true. But none of it is particularly interesting as a brand. The more interesting story is what structural engineers could do more of if the machinery of checking became easier. Engineers don't get into structural engineering because they love moving numbers between systems. They want to use their judgement and experience to make buildings and projects better. They want to get involved earlier, improve designs, find better solutions and bring more of their expertise to the work. So the opportunity for Prove isn't just to remove calculation and checking. It's to champion the value of structural engineers and give them more freedom to do the work they're actually there to do - the work that improves structures and outcomes. That's a much bigger place to build a brand from.

3. Brand is what you do

There's an expression we love: a comedian doesn't tell you they're funny, they tell you a joke. Brand works the same way. If you want people to believe you champion your customers, you need to champion them. If you want to be known for opening new frontiers, show what you are making possible. If you want to lead an industry, do some leading. A brand isn't what you say about yourself. It's what people see you repeatedly do.

The strategy gives you the associations you want to build and an idea to build around. The visual identity helps people recognise and remember you. For the brand to become real, people need evidence through action.

For most start-ups, the product is the biggest brand touchpoint of all. Someone might spend a few minutes on your website and hundreds of hours using the product. If your brand is about simplicity but the product is confusing, you don't have a simple brand. If the idea is speed, the product should feel fast. If you're here to give structural engineers more freedom to use their expertise, the product has to actually give them that freedom and should demonstrate how it lets you do more of the thing they care about. The same idea carries into the rest of the company. The customers you hero. The people you hire. The events you run. The research you publish. The subjects you speak about at conferences. The partnerships you make. These aren't things that sit underneath the brand. They are the brand.

So are the less visible things: how you answer a support call, how the founder handles a mistake and whether your workplace lives up to the values you talk about. People are choosing who they want to deal with as well as what they want to buy. We'll look more closely at reputation, founder brand and values in Chapter 6.

Timely is a useful example. Changing the homepage mattered, but recruiting an industry expert to the board and turning up for salon owners when Covid hit did far more to prove that it belonged in their world.

You may already be doing much more for your customers and industry than the outside world can see: helping customers get better at their work, bringing people together, sharing useful knowledge or celebrating what others are achieving. These things might be familiar inside the company but almost invisible in how you present yourself.

Look at what that activity has in common. Are you helping your customers become better operators, gain more recognition for their expertise or build more successful businesses? The things you already do can give you a strong clue about the bigger opportunity for your brand.

One of your biggest opportunities may not be to invent a whole new set of things to do. It may be to recognise the value of what you are already doing, do more of the strongest things and make them much clearer to the outside world. Later, in the Drumbeat chapter, we will look at how to turn that work into stories and get them in front of the people you want to reach.

The useful test is simple:

If we say we're about this idea, what would we actually do to make it more true?

If the answer gives you a list of useful actions, you're getting somewhere. If the only answer is to put the words on the website, you haven't yet worked out how to earn the reputation you want.

4. A brand is something you build

There is one part of brand thinking that can feel particularly uncomfortable to people coming from engineering, research, product or other disciplines where being precisely true is important. Brand asks you to think slightly differently, perhaps more like how you think about your product roadmap than your product.

Of course your associations and Brand Idea have to be grounded in truth. You can't simply invent a position the company has no right to occupy and head towards it. But you're also not writing a technical specification of the company exactly as it exists today. You're choosing the position you want to build towards.

It's called brand building for a reason. We sometimes describe a good Brand Idea as 75 percent true. That's not a measurement, just a useful way to express the balance. There should be enough evidence underneath the idea that people can believe it, but enough stretch that it tells you what to do next. If it's already 100 percent true, there's a good chance you're describing where you've been rather than where you're going. At the other extreme, if there is almost nothing in the business that supports the idea, you haven't earned the right to claim it yet. The same applies if you decide to champion your customer, lead your industry or create a new category. You probably won't be doing everything that position demands on day one. That's fine. Start with the strongest truth already inside the company, make the choice clearly, then build the evidence, product, content and marketing activity that seeds the idea, backs it up and establishes it.

We call this lift and build. Lift the strongest thing that is already true, then invest in making it increasingly undeniable. This approach can be used for the associations you want to build, your Brand Idea and your Unique Value Proposition if it is currently a bit undifferentiated.

This is also why a slightly uncomfortable Brand Idea can be a good sign. You're staking out a position for the company you are becoming, not simply finding nicer words to describe the company you already are.

No two brands are built in exactly the same way. The right role for a company bringing completely new technology into the world is different from the role for an established software business that already has credibility and wants to become the leader in its industry. Over the years we've found six Brand Roles come up again and again. They aren't intended to be a grand taxonomy of every possible brand, and companies can overlap or move from one role to another over time. The goal is much more practical. Which role gives you the clearest idea of what to do next? A useful Brand Role should start helping you decide how to behave in your customer's world. What should you talk about? What should you build? Who should you champion? What should you prove? What sort of events should you run? What position should you take in your industry? If choosing a role doesn't start answering those questions, it probably isn't useful enough yet. Alongside our own case studies, we’ll mention some well-known brands that carry these roles in the way we think about them. These examples highlight a particular aspect of each brand. Companies can play more than one role, and their role can change as they grow.

Let's meet six brand roles.

The Champion

The Champion is a great Brand Role to play when you have a really clear customer group and can understand what they want to do more of, then use the brand to help make that happen. Your product might solve a particular problem for them, but the brand can do something broader. It can help them get better at their work, progress in their careers, gain more recognition, achieve better outcomes, or have more influence in their industry. A Champion brand wins by helping its customer win. It becomes a visible partner to the people it serves, telling their stories, celebrating their work and helping lift their role in the industry. This role tends to work best when your customers are doing important work but could feel under-recognised, under-resourced or misunderstood inside their organisation or industry. The key is to find the overlap between what you care about and want to make happen, and what they care about, then do the work to support them. Putting "customer first" on a slide doesn't make you a Champion. You need to understand what your customers are trying to achieve beyond simply using your product, then use your own resources and position to help them get there. Shopify is a well-known example. Beyond providing an ecommerce store, it gives entrepreneurs education, support and inspiration to help them build more successful businesses.

Tracksuit is one of the clearest examples from Previously, with the development and work led by James, Phoebe and Connor Archbold, the co-founder and CEO. Brand tracking had been a fairly dull category, dominated by expensive research, periodic reports and large research companies. Tracksuit made the product radically more accessible and affordable, giving marketers an always-on view of how their brands were performing. But the bigger brand opportunity was not simply to become the cheapest or easiest brand tracker. It was to be on the side of the people building brands. Brand builders often have to defend long-term investment in environments dominated by short-term measures. They need to justify budgets, demonstrate the value of brand and explain why something that cannot always be tied to an immediate click still matters. Tracksuit as a brand could help them do that. So Tracksuit makes the case for why brand matters, publishes research, builds tools and calculators, creates events and community, and gives marketers evidence they can take into boardrooms. The product measures brand. The brand champions the people building it. James's Future Demand idea and work became a main plank of the brand building.

We met Prove earlier when looking at the move from less to more. That same thinking gives it a clear Brand Role: Champion. If the product can remove more of the checking and repetition around structural engineering, the brand can help lift the profession by telling the stories of great engineers, making the case for involving them earlier and giving their expertise more visibility. The product helps structural engineers lose less time. The brand can help structural engineers win. That is what makes the Champion role useful: it turns a functional software benefit into a position in the customer's industry.

• Do you have a clearly defined customer group whose ambitions you understand well?
• Is there something they want more of in their work, career or industry that goes beyond simply using your product?
• Could your company credibly use its product, platform, voice or resources to help them achieve it?

If the answers are mostly yes, Champion may be a useful role for you.

The Category Creator

The Category Creator is a useful Brand Role when your product makes a new behaviour possible, but customers don't yet understand that behaviour well enough to go looking for it. In that situation, the brand has a job beyond selling the product. It needs to help people understand the new behaviour, why it matters, how it works and eventually make something that initially feels unusual feel normal. If customers already understand the category and are comparing you with five established competitors, you probably don't need to create one. But if every sales conversation starts with ten minutes explaining what the thing is, why somebody would want it and why the old way isn't good enough, there may be a category job to do. Creating a category doesn't require a scientific or engineering breakthrough. The new behaviour might use technology that already exists. The brand's job is to help people understand why they would adopt it. A company opening a new technical frontier may also need to create a category, but that is a separate job. A Category Creator has to do more than give something a name. You need to explain why the behaviour matters, show the economics, find the early adopters, give them language, build the product around the category and bring partners into the idea. HubSpot and Gong are well-known examples. HubSpot helped establish inbound marketing; Gong helped establish revenue intelligence. Both gave customers language, methods and tools that helped a new approach become understood and adopted.

Aglow is a good example. Like Timely, Aglow began broad and then moved deliberately into the world of beauty. But its bigger brand opportunity went somewhere different: to make a new behaviour, beauty memberships, feel normal and valuable. The company began as Payleadr, a recurring-payments product that could technically work across lots of industries. As the business learned more about its customers, beauty emerged as the strongest opportunity.

(show Payleadr Hero Recurring payments line on website)

Beauty businesses have an interesting commercial problem. Many treatments are relatively expensive and bought one at a time, which can make revenue lumpy and the business harder to predict. Recurring payments could help solve that, but "recurring payments for beauty businesses" wasn't a particularly inspiring proposition. It still put the technology, the product, at the centre rather than the customer, the brand. The more interesting idea was what the technology made possible: beauty memberships. Instead of finding hundreds of dollars every six weeks for treatments, a customer can become a member of the salon or clinic, pay, say, $50 a week, receive regular treatments and be treated more like a VIP than an occasional client. For the owner, the opportunity is much bigger than smoother payments. For many beauty business owners, the business is one of the biggest assets they will ever build. More recurring revenue can mean stronger loyalty, a business that is easier to plan and grow, and potentially a more valuable asset. It can also give an owner more predictable income to point to when they want to borrow to grow the business, buy a new laser machine or other equipment, or finance something outside the business such as a home. So beauty memberships weren't simply a new payment model. They could help owners build better, more valuable businesses, while giving their customers a better relationship with the places they already loved going to. The challenge was that memberships weren't really an established behaviour in beauty. For many businesses they felt unfamiliar, strange and potentially difficult to run. That changed the job of the brand. Aglow wasn't simply there to sell recurring payments into beauty. It was there to make beauty memberships a thing. Once we made that choice, it gave the company a much bigger plan. The product could become increasingly purpose-built for running memberships. The content could teach beauty businesses how the model worked and show the economics. Events could bring operators together to learn from businesses already doing it successfully. Partnerships could help legitimise the idea, and customer stories could show what happened when businesses made the change. Even the name helped. Payleadr described a piece of payment technology. Aglow belonged much more naturally in the world of beauty and gave the company a bigger place to build from. It was a beacon for the industry to follow.

The brand launch itself gave us an interesting early proof point. Two major industry partners that had previously not been responding to conversations with the company immediately opened partnership discussions when Aglow launched. The product hadn't suddenly changed overnight. What had changed was how clearly the outside world could see what the company was trying to do and the role it wanted to play in the industry. There is also an interesting longer-term signal. When we started the work, in 2023, memberships were relatively unusual in beauty. Since then, major booking and point-of-sale platforms have introduced membership functionality of their own. That new category they set out to be part of is now partly realised, and Aglow has built a position as an expert in it. That's really the journey a Category Creator is trying to drive. At first the market asks, "Why would I do that?" Eventually it asks, "Who is the most expert partner to work with?"

• Does your product enable a behaviour customers don't yet have a clear name or category for?
• Do you spend a lot of your sales conversation explaining why someone would do this at all, rather than why they should choose you?
• Could your company help give the behaviour language, evidence, economics and examples that make it easier to adopt?

If the answers are mostly yes, there may be a category for you to help create.

The Mission-Led Brand

A Mission-Led Brand is useful when there is a meaningful change connected to your business that you truly want to help make happen. The product can be one way you advance that mission, but the brand has a bigger job. It can educate, advocate, fund research, bring people together and help change how people think or behave, whether or not every interaction leads directly to a sale. That distinction is important. Lots of companies attach a grand-sounding purpose to what they sell. A Mission-Led Brand works the other way around. There is real work the company wants to see happen in the world, and the product is one of the ways it contributes. Anthropic carries this role through its commitment to developing AI for the long-term benefit of humanity. Its work extends beyond its products into public research on AI safety and the effects of AI on society.

Ārepa is a good example. Co-founder Angus Brown had seen loved ones live with degenerative brain conditions and became interested in brain health and performance. His goal was to create a product that would help create more great brain days. Ārepa makes brain-health products, including its best-known product, The Brain Drink. At a product level its customer can be quite specific: people looking for focus, clarity and a better way to support their brain through the day. So the unique value proposition is they make drinks and other products designed to help your brain perform better today and tomorrow.

But the brand can have a much bigger customer. We can describe the brand customer as anyone with a brain. The thought was partly inspired by Nike's idea that if you have a body, you are an athlete. Ārepa could take a similarly expansive view of brain health. You don't need to be a neuroscientist, elite athlete or biohacker to have a reason to look after your brain. Everybody has one. What makes the opportunity interesting is how little most of us know about doing that. Think about physical fitness. If you walk up a flight of stairs and get puffed, you have a pretty good idea what to do. Exercise regularly. Build up the intensity. Sleep well. Eat properly. Most of us understand that fitness isn't one magic intervention but a bunch of things you do consistently. We don't have the same relationship with our brains. But many of the things that can help are surprisingly ordinary. Get good sleep. Avoid caffeine late in the day. Drink less alcohol. Walk around the block. Take a different route to work. Call an old friend. Do a Sudoku. Read a book. Spend a few hours away from your phone. Eat well. You don't need to become obsessed with neuroscience. Do a bunch of good things for your brain consistently and it should work better across a bunch of dimensions, from focus and recall to resilience and how you feel. That was the opportunity we saw for Ārepa: almost a fitness brand for the brain. That gives the company a much bigger job than selling drinks. It can help people understand their brains and develop a better relationship with them. And importantly, this isn't a mission floating somewhere above the product. The product can be evidence of it. Sleep is a good example. One of the most useful things you can do for your brain is sleep well, and one thing that can get in the way of sleep is caffeine later in the day. Ārepa's drink is designed to support focus without caffeine. So rather than reaching for another coffee in the afternoon, the product can help you stay focused without adding more caffeine that may affect your sleep later. The brand can teach you why sleep matters to your brain; the product can help you act on it. That relationship between the two is important. The product helps your brain perform and solves a short term problem. The brand helps you understand how to look after your brain. That opens up an enormous amount of territory for the kind of activity your brand could do. A product can only talk about itself, but for a brand research makes sense. Education makes sense. Sleep advice makes sense. Puzzles, breathing workshops and conversations about brain performance all make sense. They aren't random bits of content marketing around the edge of a drink. They're evidence of what the company is trying to make true. The Brand Idea we landed on is a tight encapsulation of the brand role.

We're for brains.

The product proposition, The Brain Drink, tells you what Ārepa makes. We're for brains tells you what the company is about. And that is the useful difference with a Mission-Led Brand. Ārepa can help somebody sleep better, learn something about their brain, exercise it or understand how to look after it without requiring them to buy a drink at the end. The product advances the mission. It isn't the limit of the mission.

• Is there a meaningful change connected to your business that you really want to help bring about?
• Does your company have a credible way to contribute to that change?
• If you took the product out of the room, would there still be useful work your brand could do?

If the only things you can think of are different ways to advertise the product, you probably haven't found a mission yet, or the mission role is not the one for you.

The Industry Changer

An Industry Changer starts with something customers already buy or do. Its product changes the cost, speed, access or flexibility enough that they can use it in a better way. The brand’s job is to explain that better way, help people put it into practice and show what it makes possible. Industries build habits around the constraints they have. Over time those habits can start to feel like simply how the industry works, even when the original reason for doing things that way has disappeared. An Industry Changer has a point of view about that. It says: there is a better way to do this now. That point of view has to start with the product. Faster and cheaper might be what makes the change possible, but they shouldn't be the end of the story. The product needs to enable better results and outcomes, and the brand needs to make the case for that better way of working. The role of the brand is to make the new way visible and understandable. Explain why it is better. Give people language for it. Find the forward-thinking practitioners who are ready to work this way, help them succeed, tell their stories and use their success to spread the change through the rest of the industry. Stripe is a well-known example. Businesses already paid to accept payments. Stripe made payments something developers could readily build into their products, giving businesses more freedom to shape how customers buy.

Ideally applies the same thinking to research. Companies already buy customer insight, but when research becomes fast and accessible enough, they can use it throughout the creative process. It becomes a way to develop better ideas while there is still time to change them.

Ideally is a market research platform for marketers. It is a company we helped start through our venture studio, which meant brand, proposition and product could be developed together from the beginning, rather than brand being added later. It immediately resonated with established, high-quality research-led companies like big four banks and global beverage leaders, reaching $4m in annual recurring revenue within 18 months, making it one of the faster-growing new SaaS companies in this part of the world. The opportunity was interesting because large companies already had budgets for market research. Ideally wasn't trying to invent a new need. It took something companies were already paying for and made it dramatically faster, more affordable and easier to access, without requiring a research agency in the middle. But the really interesting part was what that change made possible. If research suddenly became fast and affordable enough to use much more often, perhaps companies could use it in a fundamentally different way. Market research has traditionally been relatively expensive and slow, which has shaped how companies use it. Rather than being something you can use constantly while developing an idea, it is often used at a small number of major gates, sometimes once a lot of the work has already been done. That creates an interesting problem. By the time an idea reaches one of those gates, a company may have invested months of work, money and internal reputation in it. Finding out then that customers don't like it is enormously costly. And when the cost of getting something wrong at the end is high, people naturally start trying to reduce the risk along the way. Ideas get moderated. Decisions get safer. But great ideas are rarely found by making every decision as safe as possible. By removing that constraint, Ideally made a different approach practical. Research could happen while ideas were still being developed, then again and again as they evolved. That opened a much bigger opportunity than faster research. Research could stop being only a judgement at the end of the creative process and become part of the creative process itself. And that led to a much more interesting point of view for the brand. Ideally isn't there to use customer research to make ideas smaller and safer. It can help people find the potential in an idea, develop it with the people they are creating for, and grow great ideas.

Drumbeat applies it to communications. Companies already invest in content and PR. Drumbeat helps them turn the useful things happening inside the business into a steady flow of stories that build awareness and support sales. That changes communications from a series of separate efforts into an ongoing part of how the business grows. We’ll look at how that idea became a company in Chapter 7.

That is the Industry Changer role. The product makes a better way possible. The brand gives that way a point of view, finds the people who want to work that way and helps their success become evidence for the rest of the industry.

• Do customers already buy or do the thing your product helps with?
• Does your product change the cost, speed, access or flexibility enough that they can use it in a different way?
• Does that unlock a meaningfully better way of working, rather than simply making the existing process faster or cheaper?
• Do you have a clear point of view about what that better way is?
• Could you find forward-thinking practitioners, help them succeed with the new approach and use their success to bring the rest of the industry with you?

If the answers are mostly yes, the opportunity may be to change the way your industry works rather than simply sell it a better tool.

The New Frontiers Brand

A New Frontiers brand is working at the edge of what science and technology make possible. Its technical advances open up things people could not previously do, or make practical something that was previously out of reach.

This is a rare role. Simply being well engineered, having clever people or using the latest technology does not qualify you. The opportunity comes when the work itself is expanding what is possible, and the possibilities it opens are a bit epic.

Technical excellence gives the brand credibility. What that excellence makes possible gives people a reason to believe in it.

The job of the brand is to make that future tangible. Show what works already. Explain the breakthrough and why it matters. Demonstrate what people can now do, and help them understand what further progress could unlock.

You can build towards this role. If you are doing substantial new work in science or technology, you can start making that work visible and bringing people into its possibilities. Be clear about what you have demonstrated, what you are still solving and what you hope it will enable. You earn the position as the evidence grows.

Think Tesla or SpaceX: a very big goal, backed by the technology, engineering and systems thinking needed to make meaningful progress towards it. The brand helps people see how achievements today are opening possibilities for the future.

The advance can come from a breakthrough in one technology, or from making a whole system work together in a way that opens up new possibilities. Research, software, hardware, manufacturing and infrastructure may all be part of it. The important connection is between the ambition, the work and the evidence of what it makes possible.

That gives the technology an important place in the move from product to brand. The achievement itself can be part of what people find interesting about the company. But the story needs to connect that achievement to the possibilities it opens. A proprietary model, a patent or a large body of data can support the story. None of them, on their own, tells us what new thing becomes possible.

This is different from Category Creator and Industry Changer, although a company can have elements of all three.

A Category Creator says: here is a new behaviour worth adopting. An Industry Changer says: there is a better way to do this work. A New Frontiers brand says: we are making something possible that wasn't possible before.

Category Creator is about helping a market understand and adopt something unfamiliar. It doesn't require a scientific or engineering breakthrough. Aglow's work to establish beauty memberships is a good example. New Frontiers is about an advance in what the technology can actually do, and the future that advance opens up. The distinction is the work the brand needs to do, rather than the size of the company or how ambitious it sounds.

Partly shows how a company could build towards this role. Its ambition is to build technology that can eventually help anyone repair anything, something that becomes increasingly valuable as more of the world around us is made up of complex machines.

That ambition gives the technical work a bigger story. The possibility is a world in which more things can be understood and repaired. The brand's job is to help people see how the work happening today could bring that world closer.

Partly is building frontier models to enable repair, starting with the automotive industry. It has developed its own proprietary model, trained on an enormous body of automotive data. The company describes that foundation as covering more than a billion parts and more than five million vehicles.

(partly visual - the model is trained on)

Those are foundations for the story. To earn a New Frontiers position, the company needs to show what they enable. Which repair problems can the technology now solve? What was previously out of reach? What still needs to be solved before the broader ambition can become real?

That gives the brand useful work to do. Demonstrate the capability on difficult problems. Publish the evidence. Put the people building the technology forward and explain the barriers they are working through. Show how each advance creates a new possibility for the people who will use it.

Partly also brings some of the conventions of leading AI labs into how it presents itself. That helps signal its technical ambition in an industry where few companies look or behave this way. High production values and care in the visual work can help carry the story, but the position needs to be earned through what the technology makes possible.

For Partly, that still means making the work relevant to the collision and repair industry it serves today. A future in which anyone can repair anything is an ambition. The capabilities it can demonstrate now are the evidence that gives people a reason to follow its progress.

• Is there a big goal that gives the technical work a clear direction?
• Are you doing substantial scientific or engineering work that expands what is possible?
• What does that work enable that was previously impossible or out of practical reach?
• Are those new possibilities significant enough to give people a reason to care about the company's future?
• Can you demonstrate real progress through working technology, research, performance evidence or credible uses?
• What parts of the wider system need to work together to deliver the ambition?
• Can you clearly distinguish what works today from what you are still trying to make possible?
• Could making that progress visible help customers, researchers, partners or future team members take part?

If the answers are mostly yes, New Frontiers may be a role you can build towards. You can use elements of the playbook while the work is developing. The strength of the position, and the claims you make for it, should grow with the evidence.

The Industry Benchmark

The Industry Benchmark is usually a Brand Role you earn rather than choose at the beginning. It becomes available when you have enough customers, experience, credibility and understanding of an industry that the opportunity is no longer simply to compete within it. You can aim to become the company the industry looks to for what great looks like. This is different from simply being the market leader. You don't necessarily need to be the biggest company or have the largest market share. The opportunity is to become the reference point: the company people look to for where the industry is going, what the best operators are doing and what standards everyone should be trying to reach. A supplier naturally talks about its product. An Industry Benchmark can publish useful knowledge, bring the industry together, recognise excellence, share data, create education and demonstrate best practice. Its product can increasingly embody what great looks like too. You need to have earned the right to play this role. Declaring yourself the benchmark when nobody knows who you are isn't a strategy. Salesforce and Autodesk carry this role in different industries. Salesforce built methods, credentials and a professional ecosystem around managing customer relationships. Autodesk combines its design and engineering tools with education, certification and industry gatherings that help practitioners develop their skills and share better ways of working. Both have built authority beyond their products, helping shape what professional practice looks like.

Re-Leased had reached this stage when we began working with it. It had enough scale, customer experience and industry standing to credibly aim beyond being a software supplier and become a reference point for commercial property professionals. Its Brand Idea became Level Up.

An Industry Benchmark becomes the reference point for the industry, then continually does the work that earns that position.

• Have you already earned meaningful credibility and standing in the industry?
• Have you seen enough customers and situations to have a useful view on what great looks like?
• Could you use your knowledge, data, product and position to help establish better practice?
• Could people who aren't customers still look to you to learn where the industry is going and how to get better?
• Is there a credible path to becoming one of the companies your industry measures others against?

If the answers are mostly yes, you may have earned the right to aim to become the benchmark for your industry.

Choosing your Brand Role

Most companies will see parts of themselves in more than one of these roles, and that's fine. A New Frontiers company can also champion its customers or create a category around a new capability. A Category Creator may also be changing how an industry works. A Champion can eventually earn enough standing to become an Industry Benchmark.

The point isn't to perfectly classify the company. It is to find the role that most clearly helps you see what work the brand could do now. That role can change as the company and market develop.

The Brand Role is a strategic choice, not a personality test.

You may recognise yourself in several. Pick the one that gives you the clearest idea of what the brand should do next. If the choice gives you a useful list of things to build, say, prove and do, it is doing its job. If it just gives you another word to put on the strategy slide, keep working.

With those possibilities in mind, we can now bring the rest of the strategy together in the Brand Set.

Now we have most of the ingredients. The next job is to bring them together into a strategy you can actually use. For something so important, there isn't much shared language around brand. What's the difference between a brand vision, mission, purpose, ambition or promise? Lots of people have been through brand processes where these words mean different things, or all mean pretty much the same thing. We've found that if we want founders and teams to take brand seriously, it is vital to try to give it some definition. So over the years we've iterated a simple framework we call the Brand Set. It is deliberately closer to a product framework than a traditional brand strategy. Each line has a distinct job, and all the elements should work together. The Brand Set does not replace your product strategy, ICPs, personas, sales messages or go-to-market plan. All of that detail still matters. This sits above it.

The aim is to give a founding team one page they can look at and agree: who we're for, what's broken in their world, what we uniquely do about it, what we want them to know us for and the bigger idea we're working to make true.

Once you've made these choices and everyone agrees on them, it is much simpler to make a brief for how visual design should support them, a plan for activity to bring them to life, and even just a shared sense as a company of who you are and what you're here to do.

Before we pull all of those pieces apart, let's look at them all together in a real brand example.

Re-Leased: from software company to industry leader

Re-Leased is a commercial property management software company. When they came to us they were already a substantial business, with more than $20m in annual recurring revenue, prominent customers around the world, and a product that was well established in its category. One thing we see quite often is that brand, product and operations end up in a kind of ongoing game of leapfrog. A brand reflects the company at one point in time, then the product improves, the value grows and the business moves on. If the brand doesn't keep moving too, eventually it starts underselling the company. That was Re-Leased. They were already doing sophisticated marketing, events and industry activity, but the visual identity and the way the company presented itself no longer reflected the quality of what was happening inside the business. This is often the moment to use brand to leapfrog again: not simply to catch up with where the company is today, but to set the direction for where it wants to go next. From the outside, Re-Leased looked like a professional software company. Product screens, technology graphics, efficiency claims, lots of the familiar language of reducing admin and saving time. If you swapped the logo and changed a few words, much of it could have belonged to a company in insurance, finance or compliance.

Inside the company, something more interesting was already happening. Re-Leased understood property professionals incredibly well. Their team knew what great operators looked like. They ran roadshows, created useful content and helped customers get better at running property businesses, but they weren't consistently sharing that ambition or point of view externally. There was also a bigger problem they could see. Property professionals can fairly quickly find themselves responsible for portfolios worth tens or hundreds of millions of dollars, yet there are fewer common standards, development pathways and ways of recognising excellence than you might expect for work of that scale. So instead of building the brand around the administration Re-Leased removed, we looked at what property professionals wanted more of: more capability, better decisions, more recognition for great operators, a clearer idea of what good looks like and better business results. The opportunity was to bring that industry knowledge and activity to the forefront of the brand, and build a clearer position as a leader and partner in property.

We wanted property professionals to know Re-Leased for understanding the business of property, helping them run better businesses and helping lift standards across the industry. The knowledge, customer relationships and activity were already there to build on.

The Brand Idea became Level Up.

It gave the company a cohesive theme for the activity it was already doing and a guide for what to do more of. Re-Leased could create education, recognise great property professionals, bring people together, share standards, help customers improve and make the product itself increasingly useful in helping people run better property businesses. Even the awkward hyphen in Re-Leased became useful. By turning it into a stepping device, we made the idea of levelling up visible in the identity itself.

The work was not about inventing a completely new company. The ingredients were already there. The Brand Set helped us unify around the bigger idea inside them, make some choices and give everything a clearer direction. On one page, it looked like this:

Re-Leased Brand Set

Brand Strategy: Move from being seen as a commercial property software supplier to being recognised as a leader in the property industry.

Customer: Commercial property professionals.

Problem: Property professionals are responsible for enormous value, but the industry has too few shared standards and pathways for helping people get better at the work.

Unique Value Proposition: The property management platform that helps you run a better business.

Associations: Understands the business of property; helps property professionals run better businesses; helps lift standards across the industry.

Brand Idea: Level Up.

That is the Brand Set.

None of the individual lines is particularly complicated. The value comes from getting them to work together, as we can see in the product, education, events and identity Re-Leased is building.

Now let's pull the pieces apart. You can try to build your own as you go.

The Brand Set has six parts.

A few pointers before you start writing

If you've already done positioning or brand work, start with the current-state diagnostic in the workbook and bring forward what is still true, useful and recognised by customers.

The aim is not to make any of these lines sound like marketing. You can turn the ideas into taglines and key messages once you have landed the strategy. For now, use straightforward language so anyone can understand what you are trying to do.

Make it make sense. Anyone inside or outside the company should be able to understand it.

Use normal language. Pretend you're explaining it to a friend at a BBQ. Avoid jargon.

Make it simple. Each line needs to carry its simplest possible message.

Make it short. If you need a paragraph to explain what a line means, it isn't ready.

Go with what is mainly true. If 75% of your customers are one type, call them your customer. If most of what you do is one thing, say that's what you do. If the Brand Idea is substantially true today and gives you somewhere useful to build, run with it. Don't add clauses and qualifications to account for every exception. Completeness is the enemy of clarity.

Brand Strategy: what brand needs to achieve

This is normally a move from one position to another. Timely needed to move from being a booking product for everyone to being a brand in the world of hair and beauty. Re-Leased needed to move from being seen as a software supplier to taking a more active role in the property industry. Yours might be a move from being known for a piece of technology to being known for what it enables, from serving everyone to really belonging to one customer's world, or from being a supplier to taking a more active role in an industry. This keeps the project connected to the business goal. A useful question is: how do we present today, and what change would help us win customers more effectively?

Customer: who you're for

This is the heart of the set and often the most important choice. You cannot become a meaningful brand in a customer's world if you haven't decided which world you want to join. The customer can be a job title, a type of business, a function or a group of people with a shared goal. It just has to be specific enough to guide real choices. Who should be most prominent on your homepage? Which events should you attend? Who should most of your content be useful to? Which customers should have the biggest vote in product decisions?

By hero customer, we mean the kind of customer you're building around. An actual customer can help make that choice concrete, but a logo on its own doesn't explain who you're for.

Choosing a hero customer can feel like narrowing the market, but it doesn't mean you stop selling to everyone else. It gives the business a centre of gravity. You can still serve other customers while knowing whose world you are trying hardest to belong in.

Problem: what's broken in your customer's world

We find it useful to think about the problem at two levels. The first is the functional problem, the practical job your product solves: something takes too long, costs too much, is unnecessarily difficult, or involves systems that don't work well together. Then there is the system-level problem. What does that functional problem stop your customer from doing? What larger issue does it create in their work or industry? The functional problem often explains why someone buys the product. The system-level problem is often where the brand lives. This is where the more, not less principle becomes useful. Once you've named what your product removes, ask what that gives your customer more of. What work are they proud of? What progress are they trying to make? What would they rather spend more time doing?

Unique Value Proposition: why they'd choose your product

The mistake here is trying to be comprehensive. "The secure, integrated, AI-powered, end-to-end platform that saves time, reduces cost and gives you visibility" sounds like half the software market. You don't need to fit everything the product does into this line. You need the clearest expression of what you provide and why it is valuable or better for the customer today. A useful formula is:

What you provide + why a customer would choose it and pay for it today.

For Re-Leased, that becomes:

The property management platform that helps you run a better business.

The first half tells you what the company does. The second tells you why that matters to the customer. A useful way to test it is the elevator scenario at a conference full of your customers. You're in the lift and someone asks what you do. What is the first useful, distinctive thing you say? Something that solves a problem they have and gives them a practical reason to choose you. One important check: Could your closest competitor say exactly the same thing? If they can, that doesn't automatically kill the idea. Ask whether you have the right to claim it, and whether you're prepared to do enough through the product, proof and activity to become the obvious credible owner of it. A UVP can be lift and build too.

What do you want to be known for?

You've chosen your customer, looked at their problems and described the unique value you provide. Now use that work to choose the associations you want to build.

An association is simply something you want people to connect with your company when they think of you. What would it be useful for your customers to know you for? What would give them a reason to choose you, recommend you or want you to succeed?

There are three useful places to look.

1. What's special about how you do it?

What gives you a particular advantage? It could be your proprietary technology, your founder's research, your expertise or a different take on how something should work. What can you do that others can't, or do significantly better? This will often come from your unique value proposition. Be clear about what that advantage makes possible for your customer.

2. What does that help your customer do more of?

Less time, less cost and less effort can be good reasons to buy. Now look at what those savings make possible. What do your customers actually want to do in their roles and their lives? How could you help them use their expertise, grow their businesses or become better at the work they care about?

3. How do you think your industry could be better?

What needs to change about how things work or how customers are served? What's your take on the status quo, and what are you doing about it? This could connect to your mission, your purpose or the reason you decided to do something new in the first place.

These are places to look, not compulsory categories. Your values, the way you treat people or a founder's particular insight may be part of what you want to become known for too. Choose the things that are most useful for your customers and most true to the company you're building.

Write two or three sentences beginning:

We want our customers to know us for...

Use normal language. "Innovative, trusted and customer-focused" could belong to almost any company. "Helps property professionals run better businesses" gives you something more specific to work on. You can ask what a better business looks like and what you're doing to help.

Check each choice:

• Would our customer care about this? How would it help the business if we became known for it?
• What already gives us the right to build this association?
• What would we do to make it stronger, and what might we stop doing?

An association doesn't have to be a claim nobody else could make. But if every competitor says it, you'll need a good reason to believe you can earn it more convincingly. Specific expertise, useful action and consistent evidence will do more than another adjective.

Keep the few that give you the clearest direction. If two say much the same thing, combine them. If one sounds good but doesn't suggest anything useful to do, make it more specific or leave it out.

Bringing them together in a Brand Idea

Your Brand Idea is the bigger thing you're working to make happen for your customer or industry. Look across the associations you've chosen for something customers care about, your team finds energising and your company has a real part in making true.

The roles in Chapter 2 can help here. Are you championing a profession, changing how an industry works or opening up something new? A role gives you a way to explore the idea and the work it could lead to.

To find the Brand Idea, start with a longer sentence:

We're working with [customer] to make [change for them or their industry] happen.

For Re-Leased, the two ideas look like this:

UVP: The property management platform that helps you run a better business.

Long Brand Idea: We're working with property professionals to help them run better businesses and lift the standard of the industry.

Short Brand Idea: Level Up.

The useful part is not simply the words. It's the attitude, posture and work they lead to. Level Up works in helping property professionals become better at their work, in the ambition for the industry and in a visual world where buildings have levels. The words become meaningful through the product, education, events and support Re-Leased provides.

The short expression can come later. If it isn't obvious yet, work with your chosen associations and a plain sentence, and notice what customers respond to, what energises your team and which activities reinforce each other.

It doesn't have to be a tagline or a phrase customers ever see. A good Brand Idea is simple enough to carry around in your head and rich enough to make the next ten decisions easier.

Product positioning and Brand Idea

Ideally offers another example. Its rapid market research platform gives marketers customer insight for creative and commercial decisions, helping them Create With Your Customer.

Its Brand Idea is Grow Great Ideas, built around making research part of the creative process, while there's still time to develop something bigger and bolder. The company is about helping marketers make better work, rather than only explaining how its research works.

That gives Ideally useful associations to build: bringing customers into creativity, helping marketers develop stronger ideas and making research useful throughout the creative process. Creative events, useful research and stories about that work help people see what the company is working to make happen.

The UVP explains the value of the product today. The Brand Idea describes the change you want to bring to your customer or industry over time.

Your product positioning and Brand Idea are two vital, complementary strands. One gives people a practical reason to buy. The other helps you become the company they think of first, connect with and are interested in, often by helping them do more of what they care about.

A useful set should make decisions easier. Which customer should we hero? What research should we publish? What could the product help people do more of? Which partnership makes sense? What should we stop spending time on? If the choices can justify almost anything, they're too vague. If they help you focus your effort and give you something interesting to build, they're doing their job.

Mission and Purpose are also useful, and we use them when they add something.

For us, a Mission is a measurable change you are working towards, something you can make progress on and perhaps eventually complete. A great example is Ethique, the beauty company founded by Brianne West. The company started with a goal to prevent 10 million plastic bottles from being made and, after reaching that much faster than expected, increased the ambition to 100 million. That is a useful mission because you can measure progress against it, achieve it, and then set a bigger target. A Purpose is why that change matters to you and your customer, your 'why' driving your work. These are also the two places where brand language gets woolliest fastest, and we don't force them. They can have real value if you are serious about creating positive impact, or are driven by a deep conviction about the change you want to make. When companies don't have a real purpose, this is when they reach for some of the things that make brands have a bad reputation. You've probably all seen a purpose like, "We're here to unlock the potential of humanity through smarter printer toner." This is the stuff to avoid. If your Purpose could belong to any company on earth, leave it to the side and get the six useful lines right first. Have a go at your own Brand Set in pencil. There is a section at the end of the book, and on the accompanying website, to help you workshop and refine each element. Try it with someone who can ask a good question or challenge a vague answer.

Once you've got a Brand Set, the next job is to make those choices visible. Your visual identity is one of the fastest ways to communicate what kind of company you are before somebody gets into the detail. When someone lands on your website, opens a presentation, sees a post or walks past your stand at an event, the design is already telling them something. Does this feel relevant to me? Does it feel distinctive? Does it look like a company from my world, or another technology company that could be selling almost anything?

Good design does much more than make the company look professional. It helps people understand you, recognise you and remember you, and gives the company a system it can keep making things from. Three ideas tend to do most of the work: the Brand Idea needs to be executable, the identity needs to be distinctive, and the visual world should connect to the world of the customer.

Alongside the Brand Idea, share the things you want customers to know you for so the designer understands what the work needs to communicate.

We call the first of these the executable concept. A good Brand Idea shouldn't just sound good in a strategy document. It should give a designer enough of an idea to start making decisions from, and enough territory that it can travel into a website, product screen, event, presentation, piece of content or something as small as a sticker without needing a completely new creative thought each time.

That doesn't mean illustrating the Brand Idea literally everywhere. If the idea is about progress, perhaps the identity can move upwards or forwards. If it is about abundance, perhaps the visual world can feel generous rather than sparse. If it is about transmission, perhaps the system can borrow from broadcast, signal and movement. The point is that the idea gives you somewhere to go.

This is especially valuable in a high-growth company, where the website changes, new products launch, sales needs another deck and a customer story has to go out tomorrow morning. If every piece of work starts with a blank page, the brand isn't giving the company much leverage. A strong brand system doesn't give you one nice hero image. It keeps giving you things to make.

Re-Leased is a simple example. We had already landed on Level Up as the idea the company wanted to build into. The identity could turn a detail already sitting in the name into a stepping device, making the idea of progress visible throughout the system. That is one reason simplicity matters so much. If your Brand Idea contains five concepts joined together to keep everyone happy, it is incredibly difficult to make visible. A simple idea gives design something to grab hold of.

The second job is distinctiveness. A visual identity is partly a memory system, and most of the people you want to reach are not studying your brand carefully. They are scrolling past a post, walking through a conference, glancing at a presentation or seeing your website for a few seconds before moving on. You are competing not only with direct competitors but with everything else asking for their attention.

Colours, typography, graphic devices, photography, illustration, motion and the way information is laid out can all become recognisable assets when you use them consistently. Over time, somebody can begin to know it is you before they have even read the name. The goal isn't simply to look good. It is to become recognisable. One simple test is to cover the logo and ask whether the work still looks like it could only have come from you.

This is where "professional" can become a trap. A beautifully executed version of exactly what everybody else in your category is doing may look better without becoming much more memorable. Distinctiveness helps separate encounters join together in someone's memory, so the post they see today can add to the presentation they saw three months ago. Distinctiveness makes all those little encounters add up faster.

The third idea comes back to the move from product to brand: becoming a brand in the world of your customer. Most technology businesses understandably benchmark businesses making similar technology. SaaS looks at SaaS. AI looks at AI. Research platforms look at research platforms. You need to understand your category, but if that is the only world you look at, the natural result is a slightly different version of the same thing.

We try to look much wider and spend time in the visual and cultural world the customer actually inhabits. When we designed Ideally, for example, we didn't only look at other research platforms. Ideally was helping people bring ideas and concepts forward, discuss them and understand how customers responded to them, so we also looked at museums and design galleries, places that elevate ideas and create a frame around many different kinds of work. That helped us explore Ideally as an institute of ideas rather than simply another software interface. If you're becoming a brand in your customer's world, that world should probably have some influence on how you look and feel.

How we approach design

Phoebe Devine, our Chief Design Officer, and I, along with the wider team, have iterated our approach over years of working with start-ups. It is much closer to product development than the traditional version of a brand agency process, where strategy and design can become separated and enormous pressure builds around a big reveal of finished-looking routes.

That kind of process can make feedback feel like a buffet: typography from one route, colour from another, imagery from a third. Enough compromises get made and the clear idea that made any of the routes strong in the first place disappears. We prefer to keep strategy and design closely connected. Designers are involved while the strategic thinking is developing, and the strategic team stays involved while the visual system is being made. We work in sprints, so founders are never far from the last point of alignment, and where it helps we bring customers into the process too.

The projects that go best feel like one team building something together rather than the company sitting on one side of the table and the designers presenting answers from the other. Having the founder or CEO properly involved makes a big difference. They know the company, where it is going and what they are prepared to commit to, while the design team brings a different kind of experience and judgement. The good work tends to come from putting those things together.

It also helps to go into the process with a bit of a what can go right attitude. If you are trying to make something new and distinctive, there will usually be a point where it feels uncomfortable. Some people will find the new idea too much at first, and a colour, typeface or other distinctive choice may get a strong reaction. If every decision is made to avoid anybody having a negative reaction, it is very easy to sand off the thing that might have made the brand interesting and memorable in the first place.

Benchmarking to find a common visual language

Before design starts in earnest, the Brand Set needs to be clear enough to act as a brief. We then benchmark both competitors and the wider world the customer lives in, not simply to collect inspiration but to build a shared visual language for what we mean. What does excellence look like in their industry? What are they seeing every day? Where is everything beginning to look the same? Which conventions are worth keeping, and where is there room to be distinctive?

Words like "contemporary", "independent", "premium" or "friendly" can mean almost anything. So rather than debating abstract adjectives, we find examples that make them concrete and align on what we actually mean before making our own version.

From there, we make. The Brand Idea becomes part of the creative brief and, in the process, we find out how executable it really is. We create, share, learn and iterate. When we bring customers into the process, we aren't asking whether they like blue or prefer one typeface. We are testing whether the work communicates what it needs to, stands apart and feels relevant to the people we're trying to reach.

This is a delicate balance. Of course the team has real associations with the brand, and you do want them to like what you are building. But a new brand can very quickly become an argument about personal preference. Getting everyone aligned first on the goals, the job the work needs to do and the customer it is for gives the team something better to build against. It makes everyone partners in building something together, rather than advocates for their own taste. There will still be judgement and disagreement, but setting the process up well makes those conversations much easier.

Bustle is a good example of a very strong move into the customer's world. Not every business wants to move this far, but it serves as a clear illustration of the idea and process.

PosBoss to Bustle

Bustle came to us as PosBoss, a point-of-sale system for independent hospitality: cafes, casual restaurants, burger joints, bakeries and bars with personality, community and owners who cared deeply about the experience they created. Founder Jonny McKenzie had managed and owned some of Wellington's best bars and originally built PosBoss to solve problems he'd experienced himself, and much of the team had worked in hospitality too.

The company knew exactly who it wanted to be brilliant for and already had some fantastic customers. The disconnect was that those customers were among the most interesting, beautifully designed and culturally relevant businesses in their cities, while PosBoss still looked and felt like a technology company. It was the choice of some of New Zealand's best casual restaurants and cafes, but you wouldn't necessarily have known that by looking at the brand.

Working particularly with Hannah Small, Phoebe Devine and Lauren Kjestrup, we landed on a clear design strategy: make it immediately obvious that this was a brand from the world of independent hospitality, capture some of the energy of the best cafes, bars and fast-casual restaurants, and reflect that world back to the people we were serving.

To do that, we benchmarked much more than other point-of-sale companies. We looked at great contemporary independent hospitality brands and asked what made them feel the way they did. What kind of illustration were they using? What did the lettering feel like? How were they using colour? What made the food photography feel delicious and current rather than generic? How did they combine a relaxed personality with the sense that everything underneath was extremely well considered?

Two ideas helped us get more specific about what we were seeing. The first was informal excellence. A great casual restaurant can feel relaxed, warm and effortless while the details that matter are completely under control. The food is excellent, the service works and the room feels right. Nothing feels corporate or uptight, but you have enormous confidence that the people running it know exactly what they're doing.

The second was wholesome indulgence, the pleasure of somebody making you something delicious and looking after you well. These weren't extra pieces of strategy for the company to carry around. They helped us define the feeling we wanted the brand to have.

That led us towards illustration, vibrant colour, friendly contemporary lettering and fantastic food photography. We used the customers themselves as much as possible, so the brand reflected the independent hospitality world PosBoss was already part of rather than an imagined version of it.

The name changed too. PosBoss did a good job of signalling point-of-sale technology, but that was exactly the world we were trying to move beyond. Bustle gave us a word and feeling linked directly to what we wanted the brand to achieve. A great cafe or fast-casual restaurant has a bustle to it: people coming and going, orders moving, food arriving, noise, energy, warmth and the sense that the place is going well.

That was also close to what the product was there to help create. Bustle takes care of some of the hard operational work so an owner and their team can focus more of their attention on the experience that brings people in. The name, visual identity and customer promise could all come from the same place.

There were already proof points inside the company. PosBoss had a product login where staff could tap an emoji code to access the system, using things like cherries, eggplants and dice. They served coffees and ran competitions for hospitality people at conferences, hosted evenings for the industry, partnered with other good hospitality businesses and published things like the Flat White Index, using the coffees sold through the platform to show how operators were faring.

The brand project didn't invent those things or discover a personality the company didn't know it had. It identified what was already distinctive and valuable about the company's relationship with independent hospitality, brought those elements together and made them much clearer to the outside world.

Once PosBoss became Bustle, the name, identity, customer stories, product details and things the company was already doing began to tell the same story.

One of our goals was for Bustle to feel like a contemporary of its customers: the kind of brand whose T-shirt a customer might wear or whose sticker they might put on the fridge, rather than something that felt like their payments provider or payroll software. The new brand delivered on that, while giving the business a platform it could keep building from as it expanded into the UK.

Realising the brand

The final part is making that system usable. High-growth companies have lots of people making things: marketers, founders, product teams, salespeople, agencies, event partners and somebody pulling together a presentation five minutes before it needs to go out. The brand needs enough clarity and enough assets that all of them can make something recognisably yours.

The aim isn't to lock everything down, but to make the brand easy to use without making it generic. For most start-ups, that means giving people a rich world in the tools they actually work in: Figma, presentations, social templates, motion, product screens, event materials and increasingly AI tools.

It is becoming extraordinarily easy for almost anybody to produce something that looks competent, which means generic good-looking design is becoming cheaper and easier for everyone to produce. If every company starts from the same tools, references and idea of what good looks like, the result will be even more sameness.

That makes distinctiveness more valuable, not less. The advantage is having a world of your own to make from: your colours, typography, imagery, graphic language, point of view and the visual concepts that belong to the idea you are building. AI can then help you make more of your brand, rather than more of what everyone else is already making.

Without a rich brand world, visual identity is decoration. With it, visual identity becomes a communication tool.

And when that visual world is distinctive and executable, every new thing you make has the chance to build connection and relevance with your customers, and memory in the market.

We do a lot of naming at Previously Unavailable, and we love it. A new name can be one of the best vehicles for carrying a Brand Idea into the world. The first thing to know is that names are things you build equity into over time. They become what you build into them. It's rare to see a name sitting on a list and immediately think, that's obviously the one. Some of the names everyone ended up happiest with were also among the most polarising at first. So rather than asking whether we like a name, we ask whether it will be useful for the company we're trying to build. That starts with the Brand Idea and strategy. The name doesn't need to explain everything the company does. It needs to connect to the strategy and give the brand a useful place to start. We also have a strong bias towards real words. If we can find one that carries useful meaning and gives us a clue about how the brand might behave, we generally prefer it. You get associations, imagery and language for free. Here are a few examples.

Appetise

Appetise came to us as MenuAid. It had started as a meal-planning product, helping people decide what to cook and then turning those choices into shoppable lists. Tens of thousands of people were using it to cut down the admin around deciding what was for dinner, and the brand matched that idea. It was stripped back, simple and quite utilitarian, like the name MenuAid. Over time the company realised that all of this activity was creating something potentially much more valuable: a rich picture of what people were actually planning to eat and buy. Which recipes they chose, which products and brands ended up in their baskets, what they substituted and how those behaviours changed. That created a new business helping food companies understand consumer behaviour and make better decisions about products and marketing. The meal-planning app became free and the commercial model changed, but the name MenuAid still belonged to the old business. It sounded functional and administrative, while the opportunity was increasingly in the world of food, appetite and understanding what people actually wanted. One of the simplest ways we described the strategic move was from admin to appetising.

Appetise.

It put the company immediately into the world of food. It was a real word, easy to understand, and it gave us much more than a new label. The visual identity could feel delicious and abundant. The company could host dinners, cook with customers, create content around food and behave like a business that loved the industry it was helping. The name didn't need to explain behavioural insights. The context could do that. The active form of the word also gave a slight nod towards a technology business doing something with all of that appetite and behaviour.

Taxi

Taxi came from a very different problem. We helped name and launch the business with Tax Traders, a New Zealand tax pooling company that had traditionally served taxpayers via accountants only. They saw an opportunity to bring some of the same cleverness around provisional tax directly to taxpayers, especially SMEs who usually aren't offered these services by the accountant. The way provisional tax works can create a real working-capital headache. A business can be paying tax ahead of its final earnings while also needing cash to fund day-to-day growth. Smaller businesses can end up with money effectively sitting idle at IRD while they use expensive overdrafts and credit cards to replace it. Tax pooling gives larger businesses ways to manage this much more efficiently. Taxi was designed to bring a version of that benefit directly to smaller businesses, allowing them to hold provisional tax in a secure account and borrow against it at a lower rate than a typical bank line while still being recognised as having paid the IRD on time. The bigger issue was that all of this trapped or expensive capital slows businesses down. The Brand Idea was about helping get businesses moving forward. Once forward movement was sitting at the centre of the idea, a name from the world of getting somewhere started to feel natural.

Taxi gave us that vehicle for storytelling.

There is a connection back to Tax Traders, with Tax and Taxi being able to be seen as siblings of a sort, but more importantly it is short, familiar and energetic. You can immediately imagine the visual world, the advertising, the trade-show presence and the merch. It gave us a way of making something around provisional tax feel much more approachable and interesting. The name also gave us different ways to activate the idea. Customer support could be called 'drivers'. You could pick clients up in branded taxis. You could send people custom Lego taxi sets. You don't need to do every possible expression of the metaphor, but there is a lot sitting there if you want it.

Extraordinary

Extraordinary is a different kind of naming story again. The company came to us as HealthNow. That name made sense for the company it had started as. HealthNow helped businesses provide health-related benefits to employees, but in building the product the team had created something with a much wider application. The personalised accounts and payment infrastructure they had built could be used for almost any payment a business wanted to make to an employee outside their ordinary wages or salary. That could include reimbursements, bonuses, rewards and recognition, allowances and even public transport subsidies funded from pre-tax earnings. The product had grown well beyond health benefits, which meant the old name was starting to hold the company back. We found that the accounting language for these kinds of payments was extraordinary payments. We liked Extraordinary because it did two jobs at once. At one level it helped explain the space the product operated in: everything beyond the ordinary salary or wage payment. But it also gave us a much more interesting idea for how the company itself could act. The experience around reimbursements, allowances, rewards and many of these other payments inside companies is usually decidedly ordinary. It can be expensive, time-consuming and inefficient, and very few people get excited about dealing with it. Founder Steven Zinsli and his team were the opposite of that. They had a real energy in the market and tended to turn up at events as some of the most interesting people in the room. Even under the much more recessive HealthNow brand, there was already a lot of personality in the company. Calling the business Extraordinary gave us a way to bring those things together. The ambition could be to make everything about rewards, recognition and extraordinary payments feel a little more extraordinary. That led naturally into the visual identity. We created a colourful, energetic brand that was a little bit extra, in a good way. The name, the way the company behaved and the visual identity all reinforced each other.

Names that give you a world to play in

Looking back across the names we've created, the strongest ones tend to give you what we call a world to play in.

Aplenty was created for a business helping greenhouse growers improve yield. It carries ideas of abundance, growth and having more, giving the company distinctive territory in an industry full of technical names built around product features.

Prove is deliberately direct. Structural engineers spend a huge amount of time proving that calculations, designs and decisions are correct. The name sits right at the heart of the functional job while also giving the company something larger to build into around proof, confidence and the role of the engineer.

These names are doing different jobs, but each has an idea inside it that can keep flowing into the language, identity and behaviour of the company.

A simple naming process

Naming will always involve judgement, but we've found you can make it a lot less subjective by agreeing what good looks like before you start considering individual words. Our process is roughly this.

1. Start with the Brand Idea and strategy.

What does the name need to help us do? What world are we trying to belong in? What associations would be useful? Does the name need to connect to an outcome, an attitude, the customer's industry or something else sitting at the heart of the Brand Idea? The strategy gives you somewhere to start and, just as importantly, gives you a way of ruling things out.

2. Agree the criteria.

Before we judge any names, we agree what a good name needs to do for this particular company. The exact weighting changes from project to project, but our checklist often looks something like this:

Naming criteria

□ Connects to the Brand Idea □ Feels relevant to the customer's world □ Is easy to say □ Is easy to spell after hearing it □ Is distinctive enough to remember □ Gives us a useful world to build from □ Has enough room for the company to grow □ Has a sensible domain available □ Has a plausible path to trademark or use □ Works in the important markets and languages □ Ideally, is a real word Not every box has to matter equally. For one company, being immediately relevant to an industry might be critical. For another, the whole opportunity might come from looking and sounding unlike anything else in the category. A business planning to operate across multiple countries has different constraints from one focused on Australia. The useful thing is agreeing which of those things matter most before you fall in love with a particular word.

3. Create broadly against territories, then assess against the criteria.

We generate names widely. What might come from language in the industry? From the Brand Idea? From product truths or benefits? Then we reduce the list against the criteria. Some options disappear because existing companies are too close, some are too abstract, and some are too narrow for where the company may go. The checklist doesn't remove judgement, but it gives you a better conversation than whether somebody likes the sound of a word. One option might connect much more directly to the Brand Idea. Another might have brilliant availability but give you nothing creatively. A third might be slightly harder to spell but open up a much more distinctive world.

4. Start experimenting with the strongest names.

A name can be hard to judge sitting in a spreadsheet, so once we have a shortlist, we start making things. Put it on a homepage. Say it out loud. Write a few headlines. Explore the identity and merch. Imagine somebody recommending the company to another person. This is where the idea of a world to play in becomes particularly useful. What language falls out of the name? What might the logo do? What attitude does it suggest? Options that looked equal on a list often separate quickly once you try to build a brand around them.

5. Check with customers.

If the name is meant to carry your story to a particular audience, asking that audience is useful. We normally give existing and potential customers a short paragraph explaining the company and Brand Idea, then show them the potential names. We ask which best suits what they've read, which best suits the company as they know it, and separately which they personally like. Those are different questions. The name somebody likes most isn't necessarily the one they think best communicates the idea. The idea isn't to outsource the decision to a survey. Rather, it is to provide more data for you to consider.

6. Check the practical reality.

Once we're getting serious about a shortlist, we look properly at domains, trademarks and whether the names appear usable in the markets and categories that matter. This is also the point to get appropriate legal advice. Our approach to availability follows, but it is not for everyone.

7. Make the call.

There is rarely a mathematically perfect winner. Eventually you take the strategy, criteria, creative exploration, customer response and practical checks, decide which name gives you the strongest platform to build from, and commit to it. The name isn't the finished brand. It is the starting point. Experience helps too. Having done this many times, we have a more trained antenna for names that open up creative and conceptual opportunities, and can often show the team what might be built from an option before it feels obvious.

How we think about availability

Availability is one area where every company needs to make its own call. Particularly for digital start-ups, our approach is pragmatic: not whether you can lock a word up everywhere forever, but whether you have a sensible basis to use it in the markets and categories that matter and understand the risk you're accepting. Circumstances can change. Someone can launch with a similar name, or a better-funded business can decide to challenge you. For a digital start-up, changing a name may sometimes be manageable in a way it isn't if you're stamping it into hardware or ordering hundreds of thousands of chocolate-bar wrappers. That is how we think about the trade-off, not legal advice. Get your own advice and make the decision appropriate to what you're building. The same applies to future-proofing. You don't want a name so narrow that it traps the company in today's product, but trying to anticipate every market, product and customer you might serve in ten years usually pushes you towards names with very little meaning at all. You are naming the company you are building now, not every company it might theoretically become. Then you build equity into the name through what you do next.

Names become what you build into them.

Earlier in the book I used an expression we love: a comedian doesn't tell you they're funny, they tell you a joke. Brand works the same way. You don't become known for caring about your customers by saying you care about them. You don't become known for opening new frontiers by putting it in a positioning statement. And you don't become a leader in an industry because the homepage says you are one. People work out what you're about from what they repeatedly see you do.

By this point you've made some choices about who you're for and what you want them to know you for. You've begun bringing those associations together in a Brand Idea, thought about how the company should look and feel, and perhaps whether the name is helping to carry the story. The next question is what those choices should make the company do differently.

This is one of the places brand projects can stop before delivering all their value. A company does the strategy, launches a much better-looking website, everybody feels good about the work, and then the business goes back to doing exactly what it was doing before. If nothing changes, it is difficult for the meaning of the brand to change either.

The good news is that start-ups are very well set up for this part. You already build things, hire people, meet customers, choose partners, attend events, publish things and decide what deserves your time and money. The opportunity is to be more intentional about which of those things you do, and how you use them to build the reputation you want.

Put each association to work

Take the two or three associations from your Brand Set. For each one, look at what already supports it, what works against it and what would make it stronger.

If you want to be known for helping customers become better operators, you might already have a support team sharing valuable advice every day. You could turn what they know into useful guides, improve part of the product or bring customers together to learn from each other. You might stop producing generic content that has very little to do with their work.

Pick the work most useful to the customer and most likely to make a difference, rather than trying to do everything. Give each action an owner, a time to do it and a way for the right people to experience it or hear about it.

Start with the product

The first place to look is the product. Here, product means the actual product or service the customer uses, rather than the way we used "product" in Chapter 1 as shorthand for a company talking mainly about itself. For most start-ups, the product is the biggest brand touchpoint the company will ever have. Someone might spend five minutes looking at your website, see the occasional LinkedIn post and attend one of your events. They may spend hundreds of hours a year using the product. If the brand says one thing and the product experience says another, the product is going to win. Aglow is a simple example. We met it earlier as the Category Creator trying to make beauty memberships a normal and valuable way to run a beauty business. Once the company made that choice, it didn't only give the marketing team something to talk about. It gave the product somewhere to go. If memberships are going to become a better way to run a beauty business, the product should become increasingly useful for setting them up, managing them, understanding whether they're working and helping an owner get better at running that kind of business. This approach worked. The further the product moved in that direction, the more credible Aglow became as an expert in beauty memberships. The product doesn't simply carry the brand. It helps to make the brand true.

You can apply the same thought to the associations you've chosen. If you want to be known for simplicity, where is the product still unnecessarily complicated? If you're trying to give a profession more freedom to use its expertise, does the product actually create that freedom? If you're arguing for a better way of working, does the product help people work that way or does it still mostly automate the old one?

Not every feature needs to perform the Brand Idea. Companies have security updates, infrastructure work, customer requests and plenty of other things that simply need doing. But if you looked across everything being built over the next year and couldn't find anything that strengthened what you want to be known for, there would be a gap between the strategy and the work.

The reverse is useful too. Where does the product currently work against what you're trying to become known for? If you're promising simplicity and onboarding takes three weeks, that is a brand credibility issue.

Your reputation is built in everyday contact

For some customers, the biggest brand touchpoint they ever have is a conversation with your team. A support call when something has gone wrong. An email explaining what happens next. Someone taking the time to understand their situation and follow through.

The professionalism of the email, the attention to detail and the pace at which you respond can mean more to your brand than an expensive video. Every way you turn up gives people a view of the company.

If you want to be known for understanding your customer's world, does your support team have that understanding? If you promise simplicity, are your emails clear? If you talk about being a partner, do you stay involved when things become difficult?

Reputation is often treated as a PR job. Communications can help people hear about you, but much of the reputation is earned in these ordinary encounters. Make sure the people delivering them understand what you want the company to be known for and have the support to deliver it.

The founder is part of the brand

For many start-ups, the founder is the best-known part of the company. Customers, investors and potential team members may have a view of them long before they know much about the product.

That makes how the founder acts one of the most important parts of brand building. What they make time for, how they treat people, what they share and what they put their name behind all tell people something about the company. The founder and early employees also set the culture through what they reward, repeat and let slide.

Give the founder's brand some thought alongside the company's. Who do they most want to be known by? What do they want to be known for? Where do their expertise, experience and convictions help build the associations the company has chosen?

A founder might be known for a particular area of research, for understanding the customer's industry or for making the case for a better way of doing things. Their personal voice can make the company's direction easier to understand and more interesting to follow.

Founder posts on LinkedIn or X can get a response that the company account struggles to earn. The founder can explain why a decision was made, share something they've learned or give a customer recognition. The company can show the work and the results, and the founder and company can share each other's posts to build the same ideas from both accounts.

Start with what the founder knows and cares about, and where it connects with the people the company wants to reach. Over time, bring other people forward too. The company's reputation should grow beyond any one person.

Values people can experience

People also choose companies because of who they are as employers, colleagues and members of a community. Your values become part of the brand through how they show up in the workplace and in the decisions you make.

How do you support parents? What happens when someone needs flexibility? Who gets opportunities? How do you treat suppliers? What does the team experience when the company is under pressure? The answers say more than a values poster.

These choices can create a connection with customers, partners and future employees who share the values behind them, even when they have little to do with the product. People want to understand who they're choosing to work with.

If there's useful work happening here, let people see it. Share the practice, the thinking behind it and what you're learning. Workplace awards and other independent recognition can help give that story credibility. Entering can also give you feedback on where to improve.

Look for the things you're prepared to keep backing and that give the people you want to reach a meaningful reason to choose you.

Customers, partners and your place in the industry

Once you start looking at brand this way, you find evidence in decisions all through the company. We saw earlier that Ryan Baker looked around Timely's boardroom, realised nobody came from hair and beauty, and recruited Tabatha Coffey. That was a much stronger signal of commitment to the industry than anything Timely could have written on its homepage. The customers you choose to put forward work in a similar way. Every start-up has customer logos, but there is a difference between putting the biggest logo you can find on the homepage and choosing the customers who represent the world you want to belong in. Who do you give the microphone to at an event? Whose story do you invest in telling properly? Which customers would make somebody else in your target market think, these people understand companies like mine? I've always loved Geoffrey Moore's Crossing the Chasm. It was written as a playbook for bringing new technology to market, and in my opinion it's yet to be beaten. The basic idea is simple: find the early adopters who are actively looking for the change you offer, work closely with them, and turn their success into the proof that makes you safer and more attractive to everyone who comes next. We've used versions of that playbook throughout the company and brand building we've done at Vend, Previously and New+Improved. We often call the strongest of these lighthouse customers: the customers other people in the industry watch. We used the same logic with partnerships too. At Vend, we built partnerships with Apple, Square and Shopify to help promote what we were doing and borrow credibility from brands customers already knew and trusted, alongside the stories and proof we shared ourselves. The places you turn up tell people something too. A hospitality software company spending all its time at software conferences is making one kind of statement. The same company pouring coffees, running competitions and spending time with independent operators at hospitality events is making another. What the company knows can become evidence as well. Tracksuit has accumulated knowledge about how brands grow and how marketers can make the case for investing in them. Re-Leased sees how thousands of property professionals operate. Vend could see patterns in retail through the transactions flowing across the platform. A company can keep all of that knowledge locked inside the product and sales team, or it can use some of it to help the people it wants to matter to. That is one of the most useful shifts from product to brand. Instead of only asking, "What can we tell people about what we sell?", you start asking, "What can we do that is useful in their world?" The answer might be research, education, an event, a tool, recognition, a partnership or something you haven't thought of yet. This is also where the Brand Role becomes useful. A Champion should naturally notice different opportunities from a Category Creator. An Industry Benchmark should see different possibilities from a company building towards a New Frontiers role. The role gives you a way of looking at the opportunities already in front of you.

The choices that require commitment

Some actions are more powerful evidence than others because they require the company to commit something. Anyone can say they care about an industry. Hiring somebody respected from that industry takes more commitment. Anyone can put "customer first" on a website. Giving a customer a bigger stage than you give yourself says something more. Anyone can say they believe in a new way of working. Spending product resource to make that way easier to adopt is more convincing. That doesn't mean good brand activity has to be expensive. Some of the best details cost almost nothing. The useful test is whether the choice would be less likely to happen if the company didn't actually believe the idea.

Lift what is already there

You also don't need to begin with a giant list of new things to do. Quite often the first job is noticing what is already there. The events, customer stories, product details, content, partnerships or community activity may already contain the beginnings of the brand. The work is to recognise which of those things point in the direction you've chosen, make them clearer, do more of the strongest ones and notice where the important gaps are. This comes back to the lift and build idea from earlier in the book. Lift the strongest evidence that already exists, then build more of it. At the same time, notice the things that point somewhere else. Sometimes stopping something is as useful as starting something. You might still be attending a conference out of habit that belongs to the technology category you're trying to move beyond, or sponsoring something because you've sponsored it for five years rather than because it has anything to do with the company you're trying to become. Brand doesn't require every decision in the company to be perfectly pure. The point is to create enough alignment that, over time, the pattern becomes clear. The New Zealand fashion designer Karen Walker once described brand to me as being a bit like coral. Thousands of tiny things accumulate over time until eventually they make something substantial and recognisable. It's useful because one customer story, one product decision, one hire, one piece of research or one event doesn't look like much on its own. Keep adding pieces in the same direction and eventually something starts to form. One action gives you a proof point. Enough proof points in the same direction give you a reputation. That is why simplicity matters so much. If you're trying to make five different ideas true at once, the evidence gets spread everywhere. When the centre is clear, lots of different things can accumulate around it. It is also why brand building takes time. The people inside the company see every expression of the idea while the market might see one thing this month and another six months later. You will be bored with it long before most people outside the company have even noticed the pattern. So the job is not to constantly invent a new brand. It is to keep making the one you've chosen more true through the product, the people you hire, the customers you champion, the things you publish, the events you attend, the partnerships you make and the choices that show what the company is prepared to back. You can be doing all of that work, though, and still find that hardly anybody outside the company knows about it. The next chapter is about how the evidence travels.

Think about the companies you know best and have the clearest feeling for. They have usually done more than put ads, features and offers in front of you. Over time, you have also heard their stories: why they started, what they believe, what they see changing, what their customers are doing and what they are trying to make happen next. There is plenty of overlap between brand and marketing, but they can do different jobs. Marketing has the practical job of harnessing and capturing demand around what you sell. Here is the feature. Here is the problem it solves. Here is the offer. Brand stories help people understand what the company is about. They are often the same stories a founder tells naturally to a prospective customer, somebody they are trying to hire, an investor or a partner. Why did we start this? What are we seeing that others might not be? What do we believe should be different? What are we trying to make happen next? Most companies are pretty good at communicating the what. The why and the how are much more underused, even though they are often where the most interesting material lives. Finding and sharing those stories is a key part of brand building. The company does the work. The stories help the meaning travel. The Drumbeat Strategy is an approach for doing that consistently. At Vend, we had a huge focus on finding reasons for people to keep hearing about the company. We had retailers doing interesting things all over the world, product teams solving difficult problems, new countries opening up, partnerships forming and a huge amount of information flowing through the platform about what was happening in retail. None of those things automatically became stories. Somebody had to notice what was interesting, work out who might care and turn it into something worth sharing. We became deliberate about it. We kept lists of journalists, industry people, potential partners and others we wanted to know Vend, and found regular reasons to stay in touch with them. Internally we called the approach the drumbeat. The name came from the idea that communications works better as a steady rhythm than a series of enormous bangs. Start-ups often go quiet until something big happens, then suddenly want everybody to care about a funding round, product launch, new market or important hire. From inside the company the news feels significant because everyone has lived through the work behind it. From outside, it can look like a company you barely know asking for your attention. A drumbeat gives the big moments somewhere to land. If somebody has already seen a customer story, noticed some interesting research, heard the founder speak or read something from the company, the next piece of news arrives with context. They recognise the name and have some idea what the company is about. For Vend, trying to build familiarity in markets a long way from New Zealand, that rhythm was especially valuable. We worked with good PR partners, but earned coverage and our own communications were strongest when they worked together. Coverage gave us independent credibility. Our own channels helped it reach the customers, partners and other people we actually cared about reaching. And the things we shared ourselves through LinkedIn, X or our blog meant journalists were not meeting Vend for the first time when a pitch arrived. There's an even bigger opportunity today. Founders can build audiences directly. Specialist podcasts and newsletters can matter more to an industry than a national newspaper. Companies can publish research, events, commentary and customer stories without waiting for anyone's permission.

The discipline is deciding what you actually want to become known for. Start with the associations you've chosen in your Brand Set, then develop a few story angles: subjects where the company has something useful to say, the audience has a reason to care and the business keeps creating real evidence.

If you want to be known for helping property professionals run better businesses, an angle could be what the best operators do differently. One story might follow a customer's decision, another share a lesson from a roadshow, another explain something useful you've learned from the product. Each gives people a fresh reason to connect you with the same idea.

If you want an association to form, you need more than one story saying it. A customer can provide one kind of proof, company data another. A product release might show that something you have been arguing for is now possible. A partnership can add credibility. The founder can explain why the company has taken a position. The subject stays reasonably consistent while the evidence keeps changing.

Choose who should tell each story. Sometimes the founder's experience or point of view makes it interesting. Sometimes a customer or someone on the team is closer to the work. The company and personal accounts can share and support each other's stories.

That is what separates a drumbeat from a normal content calendar. A content calendar can become a schedule of things you have promised to publish. A drumbeat is a schedule of evidence for the things you are trying to become known for. And that evidence has to be interesting to somebody other than you. Companies spend a lot of time on things that feel enormously significant internally and assume other people will care. You see it in all the familiar we're thrilled to announce language. But people only really care about things relevant to them. Too much company communication is another version of the product problem: we talk about ourselves instead of making the story relevant to the customer. Over time you learn which journalists, podcasters, newsletter writers and industry people care about your area, and they learn what your company knows about. Bigger isn't automatically better. A specialist newsletter or podcast in your customer's world can be far more valuable than a huge general audience. The other part is relationship building. Make a list of the journalists, podcasters, newsletter writers and industry people who matter in your customer's world. Introduce yourself before you need anything. Tell them briefly what the company does, what you know something about and the kinds of stories you might be able to help with. Then stay in touch when you have something relevant to share: customer stories, data, launches, partnerships, market observations or a strong point of view. You don't need to pitch them every time. The aim is to become a familiar, credible source, so when you do have important news there is already a relationship there. Your own channels have another important job: distribution. Earned media brings independent credibility, but the moment can be fleeting. When we raised capital for New+Improved, our venture studio, we got a great piece in the country's largest newspaper. The paper brought the credibility, but we could not rely on the investors, talent, partners, potential customers and other people we wanted to reach picking it up that day or visiting the website. We clipped the coverage, shared it on LinkedIn and boosted it directly to those audiences, so far more of the right people saw it than we could have reached through the publication alone. The biggest brand building opportunity is to create stories that are relevant, interesting and credible to your audiences, then publish and promote them consistently through the channels you control. You can be your own media. Companies are comfortable paying to distribute adverts. Why not put marketing spend behind the stories that might actually move people? You can track them in the same ways, and prove the ROI on story. The Drumbeat isn't about producing more content. It is about repeatedly finding the strongest evidence inside the company, turning it into something other people have a reason to care about, and getting it in front of the people you want to know you.

Give somebody responsibility for keeping it moving. Start with a rhythm you can sustain, even one useful story a week. Look at the work already happening, choose the strongest story, work out who it's for and plan how they'll see it. A regular time to do this is more useful than an ambitious content calendar nobody can maintain.

How the Drumbeat concept became its own company

For years we had run versions of the Drumbeat Strategy manually, first at Vend and then with companies we worked with at Previously and New+Improved. It worked, but it was hard to keep going. Start-ups are busy, communications falls down the priority list, founders carry too much of it themselves, and PR often arrives in a burst around the moment the company suddenly needs attention. We had started wondering whether there was a company to be built with a new take on PR and communications when Barney Chunn, the co-founder and CEO of Drumbeat, joined New+Improved Ventures after spending close to a decade building Conqa, a construction technology company. His experience as a founder lined up closely with what we'd seen from the other side: good companies can be doing valuable work but grow more slowly than competitors who are better at getting their story out. Barney spent time talking to founders, communications people, PR people and reporters, and one of the strongest things that came back from journalists was very simple: they don't want PR, they want news. Reporters are much more interested in what is actually happening inside the business, and in being able to speak to the people close enough to the story to tell them something useful. That provided the centre of the company. The problem was not that high-growth businesses had nothing to say. It was that useful things were happening inside them all the time and they struggled to turn those things into awareness with any consistency. The product would help companies find their story, find the audience for it and share it with a steady rhythm across owned and earned media. We saw the Brand Role as Industry Changer, and the Brand Idea became Turn story into a sales channel. That is why Industry Changer was the useful role. Companies already bought communications support. The opportunity was to make a steady, repeatable way of finding and sharing their stories practical, so communications could become an ongoing part of how they grow. Producing content faster would only be a product improvement. The bigger opportunity was changing how the company uses communications.

Using the association prompts from Chapter 3, we can make that direction more specific:

• What's special about the approach? A radically more affordable way to make PR an ongoing part of the modern marketing stack.
• What does that help customers do more of? Get their stories covered and get more value from the coverage by using it across their own marketing and sales.
• What could be better in the industry? Stories could be a much more useful and consistent part of how companies grow, rather than something they only put out when there's a big announcement.

Because the venture studio was part of building the company from the beginning, the Brand Set, product and design could develop together. We did not want Drumbeat to look like a PR agency or another polished B2B SaaS company. What we were building felt much closer to a media channel, helping useful stories get transmitted to the people who might care about them. That led the design into the world of early cable and satellite television, another moment when distribution opened up and suddenly there were more channels, more specialist audiences and more kinds of stories able to find a home. Broadcast, transmission and signal became a useful world to build from. Satellite dishes became part of the visual system, while the language could naturally move into stories going live, media beats, channels and the relationship between owned and earned.

This idea gave us territory to keep making things from. It could move into the website, product, motion, social posts, press materials, events and something as small as a mug without requiring a completely new creative thought every time. That is the executable-brand point from the design chapter in practice: the Brand Idea is not only something you can say, it gives the people building the company somewhere to go. You do not need Drumbeat the product to use the approach, though we would encourage you to try both the approach and the company. Start with the people you most want to know you, the few things you want them to associate with you, and the useful evidence the company is already creating. Then keep finding relevant reasons to put that evidence in front of them. It’s the same as any other part of conversion: people are more likely to buy from you if they know, trust and like you.

Start with what is already there

Most companies using this book will not be starting from a blank page. You may already have a website, sales presentation, visual identity, old positioning work, product language and ideas that people inside the company care deeply about. Some of it will still be useful. Some of it may reflect where the company was rather than where it is going. And some of it may now be pulling in different directions.

Whether you're starting your Brand Set or checking a first version, take a clear look at the current state. Put your website, sales presentation, existing brand or positioning work and customer research in front of you. Write down who each one appears to be for, the problem it leads with, the value it claims and the ideas it seems to want the company known for. Then compare that with the customers driving the business, what they actually value, what the product now does best and the things the company is already doing particularly well.

Do not assume the old work needs to be thrown away. Equally, do not keep an idea simply because people are familiar with it or because a lot of work went into creating it. Ask what is still true, distinctive and useful, what has earned valuable recognition, and what now undersells the company or points somewhere it no longer wants to go.

Use that review to decide what to carry forward, where the existing work is pulling in different directions and what needs to change.

If two existing ideas are competing, ask what each is doing. One might explain the product's value while the other describes the bigger change you want to make. They may belong together in different parts of the set. If they're aimed at different customers or promise conflicting things, you'll need to make a choice. Don't combine them into a long sentence just to avoid it.

How to test your Brand Set

Okay, great. So we now have a way to think about the role of brand for start-ups, and perhaps the beginnings of your own Brand Set. Now let's look at how you can tell whether it is heading in the right direction, and how you might begin measuring whether the brand is working. If the move from product to brand is largely about becoming more customer-centric, one of the best checks is an obvious one: talk to your customers. Once you have a view on your Brand Set elements, or your updated visual identity, or the actions you intend to start doing, it is great to check if you are on the right track. The trick is in how you ask. With new ideas and work that is still forming, it is very tempting to show somebody something and ask, "Do you like this?" That is rarely the question you need answered. Instead, ask whether the work is doing the job you set out for it to do.

• If you want the brand to feel more like an industry leader, does it?
• If you want it to reflect your customer's industry back to them, do they see themselves in it? Does it feel relevant to their work?
• If you think you have identified a distinctive piece of value, do they actually value it?
• For each association you've chosen, would they care if you became known for it? What would convince them it was true?
• If you want to become more distinctive and interesting, does the work feel different from the other companies they encounter?
• If your Brand Idea is built around something they want to do more of, does that ambition feel true to them?

This applies to the strategy and the visual work. Whether everyone inside the company likes a new identity is much less interesting than whether your customers find it relevant, credible and fitting for the kind of company you are trying to become. New things are unfamiliar by definition, so immediate likeability is not always a good measure of whether you have made something distinctive. If the work is doing what you intended, some initial discomfort may be a better sign than everybody saying it looks nice. The strategy gives you plenty to test too. Is the problem as significant as you think it is? Does the bigger thing you think your customer wants to do more of create any energy? Do they recognise the value you are building around? Is the language anything like the language they use themselves? A handful of thoughtful conversations can expose an idea that sounds brilliant inside the company and makes very little sense outside it. They can also give you much better language for your marketing and strategy. Often the clearest words come straight out of a customer's mouth: the phrase everybody nods at, the way they describe the problem, or the term that is completely normal in their industry but would never have appeared in your strategy workshop. This is one of the reasons we've ended up approaching brand more like product development than a traditional brand process.

Make some choices. Put them in front of customers. Learn. Improve them. Repeat the process.

You don't need to get everything right in one go. You are building something new. Some polarisation is good. If everything feels expected and safe, you probably haven't pushed it far enough.

How will we know if it's working?

Brand can seem difficult to measure. But once you have decided what you want to become known for, you can test whether those associations are getting stronger.

Start by asking customers, or the people in the market you most care about, what comes to mind when they think of your company. Ask without offering any suggestions. Then show them a list and ask which ideas they associate with you.

Use the associations in your Brand Set to guide the prompted questions, expressed in language customers understand. Include other plausible answers so people aren't simply agreeing with a list of your ambitions.

This gives you a baseline. Do the work to build your intended associations, then ask the same questions again, say six months later. If more people mention those ideas without being prompted, or choose them when shown the list, the work may be starting to land. If they haven't moved, look at whether you created enough evidence, whether the right people saw it and whether the association was useful to them in the first place. Small samples can be noisy, so look for a pattern rather than treating every change as a verdict.

Brand tracking tools can make this more systematic. We helped start Tracksuit, which helps consumer brands do exactly this. Measurement is harder in B2B, where audiences are often much smaller, but even a simple survey can give you useful direction if you remain consistent about who you ask, what you ask and when you ask again.

Then look at the wider signals. Are branded search, direct traffic and inbound enquiries increasing? Ask people how they heard about you. Listen to sales calls and notice how much explaining is needed at the beginning. Pay attention to whether customers are beginning to describe the company using the ideas and language you want to become known for.

Notice what is coming towards the company too. Are you attracting more of the people you want to hire? Are relevant partners approaching you? Are you receiving speaking invitations or being asked by journalists to comment on the subjects you want to own? No single signal proves that the brand is working. Together, they can show whether more of the right people know who you are and associate you with the right things.

AI tools offer another useful check. Ask several major models what your company is known for, which companies they associate with the territory you want to own, and how they describe you against your closest competitors.

The answers are not a precise brand metric. They vary between models and change over time. But they reflect the information and evidence those models can find about you online. Look at the sources shaping each answer and notice what is missing. You are not trying to write for AI. You are testing whether you have put enough clear and credible evidence into the world for your intended position to be understood. If the models cannot find your story, there is a good chance customers, partners and other audiences will struggle to find it too.

There is an even simpler thing to measure: did you actually do what you said you were going to do?

For each association, did you carry out the actions you chose? If you decided to help a particular customer become better at their work, what have you done for them? If there were gaps between the reputation you wanted and the company's behaviour, have any closed? Are you continuing to create and share evidence in the same direction?

A surprising amount of brand projects stops at the launch of the new identity. The real work is everything that comes afterwards. Eventually you should expect this to help the commercial work too. Greater familiarity should make it easier to get considered. Stronger associations should make it easier for people to understand why you are relevant. Better recognition should make the rest of the marketing and sales work easier. The commercial value of brand appears in how it strengthens the rest of the company. It should help more of the right people find you, understand why you are relevant and choose you. It should make sales easier, hiring stronger and every investment in growth work harder.

Strong brand building should lift the trajectory of a great team, product and market. It should give your team greater clarity about the role and opportunity for brand, and give customers a clearer reason to choose you.

Keep the work moving

The founder or CEO needs to champion the direction, but they don't need to approve every post or image. Give somebody responsibility for keeping the Brand Set and plan in use, and give the people leading product, sales, support and hiring enough context to make their own decisions.

Choose a small number of actions for the next 90 days. Make each specific enough that someone can own it, finish it and show what changed. "Improve the website" is too loose. "Replace the product-only homepage story with customer outcomes and two examples that demonstrate them" is something a team can work on. A longer-term ambition might need a first step, such as testing one customer workshop before committing to an event programme.

Review what you did, what people noticed and what you learned. Keep building the associations that are useful. Don't change direction simply because the team is tired of hearing it. The market hasn't seen all the work you have.

Conclusion

Most founders we work with didn't start as brand people. Many came to us wanting a new website or pitch deck, not a brand strategy. Some were active sceptics. Some needed to speak to three founders we had worked with before they were prepared to give up a whole day for a brand workshop. But many of those same founders have gone on to become the strongest advocates for the work. The aim of this book has been to make brand feel less like a mysterious layer of marketing applied after the real work is finished, and more like part of the serious work of building the company.

You decide who you most want to matter to and what you want them to know you for, then choose an idea simple enough to guide the work you'll do to build that reputation. The product, your people and the things the company does create the evidence. The identity makes the meaning visible and recognisable. The name can give you a world to build in. The Drumbeat helps that evidence travel consistently to the people you want to reach.

The workbooks that follow will help you develop your own Brand Set and plan, and the accompanying website has tools to help you define and refine the work. In markets where so few companies take brand seriously, it can become a powerful advantage.

A brand is an idea you make true over time.

And this is the least true it will ever be

So it’s time to get building.

The Brand Roles are there to help turn strategy into behaviour. The stories are in Chapter 2. This section is deliberately more practical: prompts to use when you are deciding what to build, prove, say or do next.

Champion

A Champion wins by helping its customer win.

Ask:

• What does our customer want to achieve beyond using our product?
• Where are they under-recognised, under-resourced or struggling to prove their value?
• What could we give them more of: knowledge, evidence, recognition, community, influence or opportunity?
• Which customers could we give a bigger stage to?
• What could the product do to give them more freedom to do the work they value?

Useful territory: education, recognition, customer stages, community, tools, research and product choices that make the customer better off.

Watch for: saying "customer first" without doing anything that transfers real value or attention to the customer.

Category Creator

A Category Creator is trying to make an unfamiliar behaviour become normal.

Ask:

• What new behaviour does the product make possible?
• Why would somebody adopt it rather than keep doing what they do today?
• What language, economics or evidence would make it easier to understand?
• Who are the early adopters whose success could make the behaviour credible?
• What does the product need to become better at as the category develops?
• Which partners could help the behaviour feel established rather than fringe?

Useful territory: simple category language, evidence, economics, early-adopter stories, guides, partnerships, education, events and product changes that make adoption easier.

Watch for: believing that naming a category means you have created one. It becomes real when other people adopt the behaviour and start talking about it too.

Mission-Led

A Mission-Led brand is trying to advance a meaningful change that extends beyond the transaction.

Ask:

• What change do we want to help make happen beyond selling the product?
• Why do we have a credible right to contribute to it?
• What useful work could we do even if there were no immediate sale attached?
• Which researchers, experts, institutions or communities could strengthen the work?
• Can we measure progress against the change in any useful way?

Useful territory: education, research, advocacy, experts and institutions, communities, practical tools and behaviours, and ways of measuring progress.

Watch for: attaching a grand purpose statement to ordinary commercial activity. If removing the product leaves almost nothing useful to do, the mission may not be substantial enough yet.

Industry Changer

An Industry Changer starts with something customers already buy or do, then makes a better way of using it possible.

Ask:

• What do customers already buy or do?
• What constraint around cost, speed, access or flexibility has disappeared or changed?
• What better practice does that make possible?
• What is our clearest point of view about the old way and the better way?
• Who is already proving the better way works?
• What evidence would persuade more conservative parts of the market?
• What could the product do to make the new behaviour easier to adopt?

Useful territory: a clear point of view, forward-thinking practitioners, case studies, research, education, useful language and product changes that make the better way easier.

Watch for: stopping at faster, cheaper and easier. Those are useful product benefits, but the bigger brand opportunity is the better practice or result they unlock.

New Frontiers

A New Frontiers brand makes scientific or technical progress visible and helps people understand the new possibilities it opens.

Ask:

• What big goal gives our technical work direction?
• What scientific or technical barrier are we working to overcome?
• What technologies, production methods or infrastructure need to work together to deliver it?
• What would overcoming it let people do that was previously impossible or out of practical reach?
• What can we demonstrate today, and what remains an ambition?
• Which difficult problems best show the progress we have made?
• What research, demonstrations or performance evidence can we share?
• Are the people doing the work visible, and can they explain why it matters?
• Who could help develop, test or use the new capability?
• What would the next meaningful advance make possible for our customers or the wider world?

Useful territory: a clear and ambitious goal, working demonstrations, scientific and engineering progress, systems thinking, research, difficult problems, visible technical teams, credible collaborators and tangible examples of what becomes possible.

Watch for: treating technical sophistication as proof that you are opening a new frontier, or presenting an ambition as an achieved capability. You can build towards this role, but your claims should grow with the evidence.

Industry Benchmark

The Industry Benchmark is trying to become the company its industry looks to for what great looks like.

Ask:

• What have we learned across enough customers to be useful to the whole industry?
• Where can we define, demonstrate or recognise better practice?
• What data or benchmarks could help people understand what good looks like?
• Who should we bring together or give recognition to?
• What should the product increasingly embody if we believe these standards ourselves?
• What would people who never buy from us still find useful?

Useful territory: industry data and benchmarks, education, recognition, convening respected practitioners, standards, best practice, research and product choices that help customers operate at a higher level.

Watch for: self-appointment. The position becomes real when the industry starts treating you as a reference point, not when you put "leading" on the homepage.

Using the playbooks

These are prompts, not compulsory tactics. A Champion doesn't need to create an award. A Category Creator doesn't need to run a conference. An Industry Benchmark doesn't need to publish a giant annual report.

Use the role to make choices. If you're deciding whether to sponsor an event, commission research, build a partnership or prioritise a product change, ask which association it would strengthen and how it would help make the Brand Idea more true.

If the role gives you a useful list of things to build, say, prove and do, it is doing its job.

About this edition

This is an early test edition being shared to make the ideas and the book better. Some of the design, imagery and examples are still placeholders and will continue to evolve. Feedback on what is useful, unclear, missing or repetitive is very welcome.

A note on the examples

Every company in this book is a collaborative effort.

The founders, teams, customers and partners did the hard work of building the businesses. The brand projects involved teams across Previously Unavailable and our partners.

I've told these stories from the part of the work I saw most closely and from the lessons we've taken from them.

Where a business result follows a brand project, it should not be read as a claim that brand alone caused it.

About Simon Pound

Simon Pound is co-CEO at Previously Unavailable, where he works with founders and teams on brand, positioning and venture creation.

Before Previously he was Marketing Director, Brand and Communications at Vend, helping build the retail software company's brand and communications as it grew from under $2m to over $20m in annual recurring revenue.

He is also a partner and co-founder at New+Improved, the founding Chair of Drumbeat, and General Partner of Brand Fund, a fund investing in companies that can be the leading brand in their industries, most of which are brands Previously partner with.

Previously Unavailable

Previously Unavailable is a ventures company working across brand, strategy, design and venture creation.

We partner with ambitious companies to help turn new products into brands and build new ventures of our own.

New+Improved

New+Improved is a venture builder creating companies and products marketers fall in love with.

It discovers, validates, builds and launches B2B SaaS companies at the heart of the marketing technology stack of the future. New+Improved is behind Tracksuit, Ideally and Drumbeat.

Drumbeat

Drumbeat is the PR and communications platform for high-growth companies. It helps teams find the strongest stories inside their business, share them with the right media and track the results.

By combining software, media relationships and hands-on PR expertise, Drumbeat gives companies a repeatable and measurable way to build brand awareness across owned and earned channels.