Brand has a real branding problem in start-up land, and as a result it's perhaps the most underutilised lever for growth that start-ups have. Today most start-ups probably couldn't agree on a definition for brand, let alone share an understanding of how it can help them find the right customers, attract the best team 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, and 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, as brand partners for some of the most forward-thinking and fastest growing companies in the market. Most of the founders we've worked with were not brand or marketing specialists. Many had not even worked in companies that took these things seriously.

So over the years we've iterated an approach that creates a shared understanding of what we're trying to do, why it will help, how we'll measure it, and how we'll build a brand 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.

This short book shares that approach. We'll define what we mean by brand, show how companies we've worked with have used it, give you a framework for defining your own, and walk through bringing it to life through design, action and the stories you put into the world. We'll also look at how to tell whether the work is beginning to land. By the end you'll have a brand-building plan in the same format we use with the companies we work with, and things you can do straight away.

Who this is for

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

It is most useful once you are commercialising and have enough contact with the market to know roughly who your customer is. If you are still deep in research and do not know who the eventual customer will be, you are probably too early to really activate brand through the methods and frameworks we will share here.

There is no particular company size where brand suddenly becomes relevant. We have used the same basic principles with companies near the beginning and with 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.

To make brand practical for high-growth companies, we've developed and are sharing a process closer to product development than a traditional brand process. We set goals, make choices, put them into the world, learn from what happens, and build from what we learn.

Why we've developed this approach

Previously Unavailable is a ventures company working in brand, strategy and venture creation. We swap equity with select start-ups in return for our work, co-launch companies like Tracksuit, Ideally and Drumbeat, and invest through our VC fund partnership with Icehouse Ventures. As venture partners we care about how brand and positioning can increase the value and outcomes of the companies we work with.

I've led much of this start-up work, having come to Previously after being an operator at Vend, a retail point of sale company. There I was creative director, wrote the website, and led brand and communications as it grew from under $2m of annual recurring revenue to over $20m. That experience taught me how brand and positioning can drive awareness and conversion, and how using brand in the right way can make it an ally of performance marketing, rather than an adversary. It also taught me that everything from the people you show on your website to the events you run and the team you hire is part of your brand. Vend sold for over $500m in 2020. It was one of New Zealand's early SaaS success stories, and a place that believed in and invested in brand from the beginning.

Since joining Previously, working particularly with James Hurman, our founder, Phoebe Devine, our Chief Design Officer, and Hannah Small, our Design Director, and the wider team, we've helped build brands for companies including Tracksuit, Ideally, Appetise, Aglow, Ārepa, Timely, Re-Leased and Extraordinary, among many others. This work is where we developed many of the ideas that follow, and we'll share them through these companies' stories.

Many of the ideas in here are well-proven in other areas of business. Some have parallels across brand, strategy, product and communications. What we've done over the years is work out which ideas are most useful for high-growth companies, bring them together in a way founders can actually use, and develop our own frameworks and practices around them.

This book is part of that work. It's a companion to James's book Future Demand, which makes the case for why brand matters and how effective it is for all kinds of companies. This is the practical side: how start-ups can define, craft and build their brand.

Let's get to it.

First: what do we mean by Brand?

Start-ups often think of brand as just the logo and the t-shirt colour. Or, at the other end of the spectrum, as the sum of everything a company does. Neither pole is much help. We try to bring solid definitions and frameworks to pin brand down, and we'll share these through the book.

We think of brand as having three main work streams.

1. Brand is your strategy and positioning. This sets out who you're for, what problem you solve, the unique value you provide, the role your brand can play in helping you reach your goals, and the ideas you want to become known for. Before any other work, you need to define these things. They are the foundation everything else is built on.

2. Brand is how you look and feel. This is your distinctive visual identity and key assets: your logo, colours, fonts, photography, and the major pieces of work that carry the brand into the world. Your website, hero imagery, social posts and more. The best visual brands communicate the key ideas in the strategy clearly and simply, sometimes explicitly and sometimes more subtly.

3. Brand is what you do. 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 content you share, the customers you hero, the keynote topic you choose at a conference. This may be the most important and least understood part of brand. You build association with the ideas you've chosen through what you repeatedly do.

Breaking brand into these three areas makes it easier to understand, and easier to create tangible, measurable workstreams to build resonance and familiarity with your audience across all three. This book concentrates mainly on the first, strategy part, and the third, behaviours, and shares a little about how we approach the visual identity, with plenty of images and examples.

What we're trying to do

People make brand too complicated. For it to work it needs to be simple. We need to decide the few things you want to be most associated with, then make as much of what you do reinforce them as possible.

That's it. Get clear on who your key customer is, what you want to be known for, and the simple idea that can tie those things together. Then turn your touchpoints, like your name, identity, website, product, content and events, into evidence of it. We'll get into exactly what we mean by that idea, and how to find yours, later. For now, the important thing is to know you need something to anchor to. Without it, you tend to fall back on whatever looks like best practice for a company like yours and just talk about your features and benefits, which is how everyone ends up looking and sounding the same.

The job of the brand is to avoid that, and make you distinctive, interesting and appealing to your customer. It's to create enough interest and confidence that the right people lean in, take your call and want to hear more, so you earn the right to give them the detail that wins the deal.

The chapters ahead build this piece by piece. We'll start with the few principles that have helped the founders we work with make sense of brand, then turn them into something you can actually use.

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.

Here are five principles we use to make brand practical and useful for start-ups.

1. The move from product to brand

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, "Gosh, I go to a $10 barber and my other director is a bald man. If we're going to become a hair and beauty brand, we'd better get an industry expert on the board."

They recruited Tabatha Coffey, a kind of hair and beauty Gordon Ramsay, a high-profile expert who fronted big US TV 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.

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 exited to a large player in their industry 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.

2. 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 of a brand strategy onto one page: what you are trying to achieve through brand, who you are for, what is broken in their world, the unique value you provide, the role you want to play in their industry, and the simple Brand Idea you want to make more true over time.

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.

The Brand Set has six parts.

3. 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.

4. 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 technical excellence, demonstrate it. 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 matters because it gives you the idea you want to become associated with. The visual identity matters because it helps people recognise and remember it. But neither is enough on its own. 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.

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.

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 obvious actions, you're getting somewhere. If the only answer is to put the words on the website, you probably don't have a brand idea yet.

5. 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 brand idea and direction has 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 your Brand Idea, and for 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.

Let's meet six common 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Ārepa is a good example. 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

The Industry Changer is useful when your product doesn't just do the existing job better. It makes a better way of working possible.

This tends to happen when an industry already has an established way of doing something, but a new technology or approach removes a constraint around cost, speed, access or complexity. What once had to be done a certain way can now be done differently.

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.

Ideally is a market research platform for marketers and product teams. 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.

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.

• Does your product create a step change in how an established piece of work can be done?
• 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.

Technical Excellence

Technical Excellence is the right Brand Role when you have created technology that is meaningfully ahead of what the market can otherwise access, and that technical advantage is important enough to become a reason to choose you.

Lots of technology companies want to tell the world how technically sophisticated they are. That instinct is at the heart of why so many present as what we are calling products rather than brands. Very few have earned the right to build their brand around the technology itself.

Being well engineered is not enough. Having smart engineers is not enough. Using AI is definitely not enough. The bar for this role is much higher. You need to have built something meaningfully better, difficult to reproduce, and important enough that the technical achievement itself deserves to be part of what the company is known for.

Technical Excellence creates a deliberate tension with much of the product-to-brand thinking in this book. Usually we're trying to get companies to stop talking so much about the product and start talking about what matters to the customer. But if your product really is ten times better, or you have built technology that others simply do not have, then the product itself can be part of what makes the brand interesting.

The bar needs to be high. If you use the same underlying AI models as everyone else, your AI prowess probably isn't a differentiating brand position. But if you have built your own frontier model, developed proprietary technology or accumulated data that gives you a capability competitors truly cannot reproduce, it might be.

That is also what makes this role different from Industry Changer.

An Industry Changer says: there is a better way to do this work.

A Technical Excellence brand says: we have built technology that others cannot match.

The job of the brand is to make that advantage and innovation visible, credible and valuable. Show the performance. Publish the research. Demonstrate the technology on difficult problems. Put the people building it forward. Make it clear why the technical achievement matters and why competitors cannot simply say the same thing.

Partly is an AI company building frontier models to enable repair. 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.

What makes Partly particularly interesting for Technical Excellence is the depth of the technology underneath that ambition. Rather than simply building applications on top of somebody else's AI, Partly 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.

That is a very different position from businesses claiming to be AI companies when they are essentially software wrappers around somebody else's model. Partly has technology and proprietary data that competitors do not have and cannot easily reproduce. That means the technology itself can become part of the brand.

The role then is to prove it. Show what the model can do. Take on problems others cannot solve. Publish the evidence. Put the technical team forward. Make the gap between your capability and the alternatives increasingly obvious. Stake out the leadership position through how you turn up in the industry.

Partly also brings some of the conventions of leading AI labs into how it presents itself. That helps signal that this is an AI innovator, not simply another software company serving repair. In an industry where few companies look or behave this way, that difference becomes even more noticeable. High production values, care in execution and the quality of the visual work all reinforce the idea that this is a company operating at a high technical level.

There is still an important customer point. Technical Excellence is not an excuse to disappear into research papers and engineering language. Partly still serves the collision and repair industry, and the technical advantage ultimately has to translate into better outcomes for the people using it.

You still need to make the technology relevant to your customer and make clear which industry or market you are part of. But if you really have a product or technical advantage that clears this very high bar, you don't need to hide it in the move from product to brand. You can make the achievement itself part of what the brand is known for.

• Have you built something technically significant that competitors cannot easily replicate or access?
• Is the advantage meaningfully ahead of the market, rather than simply a well-built use of existing technology?
• Can you prove the difference through performance, research, demonstrations or respected technical adopters?
• Does that advantage materially improve something your customers care about?
• Is the technical advantage strong enough that it deserves to be one of the first things people know about your company?

If the answers are mostly yes, Technical Excellence may be a position you have earned the right to build around - with the important proviso you will still need to move into your customer world in some way.

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.

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 property.

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 Technical Excellence company can also champion its customers. 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 choose the role that most clearly tells you what work the brand needs to 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 that role 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 are for, what is broken in their world, what we uniquely do about it, what role we want to play in our customer's industry, and the simple idea we are going to make more true over time.

Once you have these and everyone agrees on them, it is much simpler to make a brief for how visual design should support these ideas, a plan for activity to bring the ideas to life, and even just a shared sense as a company of who you are and what you are 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.

Re-Leased could stop behaving mainly like a software supplier and start behaving more like a leader and partner in the property industry, helping people get better at their work.

The Brand Idea became Level up property.

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. Most of 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. It also helped Re-Leased take the position of partner and leader in the industry, rather than a supplier selling software from the outside.

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.

Brand Role

The Industry Benchmark.

Brand Idea

Level up property.

That is the Brand Set.

None of the individual lines is particularly complicated. The value comes from getting them to work together. The customer leads to the problem, the problem sharpens the value proposition, those choices suggest a role the company can play, and the Brand Idea gives the whole thing direction.

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

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 is going to achieve for the company.

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 are 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?

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: what you do and what it allows your customer to do more of.

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 do, and what that allows your customer to do more of.

A useful formula is:

What you do + what it enables your customer to do more of.

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 their problem and allows them to do more of what they want to do in their work.

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.

Brand Role: how you act in your customer's industry.

You've just met the six Brand Roles. This is where you make the choice for your company.

Re-Leased is the Industry Benchmark. It has enough standing and understanding of property to aim to become the company the industry looks to for what great looks like.

The role matters because it gives you a playbook for how the brand should behave. A Champion should do different things from a Category Creator. A Technical Excellence company needs different evidence from a Mission-Led one. An Industry Benchmark needs to keep demonstrating why the industry should look to it.

Choose the role that gives you the clearest idea of what to do next.

Brand Idea: the idea or change you are making true.

This is the big one to land. It is the most all-encompassing part of the Brand Set, but to be useful it still needs to be very simple.

It isn't necessarily a tagline or a line the customer will ever see. It is the idea you are trying to make happen, the thing you are all about, and the change in your industry that you're working with your customers, partners and team to bring about.

For Re-Leased that idea is Level up property.

The useful part is not simply the words. It is the attitude, posture and work they lead to. To get to such a tight idea, you will generally start with a much longer sentence. Re-Leased's was something like:

We're here to help property professionals run better property businesses and elevate the industry.

That is the work sitting underneath Level up property. The phrase works particularly well because buildings have levels, but the words themselves are not magic or completely unique. They become meaningful because of the real work Re-Leased does to deliver on the idea.

So when you start looking for your Brand Idea, start with the change you are actually trying to make and the things you are prepared to do to make it true. The short expression comes later.

Ideally is another useful example because it shows the difference between the value proposition and the Brand Idea. In the last chapter we saw how making research faster and easier opened up a better way of developing ideas with customers.

Its UVP centred on Create With Your Customer, with the product described as a rapid market research platform. That explains the distinctive value the product provides.

The Brand Idea became Grow Great Ideas by making research part of the creative process. That gives the brand a bigger idea to build around and describes the change the company wants to help make true.

Those are different jobs. Create With Your Customer explains the value of the product. Grow Great Ideas gives the brand its direction.

A good Brand Idea should be simple enough to carry around in your head and rich enough to make the next ten decisions easier.

Should we attend this event? Which customer should we hero? What research should we publish? What could the product do to make the idea more true? Who should be on stage? What kind of partnership makes sense for us?

If the Brand Idea helps answer those questions, it is working.

If it can justify almost anything, it is too vague.

And, as we saw earlier, it should have some stretch in it. You are not just describing the company exactly as it exists today. You are choosing an idea you have the right to pursue, then building the company to make it increasingly true.

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.

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.

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 property 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 Johnny 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.

Over the years we've led the naming process for many of the companies we've worked with, and developed an approach that makes a very subjective decision a little more objective.

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 shoppable 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.

Its job was to give the company a more useful world to build in, and to give us a lead on what the whole brand should feel like: inspirational, appealing and very much in the world of food.

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 larger businesses. They saw an opportunity to bring some of the same cleverness around provisional tax to smaller companies.

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 there 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 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.

That's another thing a name can do. It can change the energy around a category without having to literally describe the product.

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.

This is the kind of thing we're looking for in a name. It isn't just an accurate label. It gives the company somewhere to go.

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.

Aglow replaced Payleadr when the company moved from generic recurring-payments technology into hair and beauty. The Brand Idea was to be a beacon for better in the industry. A beacon can be aglow, while "glow" is already warm and familiar language in skincare and beauty. The name connected the strategic idea to the customer's world without literally describing the technology.

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.

All of these names are doing slightly different jobs, but there is an idea inside each of them that can keep flowing into the language, identity and behaviour of the company.

That is more useful to us than a name that simply labels the category.

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 arguing about 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

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 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 point isn't to outsource the decision to a survey. It is another piece of evidence.

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. And with our experience doing this many times we have a more trained antenna for what could provide creative and conceptual opportunities, so sometimes it is a bit clearer to us earlier, and then we are able to share what we see as the opportunities and all get together on the choice.

How we think about availability

Availability is one area where every company needs to make its own call. There are an enormous number of trademarks in software, and finding a useful real word that is completely untouched and perfectly protectable everywhere can be extremely difficult.

Our approach, particularly for predominantly digital start-ups, is pragmatic. The question is often 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. Legal disputes are expensive, and sometimes the commercially rational decision is simply to change the name and keep moving. For a digital start-up that may be manageable in a way it isn't if you're stamping the name 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. HealthNow had become limiting because the business had grown beyond health benefits. 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 technical excellence 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, the problem in their world you care about, the value you provide, the Brand Role you can play and the Brand Idea you want to make more true. You've thought about how those choices 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 isn't to create a separate layer of brand activity around the company. It is to use the choices you've made to give more of the activity already happening inside the company a common direction. The strategy gives you the idea. The company has to create the evidence.

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 almost any Brand Idea. If the brand is about 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 could not find anything that made your Brand Idea more true, you should probably ask whether you have found a brand idea or just a marketing idea.

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.

A Brand Idea is useful when it can influence those conversations.

Beyond the product

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?

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 around Technical Excellence. 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 the approach we developed for doing that consistently.

At Vend, we got particularly good at 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 published ourselves meant journalists were not meeting Vend for the first time when a pitch arrived.

The channels have changed, but the behaviour has not. 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. In the Drumbeat Strategy we reduce that to a small number of story angles: subjects where the company has something to say, the audience has a reason to care, and the business keeps creating real evidence.

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.

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 something 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.

Owned and earned media work best together. Earned media brings independent credibility. Owned media helps make sure that credibility reaches the people you actually want to reach.

When we raised capital for New+Improved, our venture studio, we got a great piece in the country's largest newspaper. The coverage was valuable in itself, but putting it through LinkedIn meant many more of the people we wanted to reach actually saw it. The paper brought the credibility; our own channels brought the distribution.

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.

We thought this should be a company

For years we had run versions of the Drumbeat Strategy manually, first at Vend and then with companies we worked with at Previously. 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 the approach itself could become a product when Barney Chunn 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 gave us 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.

Because we were 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 team 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 sticker 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.

Drumbeat is still an early company, but the strategy behind it is not. You do not need Drumbeat the product to use the approach. 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.

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 partly about becoming more customer-centric, one of the best checks is an obvious one: talk to your customers.

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?
• 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 recognise themselves in it, find it credible and see it as coming from the kind of company you are trying to become.

New things are unfamiliar by definition. People tend to prefer what they already know, so immediate likeability is not always a good measure of whether you have made something distinctive. This is one of the particular challenges of building brands around new innovations. 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 how you express your strategy to your market. 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. Then use the work.

You do not need to get everything right in one go, and not everyone has to like something immediately for it to become a strong brand. You are building something new. If everything feels expected and safe, you probably haven't pushed it far enough.

Who owns this work?

Brand is not just for the marketing team. To succeed it usually needs the founder and key executives to be the biggest champions and participants in a brand project. The choices in the Brand Set reach into who the company is for, what the product becomes, where you spend money, who you hire and the position you are trying to earn. Those decisions are difficult to delegate completely to a marketer, designer or agency.

That doesn't mean the founder needs to write every post, approve every image or become the brand police. In a smaller company, the setup can be pretty simple. The founder or leadership team owns the big choices, somebody close to marketing or communications keeps the work moving, and the people leading product, sales and hiring understand the brand well enough to use it in their own decisions.

As the company grows, you usually need a clearer owner for the brand and a way for those choices to travel across the business. The job is not to approve everything. It is to keep the centre clear enough that other teams can make good decisions without constantly coming back for permission.

The opposite problem is just as bad: everyone owns it in theory and nobody is responsible for it in practice.

Outside help can bring objectivity, specialist design or naming capability, a step change in positioning, or simply a process that forces decisions to get made. But you cannot really outsource something so central to your company. An external partner can help find and express the idea. The people running the company still have to believe it and make the choices that turn it into evidence.

How will we know if it's working?

Brand has a reputation for being difficult to measure, but once you have decided what you want to become known for, the question becomes much less mysterious.

If you have chosen the few ideas you want people to associate with you, find out what they associate with you today, do the work, then ask again later and see whether anything has moved.

If you can, get a baseline before a significant period of brand building. Ask customers, or the people in the market you most care about, what comes to mind when they think of the company and what they think you are particularly known for.

Ask that unprompted first, before giving them any options. Then ask more directly which ideas from a list they associate with you. The first tells you what comes to mind naturally. The second tells you whether an association is there once it is named.

Write down the few things you want to become known for and see where you stand. Six months or a year later, after actually building around those ideas, ask the same kinds of people the same questions again.

If the associations you wanted are appearing more often unprompted, or becoming stronger when prompted, the work is probably starting to land. If they haven't moved, that tells you something too.

Brand tracking tools can make this more systematic. We helped start Tracksuit, which helps consumer brands do exactly this. It is harder in B2B, where the audiences can be much smaller, but even a simple survey can give you directional information if you stay reasonably consistent about who you ask, what you ask and when you ask again.

Then look at the signals around it.

Branded search, organic search, direct traffic and inbound all tell you something. Ask people how they heard about you and actually read the answers. Listen to sales calls and notice how much explaining has to happen at the beginning. Pay attention to the language customers use when they describe the company back to you.

Look at what is beginning to come towards the company as well. Better candidates. Interesting partners. Speaking invitations. Journalists asking for a view on the subjects you are trying to become known for.

None of these is a perfect measure on its own. Together they can show whether familiarity, recognition and standing are changing.

There is also a newer diagnostic in the AI tools people increasingly use to understand markets and companies. Ask a few major models what your company is known for, which companies they associate with the territory you want to own, or how they describe you against your closest competitors.

An LLM answer isn't a precise brand metric. The answers vary between models and change over time. But they can provide an interesting mirror of the information that exists about you online. Look at the sources and evidence shaping the answer and notice what is missing. The goal isn't to optimise a sentence for an AI model. It is to make the ideas you want to own clearer and better evidenced in the world. If the major models struggle to find your story, that can be another clue that you haven't put it into the world clearly enough through your own website and channels.

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

If the Brand Idea was supposed to affect the product, has it? If you decided to champion a particular customer, are you doing anything for them? If there were obvious gaps between the position you wanted and the company as it existed, have any of those gaps closed? Are you continuing to create and share evidence for the position you chose?

A surprising amount of brand work 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.

Attribution gets messy quickly because a growing company is a system. Product changes, sales, pricing, market conditions, new hires, distribution, capital, timing and brand all interact. It would be ridiculous to claim that a revenue increase six months after a brand project was caused by the brand alone.

But the ambition is straightforward: strong brand building should lift the trajectory of a great team, product and market.

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 to mean to them. You choose a role in their world and an idea simple enough to guide what happens next. The product 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 version, and the accompanying website has tools to help you define and refine the work.

Brand doesn't replace a great product, a real market, great people, capital, timing, sales or distribution. But in markets where so few companies take brand seriously, it can become another powerful advantage available to you.

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 believes a better way of doing an established piece of work is now possible.

Ask:

• What constraint 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.

Technical Excellence

Technical Excellence is for companies that have built something meaningfully ahead of what the market can otherwise access.

Ask:

• What have we built that competitors cannot easily reproduce or access?
• Can we prove the difference rather than simply claim it?
• Which difficult problems best demonstrate the capability?
• What research, performance data or technical evidence can we publish?
• Which respected technical users, institutions or experts would matter?
• Are the people building the technology visible enough?
• Is the customer benefit of the technical advantage still clear?

Useful territory: demonstrations, performance evidence, technical research, respected adopters, engineering voices, hard problems and a high standard of execution.

Watch for: technology for technology's sake. The achievement can be part of the brand, but customers still need to understand why it matters to them.

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 are deciding whether to sponsor an event, commission research, build a partnership or prioritise a product change, ask whether that choice helps you play the Brand Role and makes 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.

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 Creative Director 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 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.

Drumbeat

Drumbeat productises the Drumbeat Strategy in this book, helping high-growth companies find the stories already inside their business, build relationships with the people who can amplify them, and keep a consistent rhythm of relevant, interesting and credible communication going.