Essays

Your Brand Is Something You Do

A brand in operation is a continual, almost ritualistic engagement with an idea. It is not just what you know about your brand. It is what you do around it.

Your Brand as Your Search for Resonance

Your brand is not a perfect answer you lay out at the start. It is a hypothesis searching for the fit between you, your audience and your commercial agreement.

The Most Expensive Decision in the Room

A decision left unmade does not wait for you. It gets made for you. By your customers, your competitors, your category

What Brand as Infrastructure Actually Looks Like

Brand is the structure that directs your business, the operating code it runs on. Every decision flows through it, instead of getting made from scratch.

Brand Is Infrastructure, Not Decoration

Brand is not what your business looks like. It is the infrastructure your business runs on. The only question is whether it is installed.

The Brand Gap Every Business Faces

The distance between what your business has built and what your brand shows the world. Most founders & teams read it as a creative problem. It is really a structural one.

Your Offer Structure is Killing Your Brand

Going Deep is How You Create Brand Leverage

The Audience You Keep vs The Audience You Need

Why Strong Brands Choose Their Audience 

Why Positioning Fails Without the Courage to Say No

What Brand Positioning Really Is, and Why Yours is Probably Failing

How to Gain Clarity around your Brand

6 Easy Steps to Start Building Your Brand Today

Why You Need to Build a Brand, not Just a Business

The Very Many Branding Sins of the Democratic Party (2024 Edition)

6 Questions to Help Your Brand Thrive in Uncertain Times

How to achieve Brand Resonance

The 4 Levels of Branding

The Brand Bottleneck: 5 Ways Bad Branding Impacts Business Success

What makes a brand compelling?

Delivering value online

So you want a logo

The 15-minute brand sprint

Is design the new killer strategy?

How to think about Strategy

So, you want a website

Brand as Experience

8 ways having a solid Brand Identity and Strategy will propel your business or career to the next level

Why trying to rush the design process is a mistake everytime​

Understanding context is key to effective design

Case Study: Stimela Brewing Co.

Your content is your brand

You are not a brand

Why Design matters to me