I came into brand work through design, and I never left the tools behind. I still open Figma before I open a deck. I write brand narratives, art-direct campaigns, and build design systems alongside the teams I lead. The strategists I admire most are the ones who can hold a pen and hold a room. That is the standard I work to.
Over fifteen years I have built brands from scratch, led rebrands across multiple markets, and directed the creative work that makes strategy visible. I have run in-house design teams and directed agency relationships at the strategy level, not the task level. I know what it takes to set a quality bar and hold it when the pressure is to ship faster or cheaper.
Brand is a commercial discipline before it is anything else. Done well, it changes the unit economics of a business: the right people walk through the door instead of the wrong ones, they stay longer when they get there, and the next acquisition costs less because the brand has done some of the persuasion already. Done badly, it produces beautiful things that do not move anything and do not justify their cost.
I work through several strategic lenses. Brand strategy alongside platform thinking, media economics, growth dynamics, and the commercial frame the CEO actually cares about. Each lens asks a different question of the same problem, and the strongest brand decisions are the ones that hold up under all of them.
Five principles that hold up:
Diagnose the business. What is the business actually trying to do, and where is brand the lever that moves it? Not “we need a refresh,” but: what problem does the brand have to solve
Read the audience in evidence. Who they really are, not who the team wishes them to be. Segmentation, motivation, behaviour — grounded in research, not internal consensus.
Position with conviction. Decide what the brand stands for, and commit to it. The strongest positioning is the one you can defend through three years of execution, not the one that wins a workshop.
Build for compounding. Distinctive assets, a consistent strategic platform, and long-term investment. Brand value compounds across markets and over time, but only when the work is allowed to.
Measure from launch. Define the metrics before going live. Brand tracking, CPA, conversion, retention, unit economics. Without measurement, brand is invisible to the business that pays for it.
"A brand is not what you say it is. It's what they say it is." Marty Neumeier (The Brand Gap, 2003)
Five steps that hold up: