Strategy & advisory
Brand, positioning & naming strategy
One written positioning statement your whole company can repeat, a messaging hierarchy with proof behind every claim, and names that survive a trade mark search rather than only a design review.
The short version
Positioning is a decision, not a workshop. It commits you to a specific buyer, a specific alternative you beat, and a claim you can stand behind in public. Most companies avoid making that decision, which is why their messaging reads like everyone else's and every sales call starts from scratch. No logo comes out of this work — identity design is a separate service, and it goes far better once the positioning is settled.
What is included
- A positioning statement in a single paragraph, naming the buyer, the situation they're in, the alternative you get chosen over and the reason you get chosen.
- A competitive claim map setting out what each rival already says, so you can see which ground is occupied and which is genuinely still free.
- A messaging hierarchy with one primary line, three supporting propositions and a named proof point beneath each, because a claim with no evidence gets cut.
- Audience definitions built from buying situations rather than demographics, so your marketing can trigger on the moment someone starts looking.
- For naming work: a longlist reduced to 3 candidates, each checked for pronunciation, unintended meanings, a UKIPO class search, and .co.uk, .uk and social handle availability.
- A tone-of-voice page with named attributes, a do and a don't example for each, and a passage of your existing copy rewritten to show the difference in practice.
How we work
Our approach
The stages this work runs through, in order. Every one of them ends in something you can see or sign off.
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Step 01
Interview the people deciding
Positioning drawn only from a leadership session ends up describing what the founders wish were true. We run 5 to 8 interviews instead, mixing recent buyers, people who chose someone else, and whoever handles your incoming enquiries. The useful material is nearly always in the language they use for the problem, which is rarely the language currently on your website. We keep the phrasing verbatim, because a line written in the buyer's words needs no translating later.
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Step 02
Map what is already claimed
We read your competitors properly, not their logos but their words: home page headline, pricing page, public sales deck, and the reviews their customers leave. Almost every category has three or four claims everyone makes, and those are worthless to you no matter how true they happen to be. What's left over is the interesting part. The free ground may well be a segment nobody is speaking to rather than an attribute nobody has claimed, and we look for both.
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Step 03
Commit it to one page
The output is a single page you could hand to a new salesperson, not a 60-slide deck nobody opens twice. It states the buyer, the alternative, the claim and the proof, with the three supporting propositions under it. We test that page on people outside the company before signing it off, watching for the failure that matters most: a positioning your rivals could paste onto their own site without changing a word.
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Step 04
Screen names before falling in love
Naming fails late and expensively, so screening happens before we present anything. Each candidate goes through pronunciation and spelling-aloud tests, a check for unintended meanings in the languages your market speaks, a UKIPO search in the classes you trade in, and domain and handle availability. To be clear, that's a screen and not legal clearance. Registering a mark is a trade mark attorney's job, and we'll say so at the point you need to instruct one.
Before you ask
Questions we get asked first
How long does this take?
Four to six weeks for positioning and messaging, and the variable is interview scheduling rather than anything at our end. Add naming and it runs to 7 or 8 weeks, because screening takes time and rushing it is how a name gets abandoned after the signage is printed. If you need something faster for a funding round or a launch date, say so at the scoping call. We can compress by narrowing the segments in scope, but not by skipping the interviews.
How is it priced?
A fixed price in pounds after a scoping call, with positioning and naming quoted as separate lines so you can take one without the other. What moves the number is how many audience segments are in scope, whether we're naming a company or a product line, and how many interviews you want us to run. You pay any trade mark registration fee and any attorney's invoice at their own price, direct to them. Nothing of that kind passes through us with a charge of ours attached.
What do you need from us?
Access to your customers. People resist that request harder than any other on this list. We need introductions to 5 to 8 of them, including at least two who bought from someone else. Beyond that: your current sales materials, the last year of enquiry records if you keep them, and a decision-maker who can say yes to a positioning that deliberately excludes some buyers. That exclusion is the point. A positioning everyone in the room finds comfortable usually has nothing in it.
How do you measure something this soft?
Three checks, none of them a brand-awareness survey. First, a message test: put the new statement in front of people in your market and record which propositions they repeat back unprompted. Second, sales friction, by noting how often a call still needs the explanation of what you do, which should fall. Third, whether the words hold up. If your next three campaigns and your next hire's induction can be written straight off the positioning page, it was specific enough.
Want this scoped for your situation?
Tell us the goal and the deadline. You get an honest read on whether this is the right service, a fixed price if it is, and a straight no if it isn't.
Or email [email protected] directly. We reply within one working day.