It’s not about you. Your brand isn’t the thing you built. It’s the decision someone else makes about you, in a few seconds, mostly off things you never thought counted.
You can’t watch that happen from inside
your own business. I can.
I won’t be nice about your brand.
I’ll be kind to your business.
Nice is me guessing what you’d like to hear.
Kind is telling you what I actually see.
Un-Usual · Brand strategy
from the outside.
I’m not.
You’re too close to see your brand.
Stand back
“If they just understood what I understand, they’d choose us.”
Every founder has had that thought. So you explain more. You add more. You get detailed.
But nothing over there is being weighed up. Things are felt for a second and mostly forgotten. What gets in made someone feel something before they’d worked out what it was for.
Two circles of vision slide together as you scroll: everything you want to say, and people’s attention. They share a thin overlap.
The overlap grows as you earn attention and build trust, not by repeating features and talking about yourself.
You built a brand to look like it belongs in the category. It does. So does everyone else’s. That’s camouflage branding – something you paid for that makes you look like your competitors – and you can’t see it, because from inside it looks like fitting in. From outside, it’s four of the same thing. The customer picks. Three times out of four, it isn’t you.
You’re too close to your business to see your brand.
Is your brand built for you, or for the people choosing you? Most founders can’t answer that. It isn’t judgement. It’s where you’re standing. You build it from the inside. The only place you can build it, and the one place you can’t see it.
Stand Back teaches you to do it yourself. How to get far enough back to see it, and how to make what you say, what you look like, and what it’s like to deal with you all point the same way. The complete method, in one film. Free. In the edit now.
Join the waitlistWhy are you in business in the first place? Who are you here to help? What makes you the only choice? What do you stand for? What frustrates you about the status quo? Questions, questions, questions. Without answers and decisions, your brand doesn’t know what it’s doing.
For most people this is all that brand means – the logo, maybe the visual bits. There’s so much more to brand, and to identity. It’s your strategy made visible and verbal to attract the right people. It’s one thing to have a logo. It’s a whole other thing to have a visual identity system that everyone in your business can use.
This is where things start to look suspiciously like your day job. What someone experiences of you becomes your brand. A logo can’t help you if this part is neglected. Experience is where expectations meet reality. Customers choose quickly and brutally. How does your brand shape how you do your thing? Oh, another question? Head back to Strategy and start again.
Where your view of your brand splits from your customers’. For £29.
The Camouflage Test
Twenty questions for you. A handful for a customer, a newcomer and a stranger. Where their answers split from yours is where you’re blending in.
A brand review every quarter. A creative director for your brand, at arm’s length.
The Outside-In
I meet your brand the way a stranger does, with nothing you’ve told me in the way. £199 a month, six months minimum.
A decision about what you stand for, and the plan that follows it.
Get Direction
My outside view and your inside one, worked into where the brand goes next. Once that decision’s made, every other brand decision gets easier.
Every project, one thing nobody inside could see.
A selection of work, experiments, and things I’ve done along the way.
The questions founders actually ask, answered.
A brand audit is an outside read of how your business actually comes across: what a stranger sees, in the order they see it, held against what you meant. The finding is rarely a broken logo. It’s the gap between the label you wrote and the label they read.
Because it was written from the inside. Up close, you describe what you do – and everyone in your category does roughly the same thing, so everyone says roughly the same thing. The fix isn’t better words. It’s distance: seeing what people actually notice about you, then saying the one thing only you can.
A brand strategist decides what should be made before anything gets made: who you’re for, why you’d be chosen, what to say and what to stop saying. I don’t sell the making. I sell the seeing – the outside eye you can’t get from a tool, an agency, or yourself. Who does what in the creative industry, in plain words: What is a creative director anyway?
For the making, increasingly yes. For the seeing, no. AI has no outside taste: it averages what already exists and it flatters whoever is asking. Point it at your own brand and it will tell you, confidently, what everyone else in your category already sounds like. The one thing it cannot give you is the one thing you need – a senior pair of eyes that isn’t inside your business.
Usually not. Most founders who ask that have a clarity problem, not a design problem: the brand is fine, but nobody can say what it stands for, including them. A rebrand spends money changing what people see. Find out what they currently see first, then decide whether anything needs changing at all.
I do. I’m Olly Whitman, here’s my left side:
Twenty-plus years in the creative industry; former creative director at McCann (What is a creative director anyway?); work for Lloyds Bank, Aramco, Just Eat, and… we’d be here all day. That’s the part that gets me in the room. It isn’t the part I’m proud of. This is:
Answers nobody expected and everybody recognised. Two decades of looking at other people’s businesses from the outside and finding the thing that was already there.
I’m not close to your business. I’m not going to be. That isn’t a limitation of working with me – it’s the entire point.
Nice is easy. Kind is harder. It means saying the uncomfortable thing, because your business needs it. I’ll always pick kind.
You’re too close to see your brand. I’m not.
Clients
McCann
Lloyds Bank
Vodafone
Sky
Deloitte
Aramco
