It’s not about you. Your brand isn’t the thing you built. It’s the decision someone else makes about you, in about five seconds, mostly off things you never thought counted.
You can’t watch that happen from inside your own business. I can.
Un-Usual · Brand strategy
from the outside.
“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 there is a very optimistically-sized overlap between what you’re saying and what people are giving their attention to.
Your new feature isn’t getting in there. Neither is your award win.
Nothing over here is being weighed up. Things are felt for a second and mostly forgotten.
A photo of someone’s dog. A headline that made them cross. A song from 2004. Something they’ll repeat at lunch.
What gets in made someone feel something before they’d worked out what it was for. Half of it never mentions a product at all.
So make something with a feeling in it. Something they’d send to one person.
It will feel uncomfortable. It won’t look like your business. That’s why it works.
Start over here
And earn the overlap
An outside read of your brand. What a stranger actually sees, in the order they see it – not what you meant, what landed. This is the part you cannot do for yourself, at any price, at any level of talent. You just can’t read the label from inside the jar.
With the outside view in front of you, the overlap stops being theoretical. What you have that connects to something already on their mind. Why it’s you they’d choose, in their words rather than yours. That’s your positioning, and it was already there. You just couldn’t see it from where you were standing.
Then you take the ground nobody else is standing on, and you stay on it. Not better than the others. The only one.
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 video. Available in September.
Join the waitlist →
I do. I’m Olly Whitman, here’s my left side:
Twenty-plus years in the creative industry; former creative director at McCann; 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.
You’re too close to see your brand. I’m not.
A selection of work, experiments, and things I’ve done along the way.
Services
Clients
McCann
Lloyds Bank
Vodafone
Sky
ODEON
Deloitte
Aramco
Speaking
