Articulating Your Brand’s Core
Effective brand development starts with diagnosis. Before making strategic decisions you need a deep understanding of how your brand is perceived by customers, the wider market, and your own team.
My Brand Diagnostic service surfaces the insight required to make confident decisions about your brand’s direction, distinctiveness, messaging, identity, and growth.
This phase is about pursuing truth: what your market and team believes, and what is preventing clarity or scale.
Through primary research and structured analysis, Brand Diagnostics replaces assumption with evidence, establishing a durable foundation for your Brand Strategy.
Market Diagnostics
This phase reveals how customers truly perceive your brand, surfaces its distinctiveness, and clarifies what is driving choice, friction, and indifference.
By examining your brand through the eyes of your customers, you gain clarity on:
- Perceived Value – What your audience genuinely values in your brand, and why.
- Product or Service Experience – Common friction points, frustrations, unmet expectations, and existing strengths.
- Customer Purchase Drivers – The real reasons customers choose you, beyond stated preference.
- Brand Differentiation -Whether your brand is meaningfully different or largely interchangeable, and on what basis.
- Customer Language – The actual words and phrases customers use when describing your brand.
The goal is clarity, not affirmation.
Benefits
- Strong strategic inputs that ground brand decisions in how the market actually thinks.
- Depoliticise brand conversations, shifting them from opinion to observation. A shared reference point containing real customer voices helps align teams across your organisation.
- Identify where your brand is meaningfully different, and where it is perceived to be interchangeable.
- More effective brand-market dialogue, because the words and phrases your customers use have been identified.
- Identify wasted brand effort, by distinguishing real problems from what is effective.
How It Works
We identify ideal customers to interview who best represent your target audience and can provide actionable insights.
I’ll conduct recorded, one-on-one video calls with these customers. These conversations are carefully structured to uncover their experiences with your brand, their needs, their language, and what truly drives their purchase decisions.
Following each interview (or a batch, depending on the package), you’ll receive clear and concise summaries highlighting the key takeaways, direct quotes, and actionable insights taken from the conversations.
This deliverable summarises customer information into an easily digestible format. Across multiple interviews, I identify overarching patterns, common pain points, and consistent language that contribute to your brand positioning, competitive knowledge, and perceived unique value.
Internal Diagnostics
Internal perception of your brand is as important as market perception.
This phase captures your team’s cumulative understanding of the brand, from its origins and beliefs to how it is currently expressed.
This service uncovers the foundational elements of your brand.
Deliverables include:
- Brand Heritage – The key historic moments and decisions that shaped your company’s identity.
- Founder Story – The founder’s identity and formative influences, embedded in the brand.
- Working Brand Philosophy – The values and behaviours that currently show up in decisions and actions.
- Aspirations – Your long-term intent, as understood internally.
- Internal Market Perspectives – How your team currently views the market, your brand, and the competitive landscape.
- Provisional Brand Narrative – Your team’s current understanding of the themes, distinctiveness, and meanings embedded in the brand.
Benefits
- Strong strategic inputs that ground brand decisions in what your team believes and the values your organisation embodies.
- Articulate implicit beliefs – that apture the unspoken stories, beliefs, and motivations that shape your current brand.
- Preservation of brand memory by documenting founder influence and heritage for easy sharing across your organisation.
- Identify organisational misalignment by revealing where views of the brand diverge across your teams, roles, or tenure, before strategy is set.
How I Do It
We’ll conduct recorded video calls (or multiple sessions, depending on the scope and team involvement) dedicated to exploring internal perceptions of your brand. I lead structured conversations, asking insightful questions designed to uncover the brand’s history, the brand’s core values, market insights, and future aspirations of the founder(s)/leader(s) and key team members.
Following the session(s), you’ll receive a comprehensive summary document capturing the key insights discussed including the brand heritage, founder story, core values, brand, and internal market perspectives. This document serves as a foundational reference point for all future brand development activities and lays the foundation to build the brand strategy upon.
Why Me?
What if I'm not sure about my brand's core values or vision? I wouldn’t even know what to say to you.
That’s normal. Most brands are making strategic decisions instinctively which is why I’ve built a framework that turns those instincts into clarity. The session feels like a relaxed conversation, but it’s designed to surface exactly what we need.
Will I be able to see the recordings of the customer interviews?
Yes, all Zoom video calls are recorded, and you will be given these recordings. It’s imperative we record these to reference during development of your brand strategy.
How long does the Market Discovery process typically take?
The timeline for Market Discovery depends on the number of customer interviews I do. During my history in brand consultancy, this usually gets completed between 1 – 3 weeks.
Do you include internal brand perception (e.g. employees, sales teams) in your diagnostics, or is it purely external-facing?
Yes, that is part of the internal discovery process. Both market discovery and internal discovery need to be used to create the most effective brand strategy.
I’m still unsure, is there any way we can test this on a small scale?
Yes. I offer a service where I do two customer interviews so you can see the value for your brand before committing to further interviews and brand development work. Get in touch and we will arrange this.