Positioning & Differentiation
Defining a clear category, target segment, distinctive value, point of view, and competitive contrast rather than trying to appeal to everyone.
42%
Best tweets about Brand Strategy
50 Best Tweets About Brand Strategy (2026)
Discover the best tweets about brand strategy, covering positioning, differentiation, messaging, identity, category design, research, and brand growth.
Brand positioning, differentiation, audience research, messaging, category design, identity, measurement, and concrete business examples.
- Creators
- 42
- Updated
Original Xholic analysis
What 50 top Brand Strategy posts reveal
The posts commonly frame brand strategy as choosing a specific audience, category, and point of view, then expressing that choice through messaging, research, identity systems, and growth execution. Across the discussion, clarity is repeatedly contrasted with generic messaging, cosmetic design, and copied tactics.
- Dominant tone
- Positive
- Median score
- 9.23
- Leading format
- Opinion
- Recent posts
- 26%
38% of posts
All-time engagement
32% of posts
Published in 90 days
Conversation map
The themes creators return to
Brand & Growth Integration
Connecting brand strategy with product, funnels, paid media, launches, channel execution, retention, and measurable commercial outcomes.
30%
Brand Narrative & Messaging
Building memorable stories, beliefs, voice, positioning statements, proof, and messages that create emotional relevance and persuasion.
28%
Personal & Founder Brand Strategy
Developing founder or creator authority through a focused niche, authentic conviction, signature voice, content pillars, and audience-specific expertise.
24%
Audience Research & Customer Insight
Using ICP definition, competitor analysis, customer objections, Reddit conversations, psychology, and market gaps to ground strategy.
20%
Brand Design Process & Governance
Using briefs, frameworks, moodboards, rationale, stakeholder alignment, and brand guardianship to make design decisions beyond personal preference.
20%
Brand Identity Systems
Treating visual identity as an interconnected, practical system spanning color, typography, illustration, UI, guidelines, tools, and real-world applications.
18%
Category Design & Repositioning
Creating, entering, or evolving categories through category narratives, vertical focus, market education, and coordinated on-site and off-site signals.
16%
Tone and stance
Sentiment Positive leads
Author posture Supportive leads
Performance benchmark
- Median likes
- 25
- Median reposts
- 1
- Median replies
- 4
- Median views
- 967
Posts with media make up 28% of this collection. Their median all-time score is 15.2, compared with 7.62 for text-only posts.
Format mix
- Opinion 32% · score 5.17
- Tutorial 20% · score 7.28
- List 18% · score 12.7
- Announcement 16% · score 12.6
Consensus and debate
Where creators agree, and where they do not
Shared view
Positioning begins with deliberate exclusion
Posts repeatedly argue that brands become more recognizable by serving a specific segment and articulating a clear difference, rather than presenting themselves as relevant to everyone.
Shared view
Messaging needs a distinct point of view
The discussion links recognition and trust to a clear message, voice, narrative, and proof—not simply frequent publishing or generic expertise.
Shared view
Research should inform creative execution
Customer truth, ICP definition, competitor analysis, and audience objections are presented as inputs to positioning and creative strategy rather than after-the-fact validation.
Shared view
Identity is a working system, not decoration
Visual identity is presented as a connected set of rules for applications, UI, colour, and decisions; isolated logos, fonts, or palettes are treated as insufficient.
Open debate
Does brand lead growth or support it?
One view argues that brand is the main differentiator in commodity categories with limited product differentiation. Another argues that product and financial goals should establish the launch order, with growth and brand integrated in execution.
Open debate
Position first, or earn proof first?
Many posts favor early positioning clarity, while a counter-view argues that results, case studies, and testimonials should provide substance for a brand.
Open debate
Brand strength under fragmented culture
One post argues that fragmented shared culture makes broad cultural heat harder to sustain and favors smaller communities. Another argues that brand remains the principal differentiator in commodity categories.
Open debate
When should an identity be fixed?
A cautionary account describes pre-traction positioning as a hypothesis that can be costly to lock in, whereas identity-system posts emphasize comprehensive guidelines and governance.
What performs
Patterns behind standout posts
Media posts had a higher median score than text posts
Media appeared in 14 posts (28%) and had a median all-time score of 15.24, compared with 7.62 for text posts. The identity-system post was an outlier with an all-time score of 201.
Research, positioning, identity, and case-study posts appeared among outliers
The highest-scoring outlier focused on Reddit as a customer and competitor research source (201.9). Other outliers covered positioning advice, identity systems, and a detailed brand case study.
Narrative, founder strategy, and identity had the strongest themed medians
Brand Narrative & Messaging and Personal & Founder Brand Strategy each had a median all-time score of 12.09, while Brand Identity Systems had the highest themed median at 24.251.
Statistical standouts
- View standout post 1 Score 201.9 · 21.87× median
- View standout post 2 Score 201.0 · 21.78× median
- View standout post 3 Score 156.3 · 16.94× median
- View standout post 4 Score 85.1 · 9.22× median
- View standout post 5 Score 71.3 · 7.73× median
Creator landscape
Who shapes this conversation
The five most represented creators account for 20% of the selected posts.
-
1. charlota
@0xCharlota
2 posts
-
2. Alexa | Startup founder
@alexabelonix
2 posts
-
3. Davie Fogarty
@daviefogarty
2 posts
-
4. Blake Emal
@heyblake
2 posts
-
5. Alex
@heyitsalexP
2 posts
-
6. Ross Simmonds
@TheCoolestCool
2 posts
Davie Fogarty’s posts combine research and a founder-led concept view
Davie Fogarty’s two posts had a median all-time score of 111.57. One recommends Reddit for customer and competitor research; the other distinguishes founder-created brand concepts from AI-assisted execution.
Charlota frames design as contextual decision-making
Charlota’s posts translate identity work into practical decision criteria: colour should function in context, and apparently small revisions can affect an entire visual system.
Founder-brand advice favors structured self-audits
Posts from Wizofecom and Extrastiv describe personal branding through repeatable components such as ICP, niche, voice, content pillars, performance review, and targeted content rather than visibility alone.
Since the previous snapshot
What changed since Aug 12, 2026
- 72% of the selected posts remained.
- The creator count changed by -1.
- The leading sentiment remained stable.
How this analysis was made
Themes, sentiment, stance, and post format are classified per tweet. All counts, shares, medians, creator concentration, freshness, and performance comparisons are then calculated directly from the published snapshot.
Xholic's all-time score compares engagement while accounting for reach, post age, and creator consistency. It is used for relative comparisons within this collection.
This report analyzes the exact 50-post snapshot shown below. AI identifies editorial categories and drafts explanations; all statistics are calculated from the snapshot, and every narrative claim is checked against cited posts before publication.
Best Brand Strategy tweets
Top Brand Strategy tweets from 42 creators
Ranked 01–50
- 01
- 02
@alex_barashkov ·
Sometimes, during calls with leads, I’m asked whether we do branding. Yes, we do - and we’ve done it for every project in our portfolio, without exception. Even companies that thought they already had branding often did not. Branding is not just a font and a color palette chosen at random five years ago by a freelance designer. It is a system: a collection of rules, approaches, techniques, and effects that work together. It is also a decision-making framework that explains why something should or should not be done. Your brand guidelines should answer practical questions. How should your UI look on the web? What should your presentations, diagrams, and blog covers look like? Can you use 3D elements or line illustrations? Which combinations of effects are appropriate? If your brand book does not answer these questions, I have bad news: you probably just have a random set of colors, a font, and a logo. They may work well enough for the few visuals your designer created, but they do not form a complete brand system.
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- 03
@kunalvg ·
My advice to crypto content creators: get a real job. Longer version: *Do check the paid partnership point in the middle. > Learn marketing. Not crypto marketing. Marketing. Brand, positioning, audience psychology. > Learn GTM. If a project comes to you, can you help them go to market? That is a completely different and far more valuable skill than creating content. > Learn distribution. Organic growth, community building, and content flywheels. Not follower hacks. > Develop a point of view. Not just commentary. Or just memes. An actual perspective on where things are going. > Create with AI, not just from AI. Your voice and angle are still your edge. > Do not make bounties your whole personality. It signals you are for hire, not for keeps. > Paid posts are a double-edged sword. Every sponsored tweet tells your audience something about you. If I were a brand, I would not spend a penny on most of these partnerships. Brand deals should not be your income strategy. Do them only when they make complete sense. > Avoid unnecessary controversies. It feels like engagement. It is reputation debt. > Stop chasing narratives. Every hop dilutes your positioning. The best crypto creators this year will be full-stack marketers who happen to work in crypto.
- 04
@emmettshine ·
How do you tell a story about cutting-edge science that feels like it's about love and family? We hired my mom, a professional painter, to create original watercolors. Conception is a stem cell biology company working to help families have children who might not otherwise be able to. Their work is deeply technical, but their story needed warmth. My mom painted textures, colors, and compositions throughout the project, scanning them in as she went and the @littleplainsxo team took those originals into custom node-based workflows to generatively build new scenes, get feedback, and repeat. A creative cycle between real materials and generative systems that stays human no matter how far it scales. As we work more and more with agentic tools and generative systems, we find ourselves hiring more artists, painters, and photographers to help us explore new ways to express creativity. Overall, we completed the brand strategy, positioning, copywriting, identity, generative illustration, site design and development. Grateful to Matt and the Conception team for the trust.🧡
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- 05
@wizofecom ·
If 90% of your personal brand is STRATEGY: • Define your ICP • Pick your niche + authority angle • Identify your unique POV • Study 5 competitors and find the gap CONTENT PILLARS: • Pick 3-5 topics you'll own • Map each pillar to a pain point your ICP has • Rotate between education, story, conviction, and opinion WRITING: • Identify good hooks • Write in sequences • Lead with curiosity • Every post is one idea, one journey, one takeaway DESIGN: • Consistent brand colors + fonts • Thumbnail templates that pop in feed • Doc-style for long-form value • Profile photo + banner that display authority POSTING: • Batch content weekly • Post at peak engagement windows • Mix formats: short posts, threads, carousels, articles • Always have 1 week of content loaded ENGAGEMENT: • Reply to 10+ accounts in your niche daily • Quote tweet with opinions • Join the trending conversations in your space • Build relationships OPTIMIZATION: • Track what format gets the most engagement • Double down on winners • Kill what's not working fast • Incubate 1 new style every week Then you have the stack to become an authority in your industry.
- 06
@0xmelissa19 ·
One thing that separates strong Web3 marketers from average ones: They understand positioning. Not just posting. Not just graphics. Positioning. Because the truth is: A lot of projects are saying similar things. “Fast.” “Scalable.” “Community-driven.” “AI-powered.” “Next generation.” After a while, everything starts sounding the same. That’s why positioning matters. Good positioning answers: Why should people remember YOU specifically? And honestly, I learned this late. In the beginning, I thought marketing was mostly about visibility. Now I understand: Visibility without identity creates weak communities. The projects that grow strongest usually own a clear narrative. People instantly know: • What they stand for • Who they’re for • Why they exist • What makes them different And this applies to personal brands too. If your page looks like everyone else, people forget you fast. One thing I started doing differently was asking: “What do I want people to associate with my name immediately?” That question changes how you post. Another lesson: Great marketing is not about trying to attract everybody. The best brands usually become powerful because they speak deeply to a specific type of person first. Clarity attracts stronger communities than randomness. And honestly, one of the biggest marketing mistakes I see in Web3 is chasing trends without direction. Every week: New narrative. New personality. New strategy. No consistency. No identity. No long-term trust. Now I think differently. Good marketing should create: Recognition. Trust. Retention. And eventually advocacy. That’s when community members stop being followers and start becoming believers. If I were starting again, I’d focus earlier on: • Positioning • Narrative consistency • Audience psychology • Long-term trust building Because attention might bring people in. But identity is what makes them stay. What’s one Web3 project with strong positioning in your opinion? 👇
- 07
@i_amdott ·
What most projects need in branding is clarity. Clear message, clear audience, and a clear voice people can recognize instantly. When people don’t understand what you do or who you’re speaking to, they scroll past. Consistency in how you show up, how you communicate, and what you stand for is what builds trust and keeps people around.
- 08
@Extrastiv ·
PERSONAL BRANDING PROMPT FOR BEGINNERS ON LINKEDIN & X 🗞️ ↪ Take a screenshot of your bio. ↪ Copy 10 each of your top performing posts on both platforms - especially the ones relevant to your niche. ↪ Upload it on Claude and insert this prompt: "I am a [your profession/title - e.g. content marketer, SaaS founder, career coach] who helps [your target audience — e.g. early-stage startups, 9-5 professionals, female entrepreneurs] achieve [specific outcome - e.g. consistent clients, career pivots, revenue growth] through [your method/approach - e.g. content marketing, storytelling, systems]. I have uploaded my LinkedIn and X bios + 10 top-performing posts from each platform. Do the following: 1. AUDIT MY POSITIONING Based on my bios and posts, tell me exactly how a stranger would describe what I do and who I help. Be brutally honest. Flag any confusion, contradiction, or vagueness. 2. IDENTIFY MY CONTENT PILLARS From my top posts, extract the 3–4 themes I keep returning to. Label them clearly. Tell me which one resonates most based on engagement patterns and specificity of language. 3. FIND MY SIGNATURE VOICE Pull 5 phrases, sentences, or structural patterns from my posts that sound uniquely like me. These are my voice fingerprints. List them so I can write more content that sounds like this intentionally. 4. SPOT THE GAPS What topics, pain points, or content formats is my audience likely expecting from someone in my niche that I am completely missing? Give me 5 specific gap opportunities. 5. REWRITE MY BIO Give me two versions of my bio for each platform. One that is authority-first (leads with credibility), one that is outcome-first (leads with what my audience gets). Keep it under 160 characters for X and under 220 words for LinkedIn. 6. GIVE ME A 30-DAY CONTENT PLAN Based on my niche ([insert niche]), audience ([insert audience]), and content pillars you identified, give me a 30-day posting plan. Mix educational, conversational, and conversion posts. Include specific post angles, not just categories. 7. WRITE MY FIRST 5 POSTS Using my voice fingerprints, write 5 ready-to-publish posts. Two for LinkedIn (long-form), three for X (punchy, single idea). Each post should speak directly to [your audience's biggest pain point — e.g. inconsistent income, fear of niching down, imposter syndrome]. My goal is [your specific 90-day goal — e.g. to land 3 new clients from content, to grow from 500 to 5,000 followers, to launch my first digital product to my audience]. Treat me like a client who is paying you to fix their personal brand from the ground up. Do not give generic advice. Everything must be specific to what you see in my content." Save this. Use it every 90 days. I hope this helps someone🤞
- 09
A former pro snowboarder built a deodorant brand around fragrance and just sold it for $500M+. Not function. Not clean ingredients. Fragrance. Last week on the podcast, Sam Kaplan of Five Seasons Ventures said if you have a nuanced take on fragrance, he wants to hear from you. His thesis: take the boom in niche fragrance and apply it to adjacent categories. Touchland in hand sanitizer. Sol de Janeiro in body care. Tallow & Ash in laundry. Purdy & Figgg in surface cleaners. This week, Advent paid $500M+ for Salt & Stone. Sam called it. $165M revenue in 2025. DTC at 40%. 1,700+ locations across 40 countries. One deodorant every five seconds. One institutional round, Humble Growth, August 2024. Eighteen months later, out at $500M+. The fragrance isn't a feature. It's the identity. Body care as a fragrance delivery system. Fragrance-led isn't a brand strategy anymore. It's an acquisition thesis.
- 10
@0xCharlota ·
in visual identity design, revision requests like "can we try a different blue?" "can we swap the font?" sound simple. they are not. brand identities are a balancing act between opposing forces — structure and fluidity, weight and grace, warmth and edge. shift one, everything shifts. it's like cooking: the client wants less salt. but salt was lifting all the other flavors! pull it back and now the dish tastes flat, so you reach for acid. now it's bright but thin. so you add fat for body. now it's rich but heavy. you're three moves deep from one "simple" change. that's brand revision - one ingredient moves, the whole recipe reopens. never a "this is just 5min edit!"
- 11
@LukeADesign ·
We presented over 10 brand directions to YC/SF clients in the last 6 months. This is how we do it: 1. Reaffirm the brief. Start by feeding back what you pulled from their form. It shows you listened and grounds everyone before anything new is introduced. 2. Competitors. Show where the industry is. 3. Their existing brand. Acknowledge what they have. What's working, what isn't. 4. Show the moodboards. Show what you've built from their questionnaire and kick off call answers. 5. Direction. Colour, type, mood. Before they see a single logo, they already know where it's coming from. 6. The concepts. Explain everything. On the face of it, they might look simple. But there's meaning behind every decision. 7. Mockups. The cherry on top. Show it in the real world. That's when they fall in love with it. Then send them the deck and let them to sleep on it.
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- 12
@0xCharlota ·
Red is passion. Blue is trust. Green is growth. Cool. Now what? Before you pick a brand colour, ask what it needs to do. 🎨Here are 10 non-obvious questions I'm now asking myself before touching a palette: (in an interactive colour swatch component made with @framer) 1. Does colour need to differentiate categories, or is this a single-product brand? Multiple product lines, tiers, or services turn colour into a wayfinding system. That changes how many hues you need and how they relate to each other. 2. Where does this brand actually live — digital, print, interior, hardware? Colours that sing on screen often die in CMYK, on a wall, or on injection-moulded plastic. Design for where the brand is going, not just where it launches. 3. What does the brand smell like? Sounds absurd, but trust me, try it anyway. Earthy, synthetic, clean, medicinal, smoky…. this can already inspire a colour palette! 4. Will colour carry meaning (data states, navigation, hierarchy) or just mood? A brand colour that also doubles as your error red is a problem waiting to happen. 5. Is the UI data-dense or spacious? how much room does colour actually have to breathe? A marketing site can carry saturated colour. A dashboard can’t… it creates visual fatigue and fights the content. In dense UIs, brand colour needs to work at accent weight, not on every surface. 6. Will there be a lot of photography or illustration? If yes, the main palette can be minimal, even a single colour plus neutrals. The imagery does the expressive heavy lifting. A complex palette on top of rich visuals creates more noise. 7. What colours dominate the competitive landscape? And do we want to fit in or stand out? Every category has default codes. Fintech = blue. Health = green. Legal = navy. Differentiation requires knowing what you're differentiating from. (sometimes fitting in is the right call.) 8.Does the product need dark mode? Some palettes that work beautifully in light fail completely inverted. In crypto, SaaS, and developer tools, dark is often the default. Test both directions before falling in love with a palette. 9. How long does this identity need to hold — two years, five, ten? Trend-forward palettes date faster than they feel. (hello brat green!) 10. Does this colour fit into the visual world your audience already lives in? or put it bluntly, is this a colour someone would pay for on a hoodie, or only accept for free? does this colour feel at home in the environment where the product is actually used? and does it hold up next to the other tools / objects your user has chosen to surround themselves with? Colour psychology is the astrology of brand design. The real question isn't what a colour means in the abstract. it's what it needs to do in this specific brand, in this specific context, at this specific scale. good luck choosing! 🎨
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- 13
@daviefogarty ·
Every founder wants to hire "storytellers" but not many founders (or AI) can explain what brand storytelling actually is. Storytelling at its core comes down to the concept and the execution. The concept is your brand angle. It’s the lifestyle, the values, and the thing that makes you different. AI can suggest things for the concept - but they struggle with originality. It's just a big autocorrect pulling from existing concepts. No chance Chat GPT would come up with the concept behind Red Bull. Only founders can create the concept. You’ve lived the problem and built the solution. And part of brand is finding unique positioning and underserviced markets. The execution is different. That's onboarding influencers to tell your story, creating products that reinforce your message, and building creatives that communicate your angle. Now even AI can help with execution, but only once you know your concept. Ex: If I were launching a supplement brand, AI wouldn't create the brand positioning. That's on me to figure out. But once I know the angle, AI can help me create the creatives, write the scripts, and build content at scale. The problem is that founders skip the concept and jump straight to AI execution. They try to use AI as a replacement for thinking and it waters down their message. The difference is clarity on the concept and only you as a founder can create that.
- 14
@gaetano_nyc ·
Nearly all of the SEO/GEO problems I am working on today are category misalignment and mismatch problems... not ticky-tacky "optimization" tricks or GEO hacks. Here is the problem: B2B SaaS brand that's been around for 10+ years has a digital footprint in a "legacy" category that's now unsexy... but it's still their breadwinner. And now there's a new thing they need to become known for: Customer Service CRM ➡️ Intelligent CX Platform Low Code Platform ➡️ Agentic Systems Platform CMMS ➡️ Intelligent Maintenance Platform LMS ➡️ Skills Intelligence Platform Product Analytics ➡️ Product Intelligence Platform Intranet Portal ➡️ Employee Experience Platform etc... I've seen companies setup Profound with a massive list of LLM prompt tracking. The dashboards show zero visibility and they wonder why. The problem is that AI retrieval often follows entity neighborhoods. So when SaaS brands evolve into new positioning, they need a FULL BLOWN category attack plan with 50% of the effort allocated to on-site content (product pages, feature pages, brand comparisons, why we're different, etc). and the other 50% allocated to offsite: analyst relations, guest posts, review site optimization, YouTube, inclusion on Forrester / Gartner reports for the new category, etc. Instead, they launch one new product page with a press release and expect magic to happen. It just doesn't work. It's not enough. ChatGPT sub-queries are heavily branded and category dependent. You can reverse engineer any bottom of funnel category prompt and see for yourself. Inspect element, navigate to the network tab and check the sub-queries and safe URLs. No amount of tactical work can get your brand included in this consideration set. This is at least 80% of the work I am doing today. It is all deeply strategic work and almost zero tactical work. What you see going viral on LinkedIn is not even close to what's really happening behind the scenes at big companies.
- 15
@a_idume ·
The high level of subjectivity involved in brand design is why it’s a difficult industry to work in. Your job as a brand design professional aside from the technical know-how (skill) then becomes building frameworks to keep both you and the client from making decisions based on preference alone, and focus more on what actually serves the brand.
- 16
@nicktheriot_ ·
6 questions I ask before positioning any brand in a crowded market: 1. What does everyone in this market accept as normal but secretly hate? 2. What has the customer been trained to tolerate because they think there's no alternative? 3. What's the quiet frustration that hits them every single time? 4. What would make the current solution feel irresponsible or outdated? 5. What new standard could we set that competitors would have to admit they were wrong to match? 6. What's the villain we can point to that everyone already low-key hates? Bookmark this.
- 17
@0xDipo ·
I had a back-and-forth with an agency owner recently. He’s trying to place me as an SMM for a web3 project with an actual real-world product. He trusts my work, he’s seen it over time. But the brand asked for a case study. And I pushed back. Not out of ego, but because of a pattern I keep seeing: Big brands keep using case studies as a shortcut for competence. But here’s the truth: Case studies don’t prove someone is great for this job. They only prove they were right for a job. Two completely different things. You don’t hire for history, you hire for alignment, for the present. So instead, I told him this: Before I build any strategy or think about growth mechanics, I need to understand what we’re working with, not the polished marketing version, but the honest truth. Set up a 3-way call. You, me, and the team. Let me ask the real questions: • Who’s our ICP? • What do the funnels actually look like (TMB)? • What’s the true differentiator? …and a lot more beneath the surface. Because without that, any “strategy” is just guesswork dressed up nicely. But with it? I can design something tailored, grounded, and built to actually work. That’s the difference. Not what I’ve done before, but how I think before I do anything at all.
- 18
- 19
@Ishansharma7390 ·
Apple's 2nd Mumbai store is here! But why is Apple doing this? I was just at the media preview of Apple's Borivali store. This is the 6th Apple store in India. They opened 3 stores in 2025 and 2 stores in 2024. But why is Apple opening it's own stores when there are already so many 3rd party resellers available in India? Here's what I think: 1. Total brand control Apple gets full control on how it's products are displayed and communicated with Apple-trained staff helping customers, something which was often missing in stores like Imagine or Croma. 2. Better Customer Experience Official Apple stores offer things like Hands-on demos of all Apple products and services, Genius bar for support, repairs, and the Today at Apple workshops teaching users how to better use Apple's products and services. This helps deepen customer loyalty. 3. Brand Positioning Apple stores aren't just shops, they're brand showcase and status symbols that help with building an aspirational appeal in the minds of Indian consumers. This is crucial at a time where Apple is quickly moving up in the premium phone segment in India(25.6% YoY growth in Q3 2025). I still remember the first time I visited an Apple store in Bangkok in 2022 and it being an absolutely magical experience. The architecture, the use of natural lighting, greenery, the warm staff, everything was perfect and unlike any tech store I've been to. While third party sellers helps Apple reach many customers, but Apple's own stores gives the company direct control over the shopping experience and build brand prestige. Have you visited an Apple store?
- 20
@aleyda ·
🤖 How AI Systems Surface Your Brand: From Inputs to Outcomes 👇 Before a brand can perform well in AI answers, AI systems need three things from it: 1. Access: They need to be able to reach and process your content. 2. Usefulness: They need relevant content worth reusing. 3. Recognition: They need enough signals to connect that content to a credible brand. If one of these inputs is weak, your chances of being included, cited, or represented accurately are lower. Once those three inputs are in place, you can assess the four outcomes they produce in AI answers: 1. Presence: Do you show up? If your brand does not appear in relevant AI-generated answers, the rest matters less. 2. Position: How prominent are you? Not all visibility is equal. A brand that is central to a recommendation, comparison, or cited explanation has more impact than one that is mentioned in passing. 3. Perception: How are you described? A brand can be visible and still lose if AI systems describe it in weak, generic, or inaccurate ways. 4. Influence: Do you shape the answer? Influence is the highest level. It goes beyond being mentioned. It's when your brand's data, concepts, definitions, or frameworks help shape how the category is explained. I'll be going through how to optimize and measure these through an AI Search Brand Authority framework in the following days that I'll share over here and in more in seofomo(.)co (subscribe now to avoid missing out) 👀
- 21
@wizofecom ·
Bad personal brands: - Post revenue screenshots every other day like it's a personality trait - Rent a Lamborghini for a photoshoot to share "motivation" - Only post hot takes to piss people off - Post platitudes Good personal brands: - Lead with a story so people have a reason to care - Share meaningful wins AND strategic losses - Post boring, niche specific content the ICP needs - Take positions backed by experience - Create content targeted for 1,000 decision makers
- 22
@maxwellfinn ·
Most ads I see are “on brand” and look great, but suck at persuading people to buy. They look like they were made by a team of designers vs. a team of direct response marketers who understand how their customers brain actually works. Here’s a few of the things I look to include in every ad I make: 1. A specific person in a specific situation, not "anyone who buys this category.” 2. The actual emotion the product solves for, not the feature that solves it. 3. A powerful and objective reason to believe that isn't just you saying you're the best. 4. One idea, not five (if you're cramming 5 benefits in you have 5 weak ads pretending to be one). 5. Copy that sounds like a person texting a friend, not a brand talking at a customer. 6. A next step so obvious the viewer doesn't have to think about what to do next (they’ve already come to the decision themselves before you tell them). The main takeaway here is that a lot of brands obsess over what their ad looks like when they should obsess over what it actually says and whether it gives someone a real reason to act. What would you add to the list?
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@williamkast_ ·
If your creative strategist isn't doing these things, they're just an editor picking trending formats. Random testing leads to random results. Here's what a real creative strategist should do: 1) Tailors the message to the market They know the difference between an unaware ad, a problem-aware ad, a solution-aware ad, a product-aware ad, and a most-aware ad. And they know how to write differently for each one because each stage requires a fundamentally different message. 2) Builds awareness funnel They don't just make random ads based on what's "currently working". They build a system where each ad speaks to a specific stage and moves that prospect closer to purchase. They strategize when to introduce a new awareness level and with which to start. That gets a person from not even aware of the problem to wanting to buy after watching some of your ads. 3) Structured hierarchy of testing Here is what has the most impact on your ad performance left to right: Offer > Creative > Desire > Persona > Angle > Visuals > Text. A good creative strategist knows they need to test left to right. They know when to open a new branch in the posting or double down on a desired persona or angle that is already performing. 4) Leverages market gaps They don't just look for inspo in the market. They analyze what competitors are doing and then go after what competitors are NOT doing. That's how you find angles that feel fresh to the market instead of running the same messaging everyone else is running. Most of the market is just blindly copying one another. 5) Analyzes ads Every ad gets a breakdown: what persona, what desire, what awareness stage, what belief was it trying to shift. Winners and losers. They build hypotheses before each test and learn from the results to inform the next round. That's how you never run out of ideas to test. 6) Understands the funnel They know when an image ad needs a dedicated landing page vs when you can send traffic straight to the PDP. They understand that a creative strategy is only as good as the funnel it feeds into. If your creative strategist is only picking formats and editing videos, you're paying for execution but missing the strategy entirely. In the end, the strategy is what scales, not just the execution.
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@ItsMeBenChan ·
Most companies treat personal branding like a content calendar. Post 3x a week, share tips, "stay consistent." …but that’s not a brand. The popular belief is that if you show up long enough with enough "value," people will eventually trust you and buy. The brands stuck at zero traction almost always follow this exact (wrong) playbook. - Post expertise daily - Expose their best frameworks - Hope that people realize their genius But nobody cares. Because the market already has 1,000 people doing the same thing. Being "helpful" stopped being a differentiator years ago. The brands that actually break through are the ones people are EMOTIONALLY invested in. They have: - A narrative people want to follow - A point of view that splits the room - A personality that makes them impossible to confuse with anyone else If your audience can swap your name out for any other expert in your niche and the content still makes sense... ...you don't have a brand. You have a blog with a fancy profile picture.
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@heyitsalexP ·
What really differentiates consumer products? Very few have patented tech or ingredients. Very few have proprietary production processes. Most formulations can be copied or duped. So can most marketing strategies. That leaves us with "brand". But I want to push back on that because... ...shared culture is collapsing. If you asked me five years ago, I would have said that "brand", status or cultural heat were relatively strong differentiators. But it's harder than ever to build "cultural heat", because content consumption is edging closer and closer to 1:1, completely personalized entertainment. There are no watercooler moments, and there are barely any enduring fandoms. People kind of drift in and out of filter bubbles based on their special interests, or what they find entertaining in the moment. That's only part of the story. The other part is the collapse of authority. Modern movie stars like Zendaya don't have the same mystique or cross-generational cultural impact because there is no authority complex telling us (the public) that they are our "betters". It's verboten to say that person A might be better, or more worthy, than person B, even on a single dimension. So if everyone is the same, everyone's experience is equally valid...why does one brand deserve more attention than another? "Brand" still has impact within smaller, more tangible communities where there is some amount of shared culture and mutually agreed-on authority. So I am long local brands. I think global status symbols (big luxury brands) are past peak. And the rest of it...the role of brand within DTC growth strategy...I am still thinking through that. Gruns was the most recent business to at least partially leverage the old mental model of "brand"... ...but it's not like they were running superbowl ads or hiring a celebrity spokesperson. So what drives the enterprise value there? Subscription revenue? That's going to collapse with brick and mortar expansion. What makes Gruns more compelling than WalMart's inevitable store brand dupe? Again...still thinking through this...
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@camolNFT ·
I've made my career in crypto and seeing bad marketing genuinely makes me mad. Wasted budget on agencies that sell you overpriced services with 0 conversion, massive egos from influencers, and teams all trying the same exact playbook. Here's what you SHOULD be doing. 1. Have a growth employee go through your end-to-end product flow, ensuring onboarding is EASY. 2. Come up with a simple, repeatable brand positioning that is both a tagline AND an onboarding tool. 3. Stop worrying about the perfect logo. 4. Focus on the growth funnels similar WEB2 products use. Don't just YOLO your marketing. 5. Run paid marketing experiments, either with creators or ads (or both). See what converts and what doesn't. 6. Find ways to always contact your customers. Email, LinkedIn newsletters, or other. 7. Focus on SPECIFIC geos, don't try to onboard the world on day 1. Maybe just focus on Miami. 8. Find a way to make mindshare a moat for your company. If people are talking about you, they're not talking about others. 9. Be accessible. The best founders I know are almost always focussed on engaging with their users (or prospective ones). 10. Get niche-micro creators in industries adjacent to yours to create content. Crypto creators take every paid deal, which means none of them convert. But, what if you focus on WEB2 creators focussed on your niche? Way better. Obviously, all of these can get broken down way more. But these are the basics.
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@FedotOff90 ·
Klarna shipped a 100-million-product shopping search inside ChatGPT on May 20. Most ecom entrepreneurs missed it. The setup: ChatGPT users can now ask for product recommendations and see real-time visual results with current prices, availability, and offers from 119M+ Klarna users worth of merchant data across 13 markets. Powered by Klarna's Product Search MCP server. Klarna processes 3.4M transactions per day. The volume today is still tiny. We're talking single-digit percentages of total ecom search behavior at most. The brands seeing real revenue from ChatGPT shopping today are a small handful. But the trajectory is the signal. AI-referral traffic to retail sites grew nearly 700% during the 2025 holiday season. Those shoppers converted at 31% higher rates than traditional channels. Three things this changes in the next 24 months. → Product copy starts mattering for AI discovery, not just SEO. AI surfaces pull from product descriptions, ingredient lists, review sentiment. Brands with rich structured product data win. → Customer acquisition shifts. The ChatGPT shopper is comparison-shopping with infinite patience and a curated shortlist. Different CAC math. Potentially higher LTV because they self-selected for fit. → Brand differentiation collapses for commodities. AI strips the visual layer and surfaces the cheapest, highest-rated, most-reviewed option. If your only edge is Meta creative, you lose when AI mediates discovery. I'm not saying redirect spend. Meta will still drive 70%+ of acquisition through 2027. I'm saying the brands building structured product data and clear category positioning now are setting up the next 5 years. The infrastructure window opens now.
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@AJ_Odyssey ·
Brand marketing is full of spectacular failure because branding is a complex systems thinking challenge that many companies approach linearly. Brand is controversial not only because it's abstract, but because cooking up good brand strategy forces you to deal with with complex systems dynamics - culture, biology, human psychology, politics. Brand has to hit a moving target. And the only way you can properly address complex challenges with multiple interdependent variables is with Requisite Variety - aka bringing together a lot of people from within and outside an organization, all containing relevant pieces of the puzzle. One consulting firm just ain't gonna cut it. shoutout to @HipCityReg who made this crystallize for me after watching his hardware interview
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@tommylower ·
exploring handing clients brand software instead of brand guides → define core visual applications → build tool to recreate it parametrically → exports straight into the codebase → animations preview live, fine tune to components brand lives in software
Watch video
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@heyitsalexP ·
What no one is saying about Everlane's sale to Shein: politically-adjacent brand positioning is a dead end, whether you are pandering to the left or to the right. Everlane built their brand platform on "radical transparency". In 2012 that was refreshing. A decade later, it became politicized, even though that was never the intention. When you tie your brand to one of these politically-coded stances, the loudest and most extreme adherents will hold you to an impossible standard and criticize your every move online, loudly. Again, it doesn't matter if you're right-coded or left-coded. People use online political debates to escape an unsatisfying reality, and to regain a sense of power and status when their real life offers little/none. So, by "taking a stand", your brand is putting itself at the mercy of blackpilled yappers who are highly unlikely to buy anything from you. Obviously Everlane couldn't have predicted this when it chose to center "radical transparency" in 2011. But if you're thinking of making something similar the core of your brand's identity– whether you're "sustainable", "organic" or "made in the USA"– think twice...
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@MichaelDBrandt ·
Categories with the least technical or product differentiation have the strongest brands. Without meaningful product moats, the brand is the moat. Think about beer. Highly commodity, no real moat on product. So the brand *is* the differention. “Are you more of a Heineken person or a Stella Artois person?” Winning a customer comes down to how well the brand builds a world — through media, irl experiences, etc. On the other hand, if you invent a flying shoe, it doesn't matter what you call it. If you have hard technical superiority that solves a real problem, that’s your moat. Brand is optional. Think about Google, especially in the early days. So if you are looking to study great brands, look at crowded, mature categories like beer, soda, apparel, candy, laundry detergent, etc — commodity spaces where brand is the primary way to standout, and leads to Darwinian development of great brands.
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@timothylindblom ·
Branding for tech is 100% different than branding for other industries. There’s no “physical” product or package to make “pretty.” So you need to get very granular on how the UX/UI looks visually. - What’s the main hook? - What’s the icon styles? - What makes it non-boring? - What’s abstract but not random? The secret is making a non-visual product aesthetically pleasing… If you can do that (with the right idea), you’ll win.
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@funshorfelix ·
All this discourse, I would hate to take sides but maybe it's just a case of personality and precedent? 🤔 Brand A hasn't acted this way in the past, It feels not 'on-brand', and certainly hasn't responded in a similar way in the past. Brand B couldn't do much closer to their biggest publicity event and had to still 'reveal' something. It all feels cynical but both did nothing wrong. But the bigger question is do these brands have brand thinkers or guardians within their teams? Cause if they do, I'm definitely asking whether this supports our archetypal strategy. Brands in their shoes could really lean heavily on their brand strategy/not just messaging. But again, it's a good tension to have within the ecosystem but at what expense?
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@sarah_carusona ·
Brand doesn't lead company growth. Growth leads company growth. Before I continue, let me say that I'm a HUGE fan of brand. Real growth doesn't happen without it. But there's a nuance (and order) to the way company growth is approached. And each function has its optimal place. 𝐖𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐢𝐭 𝐥𝐨𝐨𝐤𝐬 𝐥𝐢𝐤𝐞 𝐰𝐡𝐞𝐧 𝐢𝐭 𝐠𝐨𝐞𝐬 𝐰𝐫𝐨𝐧𝐠: Brand wants to launch a new product campaign. They map out top-of-funnel and bottom-of-funnel messaging. They brief the influencers. They nail the key selling points. Growth finds out a week before launch. That's when we find out there are no assets built for paid media. No landing page. No PDPs. And the budget is already allocated. That's not a growth problem. That's a process problem. 𝐇𝐞𝐫𝐞'𝐬 𝐡𝐨𝐰 𝐢𝐭 𝐬𝐡𝐨𝐮𝐥𝐝 𝐰𝐨𝐫𝐤: Product and finance go first (not growth, not brand). They define what the product story is and what financial success looks like. That's the north star. Growth goes second (with brand's input). They define the KPIs per channel, budget, and timing. Brand uses consumer psychology to define how the marketing shows up across touchpoints. Channel owners go last. Web, media, owned channels. They execute with full context and feed performance data back into the loop. When growth & brand are in the room together from the beginning, launch assets get built with paid in mind. Budget gets planned before it's already spent. The whole org is rowing in the same direction. The order matters more than most people think.
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@williamkast_ ·
"Just go on Foreplay and find what's working." This is the default creative strategy for most brands and the best way to never hit $1M per month. This is what happens: 1. You find an ad from a brand doing $10M+/year. 2. You recreate it 3. It flops 4. You try another one? Same thing. What nobody tells you is that a lot of the brands you're copying are running at an unprofitable ROAS. They're losing money on acquisition on purpose. They're playing a different game. They have retention, LTV, and backend offers that make a loss leading front end work. You probably don't have that (yet). So copying their ads doesn't just fail, it burns your budget trying to play a game you can't afford. But even when you're copying a genuinely profitable brand, you're still only copying the surface. You see the format and the hook. You don't see the research behind it. You don't see which persona it's targeting. You don't see what awareness stage it was written for. You don't see the landing page it's sending traffic to. You're copying the wrapper and missing everything that actually made it work. The real strategy is never in the ad library. It's in the research, persona, awareness stage and brand positioning. Two brands can run the exact same format with the exact same production quality and get completely different results because one understood their customer and the other copied someone else's work. Once you understand your unique customer value proposition, your unique brand positioning, and your unique message, that's when you will find many winning ads that scale.
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@firstofkind ·
After this week’s big releases from @perplexity_ai we look back on our debut Season 1 episode with @henrymodis Design chief for Perplexity: Software is a material to be shaped, not just theorized. Here’s how to build an AI-native design practice. In our in-depth conversation, we discussed: › Why Perplexity adapted from answer enginer to a browser › Possibility vs. Necessity: Why most consumer UI innovation are actually arbitrary mistakes › The “Ground Truth” rule: Why mocks are just starting points for production code › Management as trust, not anxiety: Why he encourages designers to write production code and ship › The “Scorched Earth” brand strategy” - why Perplexity has no rigid style or system › Why “founding designers” and solo freelancers are the best hires for AI startups › The “View Source” impulse: How AI can make the web malleable and understandable again Watch on youtube/@firstofkind https://t.co/l2xycQocm9
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@theswapnilsri ·
Most people think Zara is just fast fashion. It’s not. It’s one of the smartest brand strategy stories of the last 15 years. Here’s what actually happened:👇 2009: Inditex (Zara) and H&M had roughly equal operating profits. Two European giants. Neck to neck. Then Shein entered. Thousands of new styles every week. Prices so low they made Zara look expensive. Younger audiences loved it. The obvious move was to cut prices and compete. H&M did exactly that. More discounts. More value lines. Cheaper products. Zara did something very different. They asked a simple question: Who do we want to be? And the answer was clear. Not that. So they went upmarket. Better stores. Better creative direction. Slightly higher prices. Fewer discounts. They started feeling closer to premium labels, not budget retail. They chose taste over price. Fast forward to today: Zara’s profits are almost 5x H&M’s. H&M is struggling. Zara is thriving. One brand chased the competitor. One brand chased the customer. That’s the whole game. When a cheaper, faster competitor shows up, the worst move is to go cheaper. You won’t win that race. The real move is to go up. Own quality. Own taste. Build a brand people feel something for. Price is just a number. Brand is a feeling. Zara understood that. H&M forgot it. Fashion founders, take a note! 📝
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@sharyph_ ·
There's a term going mainstream right now that sounds like it belongs in a PhD thesis: context engineering. Gartner published a formal definition for it in early 2026. Tobi Lütke wrote a memo calling it "the most valuable new skill in an AI-first environment." Enterprise teams are hiring for it as a job title. And Andrej Karpathy has been saying for months that most AI agent failures aren't model failures...they're context failures. Here's the thing though: if you've built a real content brand, you've been doing this for years. You just didn't have the name for it. Context engineering is the practice of designing the full information environment that AI operates in. Not just writing a prompt. Not choosing a model. The entire scaffold...brand voice documents, audience definitions, content constraints, memory structures, system instructions, output formats. The totality of what the AI knows before it produces anything. Prompt engineering was about the question. Context engineering is about everything that makes the question answerable well. When I run Claude to draft newsletter content, it doesn't just get a prompt. It gets: a full brand voice document, my audience's specific frustrations, my content pillars, my offer stack, my anti-patterns list, my tone guidelines, examples of what good looks like. That's a context layer. Before any generation happens, the model already knows who I am, who I'm writing for, and what I'd never say. I built all of that before I knew what context engineering was. And I'd argue most creators who have invested seriously in brand positioning have too. Your brand voice doc? That's a context artifact. Your defined audience persona? Context. Your content pillars and what you won't write about? Context. Your newsletter structure, your offer positioning, your proof points...all of it is context architecture, even if you built it in a Notion doc without a technical name. The creators who are failing with AI are not failing because they have the wrong tools. They're failing because they haven't built the context layer. They're running prompts into a vacuum. No brand definition, no audience clarity, no structural constraints...just a blank slate and a vague idea. And then wondering why the output sounds generic, because it is. The model is doing its best with nothing to work with. Here's what a functional creator context stack actually looks like: A brand voice document that tells the AI who you are, how you write, what you'd never say, and what phrases are signature to you. Not a mood board. A functional specification. A defined audience persona with specific fears, specific language, specific objections...not "creators aged 25-40" but the actual psychology of the person you're writing to. Content constraints that define what topics are in scope and which are not, what you've already covered, what angles are off-limits. An offer stack summary so the AI understands what you're building toward...what the content is supposed to move people toward, not just what it says in isolation. Output format rules. Length. Structure. What goes in the opener. What the close should do. What doesn't belong. I run my business with a 3-5 tool stack...that produces more leverage than most teams. Not because I have the most sophisticated technical setup. Because the context layer is built. The models know who they're working for. You don't need to become a prompt engineer or an AI developer. You need to treat your brand documentation the same way a software team treats a system specification. Build it once. Update it as you learn. And let the AI operate inside a well-designed environment instead of a blank one. Context is infrastructure. Most creators are skipping it and blaming the model. Build the context layer. Then let the AI do what it's actually good at.
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@itsmarcosruiz ·
Most personal brand "strategies" are just people copying whatever worked for the last big account they saw blow up. The problem is the thing that worked for that person was probably tied to a specific moment, a specific audience, or a specific level of credibility they already had. You can copy the format but the context that made it work doesn't transfer. The accounts I work with that grow fastest at The Birdhouse aren't running anyone else's playbook. We figured out what only they can say and they post it every single day.
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@saguppa ·
The biggest strategic mistake I've made in five years isn't about product, pricing, or hiring. It's brand positioning. We built a horizontal brand in a vertical market. And it's cost us more customers than any product bug ever did. SalesRobot does LinkedIn automation. Our best customers are agencies: 5% of our customer base, 25% of revenue, net negative churn. But our website says "LinkedIn automation for sales teams, agencies, and recruiters." Everyone. For everyone. The most meaningless positioning in SaaS. Meanwhile, Heyreach built their entire brand around agencies. Aimfox built their entire brand around agencies. When a lead gen agency searches for LinkedIn automation, they show up first. Not because their product is better. Because their brand is clearer. We lose deals we never see. That's the worst kind of competitive loss: the prospect never even evaluated us because our positioning didn't speak to them specifically. Here's what I've learned: 1. A product for everyone is a brand for no one. 2. Your highest-LTV segment should be your positioning anchor. 3. It's easier to expand from a vertical brand to horizontal than the reverse. Heyreach/Aimfox can eventually sell to SDRs. It's much harder for us to retroactively become "the agency tool" after five years of being "the everything tool." We're fixing it now. But fixing a brand is 10x harder than building one right the first time. If you're early stage: pick the one customer segment that loves you most and build everything around them. Ignore the FOMO of other segments. You can expand later.
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@LnprCapital ·
TAC Infosec Ltd : Decoding the https://t.co/VFiErShhyu Investor Update TAC Infosec Ltd released an investor presentation on https://t.co/VFiErShhyu, its AI-powered SOC 2 compliance automation platform. The Business Co is a cybersecurity company built around ESOF (Enterprise Security in One Framework), its core platform spanning vulnerability management, application security, cyber risk quantification (CRQ) and related modules. The group operates in India and through a US subsidiary (TAC Security, Inc.), and articulates a multi-brand strategy: building independent, category-focused cybersecurity businesses under one umbrella, which includes CyberScope (Web3 security), CyberSandia (US public sector) and https://t.co/VFiErShhyu (compliance automation). https://t.co/VFiErShhyu is the newest of these. It automates SOC 2 compliance, the trust attestation that enterprises increasingly require before onboarding a vendor. Positioning it as a standalone brand signals that management sees compliance automation as a distinct, scalable category rather than a feature within ESOF. https://t.co/VFiErShhyu has crossed 200 clients since launch. The first 100 arrived over six months; the next 100 over three, representing a doubling of the base at roughly twice the acquisition pace. Management frames this as early product validation converting into commercial momentum, driven by initial case studies functioning as reference proof and shortening the sales cycle. Product and Positioning The platform's differentiation rests on affordability and speed: Entry pricing around $2,700 per year, which the deck positions as materially below legacy competitors. Certification readiness in approximately two weeks, with CPA-backed attestation. 135+ automated cloud checks across AWS, GCP and Azure. 40+ ready-to-use policy templates, an Audit Vault, and AI-led remediation guidance. Claimed 40 percent improvements in reporting accuracy and audit preparation time. The strategic logic is market expansion rather than share capture. By lowering both cost and turnaround, https://t.co/VFiErShhyu targets startups, SaaS businesses and digital-first companies for whom traditional consultant-led SOC 2 has been prohibitive, converting compliance from an enterprise-only process into a broadly accessible trust requirement. The Strategic Thesis The deeper value case is cross-sell. https://t.co/VFiErShhyu is positioned as an entry relationship: acquire a customer through an urgent compliance need, then expand into the wider ESOF suite (MASA, CASA, Appsec, CRQ and others). Because compliance is a recurring, always-on workflow, it also supports retention. Management anchors this to a stated 10,000-client https://t.co/VFiErShhyu vision, a $4B+ SOC 2 opportunity, and group-level 2030 ambitions of $100M ARR at approximately $10K ARR per client with a 40 percent EBITDA margin. The Honest Counter-View A disciplined investor should weigh the following: The disclosure is client count, not Socify revenue. At the $2,700 entry price, 200 clients implies roughly $0.5M of indicative annual revenue, a considerable distance from the $100M group ARR ambition. The large numbers (10,000 clients, $4B market, $100M ARR, 40 percent margin) are forward-looking vision, not booked results. The company's own disclaimer states the figures are neither reviewed nor audited. There is a minor inconsistency: this deck cites 70 to 80 percent cheaper than competitors, while the annual report it references states 50 to 70 percent. TAC trades on the NSE SME platform, which carries thinner liquidity and no mandated quarterly financial reporting, giving investors fewer regular checkpoints. The $10K ARR-per-client ambition sits well above the current $2,700 entry price, implying the model depends heavily on successful ESOF cross-sell that is yet to be demonstrated at scale.
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@heyblake ·
Most positioning advice treats your brand as separate from you. That's wrong for founder-led companies. Here's a framework called the Identity-Positioning Matrix that fixes this. Draw a 2x2... The X axis is personal conviction, how deeply you believe in a specific worldview. The Y axis is market demand, how many people are actively looking for what that worldview promises. Top right quadrant is the sweet spot. High conviction, high demand. You deeply believe something, and the market is hungry for it. This is where the fastest-growing founder brands live. Top left is the missionary quadrant. High conviction, low demand. You believe something the market hasn't caught up to yet. This is where category creators live, but it's expensive and lonely. You need 12 to 18 months of content before the market starts to agree with you. Bottom right is the mercenary quadrant. Low conviction, high demand. You're selling what people want, but you don't deeply believe in it. This works short term and collapses long term because your content lacks the depth that comes from genuine belief. Bottom left is the graveyard. Low conviction, low demand. You're posting because you feel like you should. This is where most founder content lives and dies. The matrix tells you two things: 1/ where you are right now. If your content feels draining, you're probably in the bottom half. If your content feels energizing but nobody engages, you're probably on the left side. 2/ where to move. The goal is always top right. Either increase your conviction through deeper research and experience, or increase demand by connecting your conviction to problems people already feel.
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@johnny_lam_ ·
We delivered an identity system for a crypto client early last year. Fully paid. Never used. War metaphors, bold positioning, narrative spine for their post-alpha push. Then geopolitics shifted. Market crashed. The language anchoring their brand became painful. Identity scrapped. Nobody was wrong. Strategy made sense at the time. But it changed how we scope branding work. Brand genesis is often built on assumptions that haven't been stress-tested. Chicken and egg problem: You need a brand at launch But positioning is still a hypothesis pre-traction Betting budget on unproven narrative = expensive Now we learnt to ask harder questions upfront. Founder: "What's your logo process?" Us: "How many active users do you have? Who's running sales?" Sometimes we talk ourselves out of revenue and left on the table.... But branding weight hits different by stage: Pre-traction = locking in assumptions Post-traction = codifying what works The latter is where we can ground design in depth never seen before. The founders we work with feel it too. p.s. we volunteered to help touch up their new graphics after the pivot, they still have a place in our hearts (Unused concepts during projects)
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@ms_tourist ·
I’m always talking about brand positioning and why it matters so much as a marketing practitioner. This past weekend’s tale of two jazz festivals felt very deliberate. What stood out for me was the inclusion of Scorpion Kings in the CTJIF lineup. No disrespect to the genre, they’re undeniably influential…but the fit feels off. Some will argue it’s about expanding the audience and appealing to a broader demographic, which is fair. But then the question becomes…..are we still protecting the integrity of the brand? If the intention is to diversify beyond jazz, perhaps it’s time to position it differently, call it what it is….. a music festival. Because in the end, clarity in brand positioning isn’t restrictive, it’s what builds trust, identity, and long-term value. The success of the inaugural Montreux Jazz festival is undeniable. The other plus was having it outdoors, creating a beautiful vibe…In marketing, we appreciate competition. A definite win for the region and the destination. I did write an opinion piece prior to the MJF
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