It’s usually asked by someone who has spent years being told that everything can be attributed, and who has a finance lead sitting two desks away with a spreadsheet that agrees.

What does a dashboard actually see?

A dashboard sees what happened inside its attribution window. For most growing tech companies, that means the ad platform defaults: seven days, occasionally thirty.

What it cannot see is why they were looking, why they typed your name rather than a competitor’s, why they accepted the price without a discount code, why the sales cycle was five weeks instead of nine.

All of that is brand doing its job, and it often just gets registered as organic, direct, or nothing at all.

The demand to measure brand is fair. The trouble starts when brand is asked to justify itself in a seven-day window.

Why does the ask collapse brand into performance?

Whatever gets reported weekly gets managed weekly. Brand spend sits in the same review as channels that can show a return by Friday, so it gets pulled toward whatever the review can see.

A tracking code here, a product-first recut there. Within a year the brand work is direct response with better art direction, competing on the same keywords as everyone else while CAC climbs.

Can brand be measured at all?

Yes, on long-term indicators, over years. If the founder can live with that, record where each of these stands before the rebrand, then track them:

• Blended CAC over 18 to 36 months. Total marketing spend divided by total new customers, all channels. Falling while paid channels get more expensive is one of brand’s clearest fingerprints.

• Sales cycle, win rate and discounting. How long deals take to close, how often you win against named competitors, and how often deals close below list price. These move when buyers arrive already convinced.

• Branded search volume, plotted against brand spend. Free from Search Console. What matters is the shape of the line over two years.

• “How did you hear about us?” at signup. One free-text field. The answers attribution can’t see (the podcast, the recommendation, “just knew you”) are brand.

• How often AI models name you in your category. Ask ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini the same category question each quarter and log who comes up.

• Inbound applications per open role. Every company has this data, and it moves with reputation.

Mailchimp’s most famous piece of marketing was a 2014 sponsorship of the Serial podcast, best remembered for one mispronounced brand name that became a joke people repeated for years.

Ben Chestnut and Dan Kurzius never took outside funding and sold the company to Intuit for twelve billion dollars in 2021. That price reflected a large, profitable business built on years of consistent brand investment, with “MailKimp” one small part that no dashboard ever attributed.

Coach’s Tabby bag did not turn the brand around in a quarter either. The repositioning towards a younger customer began years before the results showed up in the numbers of Tapestry, Coach’s parent company. The interim reports would have looked like a heritage brand spending money on people who weren’t buying yet, until they started to.

So the answer to the founder’s question is yes, brand has an ROI, and it pays out over the years the company is actually judged on. The practical step is to agree the metrics and the timeframe with the finance lead before the work starts, so everyone knows what they’re watching and for how long.

Pony Studio is the Emerging-Tech Brand Studio — a London-based branding and creative design agency specialising in strategic brand development for tech companies worldwide. If you’re building something bold and want a brand that moves at the same speed as your ambition, let’s talk.

Ask ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity for the best tool in your category, and watch what comes back. Some companies surface consistently across models. Others barely exist, sometimes with better products and more funding.

There are plenty of reasons for that, most of them to do with how much has been written about a company and where. One of them gets settled long before launch, usually in a naming workshop.

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What we ask a name to do

Naming projects come with the same briefs and the same anxiety. The name has to do work: communicate the category, the benefit and the vibe, ideally all three, and immediately, the moment a stranger sees it.

But does the name really have to do all that work? The evidence has been building for decades. Google is a misspelling of a maths term. Amazon is a river, chosen partly because it started with A and would sort high in alphabetical listings. Häagen-Dazs is invented gibberish, engineered to sound vaguely Danish.

They were empty containers, and the companies spent years filling them with meaning until the name and the meaning became inseparable. So the advice for most of the last two decades was sensible: pick something you can live with, something pronounceable, ideally a bit clever so a stranger stops to think.

What happens when the customer asks a model

LLMs now field a growing share of your customers’ questions. Best CRM for a small agency. Best expense platform for a Series A company. Best way to run payroll across three countries.

The model answers from what it absorbed in training and, more and more often, from a web search it runs before replying. Either way, it has to work out which thing your name refers to.

That’s easy when a name appears almost nowhere else. Zapier and Monzo mean nothing apart from the companies, so every mention a model has seen of those strings points at the same place.

It gets harder with names like Bloom, Arc, Loop and Bolt. The model has seen these words billions of times, attached to gardening, geometry, crochet and plenty of other startups that made the same choice. Ask about Bolt and you might get a ride-hailing company, a checkout startup and an AI coding tool in one answer.

If you launched an expense platform called Loop tomorrow, the witty common-word name would be one weak association buried in a mountain of stronger ones.

Some of the qualities that made a name good for word of mouth and Google now make it harder for a machine to retrieve. Spellability mattered mostly because people typed names into browsers. For a model, the requirement is knowing, without ambiguity, that your string of characters points at you.

The obvious objection

Slack is a word for laziness, bolted onto software that exists to make workplaces more productive, and the contradiction has never cost it a customer. Notion, Linear and Stripe are ordinary words too. All four come up constantly when you ask a model about work software or payments.

They get away with it because of volume. Years of press, documentation, reviews and millions of people writing about them have given each word a dominant meaning in its category, and the models have learned it.

A company at Seed or Series A has a fraction of that signal. With a few hundred mentions on the web, there’s very little around the name to help a model tell you apart from everything else it could mean. A distinctive name makes sure those few hundred mentions count towards you.

The container argument still holds. The container changed.

A name will always matter to whoever reads it, though it can’t communicate everything about you. Its job was to be memorable, something the market could rally behind while the company filled it with meaning. The requirements were modest: human memory, a search bar, a spellable word.

Machine discovery adds a requirement at the very start, before you’ve shipped anything: the container has to be one a model can find.

A coined name only solves part of this. A model knows nothing about a brand-new word, so it won’t recommend you on the strength of the name alone. What a distinctive name gives you is a clean slot, where every mention you earn attaches to you, and filling it takes the same years of work it always did.

Our own name is a common word

Pony means a small horse, a small glass, a ponytail and, in British slang, twenty-five pounds. We’re aware of the irony of writing this under that name.

We kept it because six years of client work sit behind it, and changing it now would cost more than it saves. What we do instead is reduce the ambiguity around it. We use the exact same name everywhere it appears, one domain, and the same plain description of what we do beside it, so every mention reinforces the link between Pony and branding for tech companies.

It takes more deliberate effort than a coined name would, and that effort is worth knowing about before you choose.

Before the trademark and domain search

1. Ask five models who they name in your category. The companies that surface are your real shortlist competition, and their names show you what’s working.

2. Ask the same models what your candidate names mean. If one comes back as a yoga pose, something unfortunate in another language or three other startups, drop it. You want a name the model associates with nothing yet.

3. Weight coined and distinctive strings over dictionary words, especially if you’re early and won’t have much written about you for a while.

4. Search funded startups as well as trademarks. Check Crunchbase, Product Hunt, GitHub and the app stores. A name can clear legal review and still share a model’s attention with three companies that raised last year.

5. Once chosen, use the name identically everywhere. Site copy, directories, press, social profiles, llms.txt. Models learn the association from consistency, and every variant spelling splits the signal.

6. Describe what you do in the same plain words wherever the name appears, so models learn the connection quickly.

Everything after that works the way it always has. The company does the work and the name fills with meaning, until in a few years nobody remembers it could have been called anything else.

The checks above take about an afternoon. We now run them at the start of every naming project at Pony.

Pony Studio is the Emerging-Tech Brand Studio — a London-based branding and creative design agency specialising in strategic brand development for tech companies worldwide. If you’re building something bold and want a brand that moves at the same speed as your ambition, let’s talk.

Brand meets the same fate more often than anyone admits. “We’ll do brand properly later” gets said, and the debt starts from that moment.

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Brand debt is the accumulated cost of every branding decision made quickly and “temporarily” instead of intentionally: the interim logo, the placeholder tagline, the landing page copy that will do for now, pasted word for word from Claude.

Each one feels defensible on its own. The trouble is that they build.

What actually accrues

When brand debt builds, you can date the layers like sediment.

Three versions of the logo in circulation: the website’s, the one IT put into the email signatures in 2022, and a misshapen export living in the sales team’s Google Slides.

A tagline written as a placeholder for the LinkedIn banner the day the account was set up, still there.

A homepage, a pricing page and a careers page that describe three different companies, because three different people wrote them with their own ideas of what the company was.

More landing pages than anyone can count, the tone drifting a little further with each generation.

Adding a new page, deck template or logo variation feels like progress. Going back through what already exists, standardising it and changing it feels like going backwards. So the layers of sediment continue to build.

Why it compounds instead of just accumulating

If brand debt simply piled up, it would be annoying but manageable. You’d rebrand eventually and sweep it all away in one go.

The reason it behaves like debt, and carries interest, is that every new asset is built on top of the existing mess and inherits it.

A new hire joins marketing. Their first landing page is copied from the last landing page, which is the sensible move when there are no guidelines to copy from instead. The drift in that page becomes the baseline for the next one. A new salesperson builds their deck from the deck the top performer uses, itself assembled from four older decks. The stretched logo travels with it.

The inconsistency multiplies fastest when output demand is highest, which is usually when the company is growing fastest. So the brand looks most fragmented at exactly the moment new customers, hires and investors are forming their first impression of it.

And the cost of unpicking it scales with surface area rather than time. Fixing the tagline in year one means changing a banner. Fixing it in year four means changing the banner, the website, every landing page, the sales collateral, the app store listing, the email templates, the swag, and the muscle memory of every employee who says the old line on calls. Every quarter of delay adds another surface the change has to reach.

The “later” that never arrives

The problem with “we’ll do brand properly later” is that later has no trigger attached.

Tech debt eventually forces the issue: builds slow down, things fall over, someone senior finally can’t ship. Brand debt sends quieter signals. Win rates soften a little. Sales calls take an extra ten minutes of explaining. Candidates arrive with the wrong idea of the company. Each symptom has a nearer explanation than the brand, so the debt sits and accrues.

The brands that end up here usually made no real brand decisions rather than bad ones. Years of individual additions with no guidance produce a system nobody designed on purpose. It evolved, one change at a time.

What paying it down looks like

• Give someone deletion authority. This takes judgment more than budget: one person who can make the overarching call on what retires.

• Retire, don’t replace. When a new logo, tagline or template ships, every old version gets hunted down everywhere it exists, from email signatures to app store listings, and swapped out.

• Audit landing pages quarterly. Every page that no longer maps to a live campaign or a current product gets removed or redirected.

• Make the core pages agree. Homepage, pricing, careers: read them together, regularly, the way a prospect would, and rewrite wherever they’ve drifted.

• Treat the maintenance as real work. A recurring task with an owner and hours against it, same as any feature work. Engineering learned to treat refactoring as normal work rather than an admission of failure. Brand gets there the same way, by scheduling it.

Pony Studio is the Emerging-Tech Brand Studio — a London-based branding and creative design agency specialising in strategic brand development for tech companies worldwide. If you’re building something bold and want a brand that moves at the same speed as your ambition, let’s talk.

Both are managed by different people, judged on different numbers and written in different registers. It worked fine because they were aimed at different audiences.

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Now each one is much easier for the other audience to find. Candidates read product reviews before the interview. Customers see the layoff story in the same feed as the product launch.

In a lot of tech categories, the customer and the candidate could even be the same person: the engineer who uses the tool at work is the engineer being recruited to build it.

So the two faces of the brand inevitably end up side by side, and the difference between them is visible to people who weren’t even intending to look.

What an employer brand actually is

Strip the HR language away and an employer brand is a promise about what it means to work somewhere and what you get for it.

A customer brand is a promise about what it costs to buy something and what you get for it.

Same structure. Same mechanism. Often the same person.

The loss of alignment begins when the two promises are written by teams who don’t compare notes.

Marketing promises the product is simple because the company is focused. Talent promises the workplace is balanced, collaborative and kind, because that is what wins the recruiting benchmark.

Neither team asks whether a focused company that ships simple software at speed could plausibly also be a gentle one.

Usually it cannot, and everyone who has worked inside a fast company knows it. Candidates know it. Which is why a careers page that reads like a wellness retreat, sitting next to a product page that reads like a war on complexity, tells the reader that one of them is not being truthful.

The company that stopped pretending

Revolut is a company running one brand.

The product promise is ruthless simplicity: open an account in minutes, move money without friction, no queue, no patience required.

The employer promise, once you get past the values list, is almost identical. Move fast, own the outcome, ship something the customer notices, expect to be measured on it. Nik Storonsky has said, in more or less these words, that the place is not for everyone.

When years of harsh employee reviews piled up, the company’s answer was a CultureLab team and mandatory one-to-ones, aimed at how people treat each other rather than how hard they work.

The pace was never disowned. The careers page still describes a pro sports team, and the product still moves like one.

It works like a filter. Someone actually looking for a high-intensity environment where shipping is the point reads the reviews and thinks, yes, that’s me.

Someone who wants a slower pace self-selects out at the first thread. Both decisions cost the company nothing, because it never claimed to be something else.

The cautionary case is BrewDog. In 2021 a group of former employees published an open letter describing a culture that did not match the punk, anti-establishment identity the beer had been sold on for a decade. There was uproar because the distance between the promise of honesty on the can and actual experience was so vastly different.

What the contradiction is made of

When the two sides of the brand fight, it is rarely because anyone lied on purpose. Each was optimised locally. The customer brand is optimised for differentiation, so it makes bold, specific claims. The employer brand is optimised for applicant volume, so it makes broad, safe claims that score well on every survey.

One is to stand out, the other to offend nobody, which makes the safe one seem artificial when it may be just as accurate.

How to make them stop contradicting each other

• Start with what the product demands of the people who build it. Speed needs people comfortable being measured on shipping. Craft needs people who will be slow when slow is right. Think realistically, not just about what will align with most people.

• Define the values and a personality that reflect how the team actually operates, and accept the cost. An honest one attracts some people and pushes others away. That is it working.

• Write the employer brand as the price of the customer promise. The customer gets simplicity because the team absorbs the complexity. The customer gets speed because the team accepts the pace. Phrased as a trade, candidates can test it against reality.

• Put the reality in writing. If the place is fast, measured and not gentle, say so on the careers page. Stated plainly, it filters. Hidden behind a promise of balance, it becomes a Glassdoor review.

• Read the top ten employee reviews and the top ten customer reviews in one sitting. Find the sentence where they disagree. It might be about pace, autonomy or how decisions get made, and it is usually something the company already knows and has never written down.

• Give one person the authority to reject either brand. Someone senior enough to kill a recruiting campaign because it contradicts the product, or a product claim because the team can’t honestly deliver it. In a small company it should be the founder.

A careers page that tells the truth about pace gets fewer clicks than one that promises balance.

But it is still the right trade. The applicants lost are the ones who would have arrived expecting the palatable version and written about the difference. The customers lost are the ones who read that review and wondered what else was being softened.

Revolut’s growth owes something to an employer brand that puts people off. It tells the truth about the product, and the people who join are the ones who read both and wanted exactly that.

Pony Studio is the Emerging-Tech Brand Studio — a London-based branding and creative design agency specialising in strategic brand development for tech companies worldwide. If you’re building something bold and want a brand that moves at the same speed as your ambition, let’s talk.

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The standard critique is this is a complexity problem: too much jargon, too many acronyms, simplify until your mum gets it.

But most deep-tech copy is often perfectly well written. The problem is what it’s written about.

The mechanism gets the whole page, and the consequence, the thing the buyer actually came for, is buried somewhere inside it if it shows up at all.

A visitor arrives wondering what world this thing produces. They leave without an answer, because everyone was busy explaining how the engine runs.

The mechanism is the founder’s story

Founders lead with the mechanism because it’s the achievement. Five years in a lab, the patent, the thing three other teams tried to build and couldn’t.

So the homepage has to become a proof of existence, with an architecture diagram, benchmark table, evidence that this is not vapourware.

This means the mechanism does get its moment. It gets properly examined in the sales call, the security review, the pilot.

The homepage’s job comes earlier, and it’s smaller: it has to work before anyone agrees to a call.

Simplifying makes it worse

The usual fix tends to produce something worse: category language.

Strip the detail out of your ML-driven anomaly detection, and you sound like every other company doing anomaly detection.

Somewhere along the way, simplification got confused with minimalism: fewer words, cleaner pages, delete anything that looks technical.

But the detail is where the differentiation sits. Delete it, and you keep the generic frame, which is why so much simplified deep-tech copy reads like it was written by the category rather than the company. “We use advanced AI to secure your infrastructure” could run on forty homepages without anyone noticing the swap.

Good simplification chooses which detail carries the point. Bad simplification removes weight until nothing is left to disagree with.

What the good ones actually did

Stripe’s technology is complex: card networks, acquiring banks, reconciliation, compliance across a hundred jurisdictions.

All of it is explained somewhere, and the docs go as deep as any engineer wants. None of it leads. What leads is the consequence: a developer ships payments this afternoon instead of this quarter.

Even the famous seven lines of code were never really an explanation of how Stripe works. It was a picture of what your Tuesday looks like once it does. Above it all sat a consequence so large it doubled as a mission: grow the GDP of the internet.

Cloudflare runs one of the more technical networks on earth: anycast routing, edge compute, DDoS mitigation at a scale most engineers will never touch.

It publishes obsessively about all of it; the homepage just doesn’t make you read any of it first. What the homepage sells is the world where your site stays up, loads fast everywhere, and attacks bounce off before you notice them. The network sits behind that as proof.

Neither of them dumbed anything down. The technology stayed exactly as complex as it was. They moved it behind the consequence instead of in front of it.

In practice

Run your homepage copy through these before it ships:

• Write down what the customer does differently after deployment. If the sentence contains your architecture, rewrite it. The output should be concrete: a shipped feature, a closed threat, a faster decision.

• Paste your headline onto a competitor’s homepage. If it still works there, it’s category language. Rewrite until it could only be yours.

• Check where the mechanism lives. One click deep, not on the front door. If a technical buyer can’t find it at all, you’ve overcorrected.

• Ask whether the copy feels safe. Consequence copy makes a claim someone could challenge. Mechanism copy describes what you built, and safe usually means nothing is being claimed at all.

Pony Studio is the Emerging-Tech Brand Studio — a London-based branding and creative design agency specialising in strategic brand development for tech companies worldwide. If you’re building something bold and want a brand that moves at the same speed as your ambition, let’s talk.

When an AI agent evaluates a company, it reads the raw text of your website, your structured data, and what everyone else on the internet says about you.

That should worry more brands than it currently does.

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How to check

Take your homepage. Remove the hero image, the gradient, the logo, the animation. Read what’s left as plain text.

For most tech companies, what’s left is likely a sentence like “We help teams unlock their potential with intelligent solutions”. Which breaks down to not differentiate or mean much at all.

It contains no claim an agent can extract, no fact it can compare, no statement that distinguishes you from the four competitors it’s reading in parallel tabs.

Humans have always been generous readers. We fill vague copy with vibe, the confidence of the layout, the quality of the paper stock, the fact that someone we respect shared it.

Agents extend no such generosity. They are the first audience in the history of branding that takes you completely literally. If the words don’t say it, you didn’t say it.

The industry is busy debating schema markup and llms.txt files while the actual problem sits in plain sight: most brand copy, read literally, says nothing.

Where agents form their opinion of you

Yext analysed 6.8 million citations across AI-generated answers and found that around 86% come from sources brands either control or strongly influence: your own site, your listings, your reviews. Brand websites alone account for roughly 44% of citations.

However, Agents triangulate. Ahrefs and Surfer have both shown the same pattern: the more of an answer’s cited sources mention a brand, the more strongly that brand gets recommended.

Reddit sits near the top of the most-cited domains across every major model, which means a thread from 2023 where someone described your onboarding as “fine, I guess” is now part of your positioning.

Consensus is the new share of voice. An agent asked for the best tool in your category is looking for the name that keeps appearing when other people answer the question.

Distinctiveness was always about being describable, giving the market a specific thing to say about you. Agents have simply made the mechanism visible, and put a cost on failing it.

If nobody can articulate what makes you different, the model averages you into the category, and the category answer won’t include your name.

What to actually do

Limy analysed 500 million AI bot traffic events and found the major search crawlers almost never fetched llms.txt. They read your HTML directly. The real work is verbal.

• Write one sentence about your company that is true only of your company. Not “we’re the leading platform for” — a sentence a competitor truly couldn’t say. Then check whether it appears anywhere on your website in plain, extractable text. Maybe it got rewritten in a review, buried in a case study PDF, or delegated entirely to a visual metaphor.

• Put your facts in text. Pricing, integrations, who you’re for. Agents cannot read a claim that lives inside a visual. The brands doing this well read almost blunt — short declaratives, specifics where the category uses abstractions, the confident plainness of a company that knows what it is.

• Make every surface tell the same story. Consistency matters more than volume: the same company description, the same category language, the same claims across your site, your listings, your founder’s LinkedIn, your G2 profile. Every inconsistency is noise in the model’s picture of you, and noisy entities get summarised cautiously.

• Feed the consensus. A podcast appearance, a genuinely useful answer in a forum, a piece of original research other people cite. Agents triangulate from what everyone else says, and earned mentions are how you shape what everyone else says.

A caveat before anyone torches their homepage in pursuit of uniqueness. Some overlap with your competitors is necessary.

Category language is how an agent works out what you are; if you are a “project management tool” that refuses to call itself one, you’re opting out of every project management answer.

Shared vocabulary gets you into the room. The sentence only you could write is what gets you chosen once you’re in it. Keep both, and know which job each one is doing.

Pony Studio is the Emerging-Tech Brand Studio — a London-based branding and creative design agency specialising in strategic brand development for tech companies worldwide. If you’re building something bold and want a brand that moves at the same speed as your ambition, let’s talk.

Whatever thinking there was to do got done years ago, somewhere else, by a version of you who wasn’t shopping at the time.

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That’s brand working exactly as designed. Not persuading you at the shelf. Making sure there was nothing left to decide by the time you got there.

Most of how we talk about brand assumes the opposite. We treat it as the edge that wins the moment a buyer lines you up against a competitor, the awareness, the preference, the distinctiveness that supposedly tips the choice your way.

But that was never where brand did its work. It worked earlier, on the question of whether the buyer would ever line anyone up at all.

Comparing is expensive

Actually choosing between eleven moisturisers or nine payment tools is miserable. It eats an evening, breeds second-guessing, and most of what separates the options turns out not to matter once you’ve spent the time finding it out.

Economists call it search cost. The rest of us know it as the browser with thirty tabs open and no decision made.

So people struck a bargain. Pay a little over the odds and the whole exhausting exercise disappears. Brand is what made that bargain available. A bit more money in exchange for never doing the homework, and somehow everyone walks away convinced they came out ahead.

Trust arrives by association

The name, the styling, the sense of quality, the imprint a product leaves in your memory, all of it is competing for a slot on a shortlist that never actually gets scrutinised.

Association does the deciding. By the time someone’s ready to buy, the verdict is already in, assembled from fragments they never registered as research. A friend had it on their shelf. A founder who mentioned it. It was sitting on the counter of a café they liked the feel of.

Not one of those encounters came with a spec sheet, but each helped strike a competitor off the list. What accumulated instead was a picture of who this is for and what choosing it would say.

Which is the entire case for spending on distinctiveness. A name people recognise, and a look that stays put give those scattered impressions somewhere to gather.

Every encounter in a context someone already trusts adds to a balance you never see on a ledger.

The premium is a receipt

Part of why people pay more for the familiar tub is that paying more means never having to read the back of the other ten. A pound more on the shelf is a bargain against twenty minutes of deliberating, or scrolling through reviews while you block the aisle.

It scales into B2B without much changing. The founder who reaches for Stripe never has to defend the call in a meeting. The familiar option draws no scrutiny, so part of what the higher invoice buys is the quiet, certainty and cover, bundled in with the software.

Where brand stops working

Put two products genuinely side by side compared on a procurement sheet, a feature grid, an AI assistant fielding “so which one should I actually buy?” and brand’s contribution is less impactful.

The ratings, the pricing, the specs are what move the outcome now. Brand already had its say, further upstream, in whether that side-by-side was ever going to happen.

Yet we keep measuring brand as though it wins the side-by-side. Awareness, salience, preference, all logged as though they’re waiting to be spent at the point of decision.

The actual work finished earlier. By the time a buyer is genuinely holding you up against someone else, brand has already blundered on the one thing it was there to do: keep that moment from arriving.

The upstream test

What a strong brand produces is the comparison that never happens. That’s exactly why it resists measurement and why it’s worth so much when it works.

No one draws up a spreadsheet for the options they never thought to consider, so the win leaves nothing behind to point at.

It does hand you a way to judge the spend, though. Ask whether the work is getting you onto the shortlist before anyone starts comparing or whether it’s decorating a product that’s still going to have to win the comparison on its merits.

B2C is the forgiving version, where a single person decides and gets to decide in advance.

B2B is stricter. There’s a committee, a process, a business case, and all of them exist precisely to force the comparison you were hoping to sidestep.

Brand still counts; it shapes who lands on the shortlist and who gets the benefit of the doubt when the numbers are close, but it can’t make the comparison evaporate the way it does for someone reaching, without thinking, for a familiar jar.

In B2B, brand earns its keep by getting you into the room, even if it can’t keep the room empty.

Pony Studio is the Emerging-Tech Brand Studio — a London-based branding and creative design agency specialising in strategic brand development for tech companies worldwide. If you’re building something bold and want a brand that moves at the same speed as your ambition, let’s talk.

Deadpan, local, completely unbothered.

In 2024, a hoax went viral claiming the store was finally closing, and people were so upset they drove there from across the United States.

The store’s response: don’t believe everything you read, we’ll be here until the bitter end. Merch orders spiked. A rumour of death was the best marketing the brand had in a decade.

Then there’s Concorde. Retired in 2003 after the economics finally caught up with the romance. Twenty-three years later, there are volunteer groups restoring droop noses on museum airframes, a quarterly fan magazine, and Club Concorde, which has been trying to get one back in the air since 2011.

Nobody does this for a discontinued SKU. So what exactly are these people loyal to? Because it isn’t video rental and it isn’t supersonic flight.

A brand’s afterlife is the audit

Death strips a brand down to whatever it actually was. While a company is alive, you can never quite separate the brand from the distribution, the media spend, or the habit. Customers show up, and you flatter yourself that it’s love when a lot of it is convenience.

The afterlife removes every confound. No stores, no ads, no product. Whatever’s still standing is the real brand.

Run the audit on Blockbuster, and the answer is obvious. Nobody misses rewind fees. People are mourning Friday night, the walk down the aisle, the gamble on the box art.

Blockbuster was selling a ritual and thought it was selling rentals. Netflix killed the company in a decade, but it couldn’t kill the meaning. There is no scenario in which people form a fan club for an algorithm that autoplays the next episode. Netflix won the business and forfeited the afterlife.

The mourning test

Now run it on tech, where most brands are utilities wearing brand costume. Skype shut down in 2025 after two decades as a verb, and the funeral was a shrug. Quibi raised $1.75 billion and died without a whisper.

Meanwhile people are still grieving Google Reader thirteen years on, and Vine is so culturally load-bearing that TikTok is essentially built inside its ghost. The correlation between money spent and afterlife earned is approximately zero.

So what do you build?

A little friction, for a start. The Blockbuster aisle was the product. So was the Concorde boarding experience. Utilities that rush users to the outcome don’t get fan clubs. And the ritual has to stand for something contestable. Vine argued for creative constraint. Concorde argued the future should be faster and more glamorous. Nobody mourns a brand that agreed with everyone.

The resurrections are the proof. Polaroid came back because fans bought the last factory. Nokia relicensed the 3310 because the affection outlived the handset by a decade.

If you’re running a startup, maybe spend less time studying why brands died and more time studying what refused to die with them.

That residue is a pre-validated brief.

We’ve spent years optimising for habit and calling it loyalty. But habit is what happens when nobody’s deciding anymore. Ritual is friction people choose. People drove across America to Bend because of a rumour.

Habit dies the second a better product ships. Ritual gets a fan club.

Pony Studio is the Emerging-Tech Brand Studio — a London-based branding and creative design agency specialising in strategic brand development for tech companies worldwide. If you’re building something bold and want a brand that moves at the same speed as your ambition, let’s talk.

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Thousands of people, the same tools, working independently, all landing in the same place. The tool isn’t the thing that failed. Taste is.

What changed when execution became free

Making things used to be hard and slow. Clients paid agencies partly for thinking, but mostly because agencies could produce. The kerning. The guidelines document.

The deck that didn’t look rushed at 5pm. Execution was the product, and thinking came bundled in for free.

AI hasn’t eradicated that. It has inverted it. When anyone can generate forty competent options in an afternoon, the value of those options drops to nothing, and the value of knowing which one, and why, becomes the whole game.

The cost of making collapsed, so all the value pooled in choosing. Taste stopped being an aesthetic preference and became a decision-making discipline, the difference between forty things that could exist and the one that should.

You can already see the gap

Surreal sells cereal off the back of ads that are, executionally, almost nothing. Flat colour, one line of copy, a joke about hiring random men called Dwayne Johnson so they could technically claim a celebrity endorsement.

Plenty of people could have made those ads. Not many would have run them. The judgement, knowing exactly how far to push the bit and that the category was earnest enough to crack under one good joke, is the entire brand.

No model arrives there, because models optimise toward the plausible, and the whole joke lives in the implausible.

Now the other direction. Last December, McDonald’s shipped a fully AI-generated Christmas ad in the Netherlands and pulled it three days later under an avalanche of mockery. Ten specialists, seven weeks, thousands of generated takes.

Enormous effort went into the making. What nobody in that pipeline did was stop and ask whether it should go out at all, even though Coca-Cola had taken the exact same beating the Christmas before. Near-unlimited capacity to make, and the entire failure lived in a single decision nobody exercised.

Luxury fashion ran the trial run for this a decade early. Through the late 2010s, the great houses filed their serifs down into the same flat geometric sans, each decision defensible on its own,the collective result being century-old brands converging on a default setting.

Then Burberry reinstated its serif and the Equestrian Knight, deciding a hundred and twenty years of accumulated character was worth more than fitting in. Serifs, crests, ornament, all the texture the minimalist years had sanded off, became the point of difference precisely because nobody else could claim it.

AI is that convergence times a thousand, arriving across every medium at once. The brands that escape it won’t out-produce anyone. They’ll out-decide them.

Taste is not what most people think

Here’s the part that gets romanticised. Taste isn’t a gift you’re born with. It’s pattern recognition plus conviction: having seen enough good and bad work, closely enough, to know the difference before the market tells you, and being willing to act on it when that’s inconvenient.

Ira Glass described the mechanism years ago. Your taste develops faster than your ability, and the gap between what you can recognise and what you can make is what kills most people early, before they’re good enough to satisfy their own standards. AI just deleted the second half of that equation.

The ability gap is gone. All that’s left is the recognising, which means the thing Glass called the painful part of being a beginner is now the entire job.

How you actually build it

Taste is learnable. The method is boring and unglamorous, which is exactly why it’s defensible. Nobody can shortcut their way to it, which means the people who put the reps in stay ahead.

Articulate, don’t just look. Pull up a hundred identity systems and write down why three of them work. Then debate it with someone who might disagree. The writing and the argument are the reps, not the scrolling.

Make the call before you know the answer. Commit to a direction in writing, date it, and go back in six months to mark your own work. Taste compounds through outcomes attached to your name, not opinions you never tested.

Get specific about what’s wrong. “I don’t love it” won’t help you. “The serif is doing heritage, the palette is doing startup, and the brand can’t be both” will. Vague reactions stay vague forever.

Defend a position longer than is comfortable. Taste without conviction is just curation, and curation is something models are getting good at.

Study the failures, not the award books. Everyone can explain why the winners worked, usually after the fact. Working out why a technically excellent piece of work still landed badly is where the actual judgement lives.

None of this is fast, and that’s why it stays human. The tools will keep getting better at making things. None of that improvement touches the question of what should exist in the first place, and that question was always the interesting one. It just used to be possible to hide from it by staying busy.

Pony Studio is the Emerging-Tech Brand Studio — a London-based branding and creative design agency specialising in strategic brand development for tech companies worldwide. If you’re building something bold and want a brand that moves at the same speed as your ambition, let’s talk.

The forty minutes of comments pointing the other way tend to retire the same evening.

In reality, what gets taken away from a focus group has less to do with what the participants think, and more to do with the people behind the glass: what they needed to hear, and what they were planning to do with the answer before anyone said a word.

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Start with who’s actually in the room

Before we get to bias, look at recruitment.

Who is available on a Tuesday afternoon to spend ninety minutes discussing packaging for a £60 incentive? Your customer is likely at work, or picking up their kids, or living their life in blissful ignorance of your brand architecture debate. The person in the room is someone with the time and the inclination to be there.

Then there’s the screener itself. Screeners are written to find people who care about the category. You’ve recruited a handful of major enthusiasts (or critics) to represent a market of people who likely feel somewhat indifferent.

Even when recruitment lands, the setting warps everything. We consume brands in three seconds at a shelf or a screen, half-distracted, mostly on habit. A focus group asks people to become rational narrators of an irrational process, in a beige room, in a group of strangers.

The real client is behind the glass

By the time a brand decision reaches formal research, the decision has usually been made. The research is there to prove it.

You can tell which kind of research you’re in by reading the discussion guide. A guide written to learn is full of open territory and uncomfortable stimulus.

A guide written to validate walks respondents gently toward the preferred route, shows the leadership’s favourite option last, and frames the alternatives just weakly enough to be unfavourable.

Then the findings do their real job. If the rebrand succeeds, leadership had conviction. If it fails, well, the research supported it at the time.

The inverse happens too. A leadership team is nervous of a bold move and short of the justification to back one, so it commissions groups. Groups punish bold moves. Nobody wants to defend something unfamiliar in front of strangers, so the interesting option gets called confusing, or off-brand, and everyone gets to say the market wasn’t ready. The team hands its decision to a few strangers and a one-way mirror, then calls the outcome evidence.

Think about the brand work you actually remember from the last decade, the distinctive kind that shifted a category. Put it in front of a group before launch and the transcript writes itself: weird, chaotic, off-putting. Because it was. That was the point.

Familiarity scores well in rooms and then disappears in markets.

What research is actually for

Talking to customers is still worth doing, and worth doing properly. Understanding what real people outside the brand think about your decisions will always be valuable. We all get stuck on a one-way track, and a reality check, or a point of view you could never imagine without being one of them, will always create better work.

The question is what you’re asking research to do. Research is good at telling you how people behave, what they notice, and where your assumptions are wrong. Research is bad at making brand decisions, and it turns hostile the moment you ask it to carry one.

So if you’re going to run sessions, run them properly.

The ingredients of a session worth running

• Decide in advance what a negative result would change. Write it down before you brief the recruiter. If the honest answer is nothing, cancel the research and spend the money on the work. This is the single test that separates learning from cover.

• Go in without the answer. The research has to be objective, which is hard when there’s already a preconceived answer in the building. If leadership has a favourite, say so out loud and design the guide to attack it, since flattering it will happen on its own.

• Recruit properly, and pay for it. Get as close as possible to the audience you actually want to reach, and accept that the people easiest to recruit are rarely them. Screen for real behaviour (what they bought, switched, cancelled) over stated attitudes. A smaller number of the right people beats a full room of professional respondents.

• Recreate the moment of choice. Show the work the way the market will meet it: on a shelf, in a feed, on a screen, for seconds. First reactions in context tell you more than twenty minutes of group deliberation about a logo on a foam board.

• Watch as much as you ask. The useful material lives outside your structured list: the hesitation, the misreading, the thing they mention on the way out. Where you can, trade the group for one-on-one interviews in context, about actual behaviour rather than predicted preference. People are honest historians and terrible forecasters.

• Write the guide to learn. Open territory, uncomfortable stimulus, options shown in rotating order, alternatives framed at full strength. If a guide only makes sense with the preferred route winning, it’s a script.

• Report everything, including the inconvenient forty minutes. The debrief should carry the comments that pointed the other way, with the same weight as the ones leadership enjoyed hearing. If a finding only survives when it agrees with the room behind the glass, you ran theatre.

• Keep the decision where it belongs. The positioning, the risk, the point of view: that belongs to the team. Listen to what people tell you, take the reality check seriously, and then make the call yourselves. A focus group can inform a brand decision. It can never make one.

Next time someone proposes groups to “de-risk” a brand decision, ask what would change if the groups came back negative. If the answer is nothing, cancel the research and spend the money on the work. If the answer is “we’d have cover,” at least be clear about what you’re buying.

Pony Studio is the Emerging-Tech Brand Studio — a London-based branding and creative design agency specialising in strategic brand development for tech companies worldwide. If you’re building something bold and want a brand that moves at the same speed as your ambition, let’s talk.

HBO Max became Max, lost its mind, and crawled back to being HBO Max black and white, prestige serif, the works. La-Z-Boy went back to the character of its original logo and was one of Ad Age’s Top 5 Rebrands of 2025.

When Cracker Barrel tried to go the other direction, modern, flat, no old man on a barrel, the public reaction was so aggressive that the company reversed it in about 48 hours.

Cracker Barrel, in particular, is a strong use case showing that nostalgia is now much more than just a design trend.

So what’s actually going on?

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Why are brands going back to their old logos?

Nostalgia builds trust and creates an emotional connection. But that’s completely useless as an explanation, because nostalgia has always done that, and brands didn’t spend the 2010s mining their own archives.

They spent the 2010s dulling everything down into the same geometric sans-serif. They spent the 2010s dulling everything down into the same geometric sans-serif. Everyone can tell you why nostalgia works. Why now is the harder question.

Well in the age of AI, bedrotting and the political climate, perhaps brands reach backwards when the future stops being a sellable destination.

For about fifteen years, “the future” was the most valuable territory in branding. Tech aesthetics were clean, frictionless, vaguely Californian to signal progress, which in turn signalled value.

Every bank wanted to look like a fintech, so every fintech wanted to look like an app, and every app wanted to look like a sedative; everyone at every meeting nodded along to “modern, clean, scalable.”

Then the future got complicated. AI anxiety, platform decay, the general sense that the next thing might be worse than the last thing.

The aesthetic of the future is now the collective of stuff people are nervous about.

When Jaguar launched “Copy Nothing” with a minimalist logotype, and conceptual everything to deliberately sever itself from its own past, it got torched because it felt as if it was making a bet on a future nobody felt warm about.

An old logo is like the only pre-approved asset on the balance sheet. Your archive is the one place you can do where nobody can accuse you of getting it wrong, because the audience already did the approving decades ago, for free.

You can watch this happen in real time in how AI sells itself. OpenAI’s first big ChatGPT brand campaign was shot on 35mm film, grainy and soft-lit, with real actors, and the entire visual language of a pre-digital world.

The most future-facing product ever made chose to sell itself with the aesthetic of the past. And it’s not just them. Look closely, and most of the AI category is doing it, reaching for analogue warmth to make the future feel survivable.

Nostalgia is risk management wearing a vintage jacket

A lot of these “heritage revivals” would be better described as insurance policies over intentional creative decisions. Going back to the 1994 logo means you can’t fail the way Cracker Barrel failed, the way Gap failed, the way Tropicana failed.

The strategy deck might say “returning to our roots.” The subtext says, “We have watched what the internet does to new logos, and we would like to not be a meme, please.”

It is understandable. The cost of a botched rebrand is now public, instant and permanent.

Social media turned every identity launch into a referendum. If you’re a CMO with a three-year tenure, the old logo is to be romanticised; it is the safest brief you can sign off, but let’s not pretend safety is a revolutionary strategy.

Are old logos just better?

These logos being dug up were made under completely different circumstances, Smaller teams. Fewer stakeholders. No 47-slide research debrief, no legal pass on whether the mascot tests well in six markets.

Somebody with taste just made a decision, and the company lived with it. The result was specificity. Weirdness. A unique point of view.

But when professionalism came along. We optimised for legibility at 16 pixels, for app icons, for “scalability,” for not offending anyone in any market ever.

Leading to a decade of identities so interchangeable that the most popular genre of design content online is mocking how identical everything looks.

So when audiences say they love the old logo, they’re saying they love the past. They’re saying they can tell the old one was made by people and the new one was made by process.

If you’re a founder or a brand lead reading this, remember that audiences are beginning to sniff out borrowed memory, and when everyone’s reaching backwards, backwards becomes the new boring.

What you should take away is not to use your old logo. But to recover the conditions that made the old logos good:

• Conviction over consensus. The revived marks people love were made with opinions, not compromises. If your identity could survive your most cautious stakeholder untouched, it’s probably not doing enough.

• Specificity over scalability. Yes, it has to work as an app icon. But make distinctiveness the asset not scalability as a strategy.

• Meaning over freshness. Cracker Barrel’s customers were defending accumulated meaning. Before you’re so quick to “modernise,” do the maths on what you’re writing off.

So why is nostalgia eating branding?

Because the industry spent a decade stripping meaning out of brands in the name of optimisation, the culture stopped trusting the future as a promise, and the only meaning left lying around was the old stuff. It told us that audiences preferred us when we believed in something too.

With the way we are going, there will be nothing to be nostalgic about in the future. So if you want to be a memorable brand, be brave enough to make something today that’s worth being nostalgic about in thirty years. That used to be the whole job. Somewhere along the way we completely swapped it for risk mitigation. Come 2056, the brands raiding their archives now will find nothing but copies of someone else’s.

Pony Studio is the Emerging-Tech Brand Studio — a London-based branding and creative design agency specialising in strategic brand development for tech companies worldwide. If you’re building something bold and want a brand that moves at the same speed as your ambition, let’s talk.

Patagonia jacket in the cupboard, SHEIN haul on the doorstep.

Paid subscriptions to the most thought-provoking of Substack newsletters, but also spends three hours on TikTok every night.

Maybe it’s deeply inauthentic. Or maybe it’s not contradictory at all. This is what buying has become when every brand has spent a decade creating a niche, ownable identity that customers were expected to commit to.

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Open any marketing book from twenty years ago, and it will tell you: don’t sell the product, sell the identity.

Don’t say “athletic shoes,” say “athletes.” Make the customer feel something about themselves when they hold the box.

It worked when identities stuck. The person who bought Nike in 2005 was a Nike person, this was when lifetime value was built on the consistency of the self. That’s not the customer anymore.

The customer in 2026 is claiming four identities before lunch. A wellness influencer for the smoothie. A fashionista for the haul. An intellectual for the Substack, and a doomscroller for the algorithm. They can all live in the same person without ever resolving into one like before.

What’s actually being bought

It’s not actually about the smoothie or the coat, or buying into the brand tribe. They’re buying a fifteen-minute version of a self, someone who has time for that smoothie, that morning routine. With postable proof that they did it. By late afternoon, they want to be different. They’ll buy a different proof.

Identity adapted from a one-time membership to an ongoing performance, which only requires a prop that lasts as long as the act.

When we looked at how brands connect with Gen Z, the insight was aspiration over relatability. The best brands aren’t telling customers what to do. Erewhon isn’t telling anyone who they are. Aesop isn’t either. What they have is a very specific look, smell, gesture that the customer can use in whatever they’re performing that day.

The customer is now the director. You’re in the prop cupboard. So you need to be findable.

The B2B version

B2B brands have been discovering identity-driven marketing. “For builders.” “For the curious.” “For people who give a damn.” Every other SaaS landing page is selling a personality type instead of a product.

It doesn’t work the same way. Nobody can see your CRM. The buyer can’t wear your software.

What B2B buyers actually buy is competence-identity. Not “I’m a builder.” More like “I’m the person who knew about this tool first. I’m the person who picked the thing that didn’t break.” The audience is small: peers, the team, and the person interviewing them in two years. The prop is the knowing, rather than the using.

B2B has been selling the costume when it should be selling the credit. The thing the buyer gets to say they knew about. The thing that makes them look right in a Slack DM. That’s what software is actually selling.

What this changes

You can’t keep thinking the old way, about who our customers are and what we mean to them.

The question you need to be asking now is what version of themselves are they trying to be, and is our product a useful prop for that performance?

It means building a brand by being specific, recognisable, and useful for self-performance, and letting customers pick you up and put you down as they shift.

Most customers are buying your brand for a specific situation, alongside three others you’d never put in the same sentence. In this case, loyalty now means being reached for at the right moment.

The uncomfortable bit

It might sound like a downgrade, thoughtful brand work turning into a temporary costume. But there’s still work to be done in understanding the specific situation the customer is trying to perform their way through, and being the most recognisable, reachable, and aesthetically resolved option in that situation.

The traditional model flattered customers by telling them they had a stable self that brands could speak to. The new one is accepting that they are juggling, improvising, and reaching for whatever helps them be the version of themselves they need to be that day.

Identity used to be something you sold to a customer. Now it’s something they assemble themselves. With or without you.

Pony Studio is the Emerging-Tech Brand Studio — a London-based branding and creative design agency specialising in strategic brand development for tech companies worldwide. If you’re building something bold and want a brand that moves at the same speed as your ambition, let’s talk.

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The implication is that the company has been getting by on the founder’s personality, and now it needs to grow up and stand on its own. Acquire some gravity. Sound like a business instead of a person.

That impulse isn’t wrong. Brands built entirely on one human being are fragile in a specific, predictable way. The founder gets tired, cancelled, bored, or simply runs out of the particular energy that made the whole thing magnetic in the first place.

When the brand IS the person, every one of those ordinary human events becomes an existential risk to the company. You’ve turned a CEO into a single point of failure for the entire perception of the business.

So the company professionalises its voice and hires a comms team. The founder’s spiky, slightly too honest LinkedIn posts get replaced by content that’s been through three rounds of review.

The dependency problem is solved, and a worse one takes its place. The company now sounds like every other company in its category, and the rough edges people actually connected to are gone.

Both failure modes are real, and most companies escape one by sprinting straight into the other.

The dependency runs both ways

We talk about founder dependency like it’s a one-directional risk: the founder leaves, the brand collapses.

But there’s another version that does more damage because it never announces itself. The company becomes dependent on not having a voice. On consensus copy. On positioning so broad it couldn’t possibly offend anyone, which is another way of saying positioning nobody could possibly love.

Mailchimp is one example. Ben Chestnut and Dan Kurzius bootstrapped it out of Atlanta for twenty years and sold to Intuit for $12 billion without taking a cent of outside money. But the brand that made Mailchimp was never Chestnut’s face. It was Freddie the chimp, the deliberately odd copywriting, the bet that email software could feel like it was made by people with a sense of humour. The personality got institutionalised. It lived in the product, not the founder’s profile. Chestnut himself is famously low-key. His LinkedIn status currently reads “resting.”

Mailchimp moved the personality from the person into the company, on purpose, and kept the weirdness intact through the transition. The voice survived the founder stepping back because it was never solely the founder’s to begin with. It had been given somewhere durable to live.

Compare that to the more common pattern, where personality and founder are treated as the same asset, so when you reduce founder risk, you accidentally delete the personality too. You can’t tell the difference between the two until you try to remove one and find you’ve removed both.

Architecture, not allocation

A founder is good at holding conviction. Specific, contestable, occasionally obscure opinions about where the world is going.

Founders can say “we think the entire category is built on a lie” and it’s seen as courage rather than corporate risk-taking, because it’s attached to a person who’ll wear the consequences.

A founder can pick a fight. A founder can be early to something and look foolish for two years before looking prescient.

These kinds of bets read as authentic from a human but completely wrong from a logo.

A company is good at holding the things that need to outlast any individual’s mood.

The proof that this is a system producing good work repeatedly, not one person’s hot streak.

The kind of boring, operational trust that makes procurement teams comfortable handing you their payment infrastructure, without needing to know whether a charismatic founder is still excited this quarter.

The work is deciding, deliberately, what goes where. The founder owns the point of view and the bets. The company owns the proof and the continuity. And then you build the bridge between them on purpose instead of hoping it forms by accident.

Where they amplify each other

The bridge between the two is often left to chance, but it is where the real value sits.

It works when the founder’s conviction becomes the company’s product reality. The founder says something pointed about how the industry should work.

The company then ships the thing that proves the founder wasn’t just posting. The opinion becomes evidence. Now the founder’s next opinion carries more weight, because the last one turned out to be load-bearing.

That loop, conviction to proof to credibility to bigger conviction, is the entire mechanism. It’s the only version of this that compounds.

It breaks the moment the two halves contradict each other. When the founder is out there preaching radical transparency and the company’s actual contracts are a thicket of hidden fees.

The audience will notice. They always notice the gap between the human’s claims and the institution’s behaviour, because that gap is the most interesting thing about any company and people are extremely good at finding it.

What to take from this

Run the test on your own company. If your founder vanished tomorrow, what specifically would die with them?

If it’s the entire personality of the brand, you’ve built a cult of one, and you’re exposed.

If it’s “nothing, it’d be fine,” It probably means you spent years sanding off everything distinctive your founder gave you, and now any competitor could be swapped in without anyone noticing.

The founder owns the conviction and the bets. The company owns the proof and the continuity. Keep the two telling the same story.

We wrote recently about how the founder has become the asset that can’t be cloned. This is the other half of that argument.

If the founder is the thing worth betting on, the question every growing company eventually faces is how much of the brand should rest on one person’s face, and what happens to all that personality when they step back. Read more here.

Pony Studio is the Emerging-Tech Brand Studio — a London-based branding and creative design agency specialising in strategic brand development for tech companies worldwide. If you’re building something bold and want a brand that moves at the same speed as your ambition, let’s talk.

In the moment they accept a category someone else invented and decide to win inside the box.

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The brief arrives with the category pre-filled. The competitor audit reinforces it. The positioning work happens inside a frame nobody thinks to question.

What you get is a brand that’s well-executed and strategically trapped. Optimised to be the best version of a thing that already exists, in a space that’s already crowded, using language the market has already tuned out.

The brands that are breaking through don’t get better at the game. They look at the board differently.

Monzo didn’t win at banking. It made banking feel like the wrong word. Notion didn’t beat project management tools. It made the whole category feel like it was built around the wrong problem, neither competed harder within an existing frame. They questioned whether the frame was right.

This is what category design actually does, and why it matters more in crowded, traditional markets than in the markets where it gets talked about most.

The question that changes everything

What if the category itself is the problem? What if the messaging isn’t landing because you’re explaining yourself inside a frame that was never built for what you do?

These are the most valuable questions you can ask about your brand. They’re also the hardest to ask, because the moment you accept a category, you inherit everything that comes with it.

You’re not just describing yourself. You’re agreeing to be evaluated on terms someone else set, against competitors you may not actually compete with, for buyers who may not be yours.

The uncomfortable truth about category creation

It might mean being misunderstood for a while.

There’s no comparison table that helps you. No benchmark. You’re standing somewhere new and asking the market to follow, which is a vulnerable position and a terrifying brief to take to a board.

It’s also the only move that’s genuinely uncopyable. Anyone can copy a landing page, a feature set, or the shape of a go-to-market plan. Nobody can copy a category you already defined and own.

What to take away

Every market that looks crowded looks that way for one reason. Everyone in it accepted the same frame and got better at competing inside it.

The whitespace was never where they were looking. It was in the question nobody was willing to ask.

The enemy of differentiation isn’t a competitor outspending you or a market that isn’t ready. It’s the assumption that the game you’re playing is the right one. The brands that work that out early build something nobody else can follow them into.

Pony Studio is the Emerging-Tech Brand Studio — a London-based branding and creative design agency specialising in strategic brand development for tech companies worldwide. If you’re building something bold and want a brand that moves at the same speed as your ambition, let’s talk.

The sentence that really matters is almost always in there somewhere. Shyly sitting around slide 32. Under a header nobody remembers, next to a diagram that needed its own explanation.

If the brand strategy has landed, you won’t need to ask anyone in the room. You’ll already know.

Can your most recent hire say what you do, without looking anything up? Can your lead investor describe you at dinner, not pitch, but just describe you without looking at their phone? Can a customer who’s used you twice explain you to a friend in a way that makes the friend want to try it?

Purpose is the conclusion the strategy is building toward, not the deliverable it starts with. The workshops, the frameworks, the values exercises, none of it will produce it.

They just create the conditions where it might eventually surface, by pushing until the room gets uncomfortable, until someone says something they actually believe, and everyone else goes quiet because they know it’s true.

That moment is the strategy. Everything else is just its packaging.

Freedom-First Finance. Three words that replaced forty slides for Moneda. It’s the decision about what the product actually is: money without a middleman. Self-custodial, high-yield. The first platform built on the premise that financial freedom shouldn’t require a bank. Once that was named, everything else got easier - what to say, who to say it to, what to stop doing.

Real brand strategy to the market, to new hires, to the founders, with a hard call at 11 pm when there’s no time to open a deck and find the answer.

Purpose is the sentence that makes every other decision faster. Not the paragraph buried in the brand guidelines that nobody reads after the handover call — the one that’s so clear you don’t need to look it up.

If you don’t know it yet, you haven’t finished the strategy.

You’ve just stopped working on it.

Pony Studio is the Emerging-Tech Brand Studio — a London-based branding and creative design agency specialising in strategic brand development for tech companies worldwide. If you’re building something bold and want a brand that moves at the same speed as your ambition, let’s talk.

The four things that actually work are small, dull, and doable this week.

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What actually gets you cited by AI in 2026?

Your brand needs to be unambiguous as an entity; your content has to add something the model hasn’t already eaten ten thousand times, and other sources describe you the same way you describe yourself. Everything else is decoration.

What To Do

Write the sentence once. Paste it everywhere.

“Empowering modern teams to do their best work” is not positioning.

Write an actual sentence: “Acme is a payroll API for European fintechs.”

Then put it, verbatim, on your homepage, LinkedIn, G2, Crunchbase, About page, meta description, and the first line of every podcast you do this year.

If your site says one thing and LinkedIn says another, you’re increasing ambiguity.

Models hedge on ambiguity. Hedging means you don’t get named.

Put one number, one quote, or one named framework in every post.

Princeton’s GEO research found expert quotes lifted citation probability by 41%, statistics by 30%, inline citations by 30%. The model is looking for things that look like evidence.

Numbers. Attributed quotes. Named methodologies. Things with edges.

Most “AI-optimised content” being produced right now says the opposite: FAQ-stuffed and structurally polite.

Models can extract from it. But they have no reason to.

Fix Your Third-Party Profiles.

Open every profile that ranks for your category — LinkedIn, G2, Capterra, Crunchbase, Wikipedia if applicable.

Paste in your one sentence.

Teams underinvest in this because there’s nothing to show for it at the end. But it’s where the model decides whether you’re one company or three.

For developer tools, GitHub and Stack Overflow are the real homepage.

For founder-led brands, it’s your LinkedIn posts and every interview you’ve given.

Write llms.txt and Walk Away.

Host a file at yourdomain.com/llms.txt. State what you do in plain language, and link to your most authoritative pages.

Adoption is uneven across providers, but it’s one of the only places you get to speak directly to the system.

While you’re there, add Organisation schema with sameAs links. Then leave it alone.

Anyone selling “schema audits” as an ongoing service are mostly selling peace of mind.

What’s Actually a Waste of Money

• Buying “AI visibility” tools before you’ve written the sentence. The dashboard will tell you you’re invisible. You already knew.

• Rewriting your existing pages with “AI-friendly” filler. The model can already extract from them. You’re only adding extra noise.

• Paying anyone who guarantees AI placement. No one can guarantee it.

What to Takeaway

Pick a sentence, repeat it everywhere, give people a reason to quote you.

The old job was to make the page rank. The new job is to make sure everyone else is describing you the same way you describe yourself.

Pony Studio is the Emerging-Tech Brand Studio — a London-based branding and creative design agency specialising in strategic brand development for tech companies worldwide. If you’re building something bold and want a brand that moves at the same speed as your ambition, let’s talk.

What none of it addresses is the more uncomfortable truth that Gen Z has grown up with brand performance going wrong, and that their tolerance for it is essentially zero.

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Every generation has been able to smell the difference between a brand that believes something and a brand pretending to. What’s changed now is the volume of evidence. Pivot-to-cause campaigns that disappeared when the moment passed. Influencer partnerships that felt inauthentic and transactional. “We stand with you” statements posted and deleted within the week.

It’s not that Gen Z are somehow harder to fool. They have just had so much more material to work with. It’s now impossible to hide behind bad branding anymore. Here is what that means for your strategy.

Performance isn’t a strategy

Gen Z grew up with more examples of brands getting it wrong than any generation before them.

Pepsi’s Kendall Jenner ad is the most documented example of this failing publicly, a brand trying to attach itself to cultural movements it had no real connection to. Not only did the audience reject it, but they dissected it frame by frame.

The credibility gap wasn’t just because it was an inauthentic ad. It was a brand with no real position trying to borrow one for thirty seconds. That’s one thing Gen Z is particularly good at identifying, and completely unforgiving about.

Relatability had its moment

For years, the playbook was relatability, brands that felt just like us, spoke like us, shared our references. That worked when the noise was lower and the options were fewer.

Duolingo built one of the most unique brand presences on TikTok, chaotic, self-aware, and completely unexpected for a language learning app. It worked because it felt like a personality.

Then every other brand tried to replicate it. Suddenly, every corporate account was being unhinged and quirky.

The moment it became a playbook, it stopped working, because the audience could see the template underneath. Duolingo’s own engagement softened as the novelty wore off and the imitators crowded in.

Relatability at scale has a shelf life. It always has. What cuts through the noise now is aspiration, not exactly in the traditional luxury sense, but brands that stand for something worth being associated with, not just understood by.

Coach is the clearest example of what comes next. The brand spent years trying to compete with European luxury houses on their terms of craftsmanship and exclusivity. It wasn’t working.

The positioning was borrowed, and the audience knew it. The turnaround came from going the other direction entirely, leaning into something more specific and more honest. New York, subculture, the slightly worn-in, the idea that luxury doesn’t have to take itself so seriously.

The Tabby bag became a Gen Z staple not purposefully, but because the identity underneath had enough substance to be worth finding.

Conviction means knowing what you won’t do

The brands that have genuinely captured this generation don’t share an aesthetic or a tone of voice. What they share is being specific about what they believe, who they’re for, and most importantly, what they’re not willing to do even when it costs them.

The Ordinary close their stores and website on Black Friday. No sale. No limited edition drop. Just an invitation to shop intentionally for the rest of the month, with what they called Slowvember.

To intentionally opt out of the single biggest retail moment of the year can only be done by a brand so clear on its position that it can afford to lose customers who don’t share its values.

They’re a filter, not a target market

Most companies spend everything trying to reach Gen Z and nothing on figuring out how to keep them.

Depop built something genuinely useful for a specific kind of person and largely got out of the way. When Etsy acquired it and began optimising for broader appeal and conversion metrics, the core audience noticed immediately.

The changes were relatively minor. The signal they sent was not.

Along came Vinted, which didn’t try to win by being cooler or even better marketed. It won by staying closer to what that audience actually needed without trying to also be a cultural moment.

The community Depop built migrated to the product that respected them as users rather than a demographic to expand into.

This isn’t actually a Gen Z problem

No generation is a monolith. What Gen Z specifically shares is access to information, to alternatives, to each other.

Brand inconsistency gets surfaced faster. Inauthenticity travels further. The gap between what a brand says and what it does has never been shorter.

That accountability infrastructure doesn’t switch off for other audiences. It applies to everyone, all the time. The brands treating this as a generational quirk to manage will rebuild their strategy every five years.

Those who treat it as a permanent shift in how trust works will build something that doesn’t need rebuilding.

The brands that win with this generation aren’t copying the latest trend the fastest. They knew what they stood for before the audience arrived and didn’t move when it got uncomfortable.

Pony Studio is the Emerging-Tech Brand Studio — a London-based branding and creative design agency specialising in strategic brand development for tech companies worldwide. If you’re building something bold and want a brand that moves at the same speed as your ambition, let’s talk.

By the time the brief arrives, the decision has already been made. In a room nobody was invited to, where two CEOs traded the brand name like the last item on a divorce settlement.

The job is usually to reverse-engineer a strategic rationale for a call made on ego, politics, lawyers’ advice, or whoever blinked first.

The good ones refuse to start there. They start with the business underneath, and what it stands to gain or lose, not the name on top.

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Strip away the consulting language, and there are four options when one company buys another.

Kill one, keep the other. The acquired brand disappears, and customers get a migration email. Clean, decisive, and right when the smaller brand carries no equity worth preserving. Wrong when customers chose that brand specifically because it wasn’t you.

Merge the names. A portmanteau, a hyphenate, a coined word. Done well, it signals a genuinely new entity rather than a winner and a loser. More often it's the compromise two leadership teams reach when neither can agree on which name should disappear — so neither does.

Keep both, separately. The acquired brand keeps its identity, sometimes its leadership, and the parent stays in the background. The hardest to sustain but often the smartest when the acquired brand has equity you’d be insane to dilute.

Endorse one with the other. Slack, a Salesforce company. The least sexy option and frequently the most honest. A transitional structure that buys time to figure out what to do permanently, which is why most companies stay here longer than they planned.

Which one fits is never really about what’s strategically optimal. It’s about what the deal structure supports and whether anyone is honest enough to say so.

When it goes wrong

AOL Time Warner. DaimlerChrysler. Sprint Nextel. The lesson the industry keeps drawing from these is culture clash. Which is true, but incomplete.

Two organisations with different histories don’t merge because someone designed a new logo. The deeper failure in each case was that the brand was made to carry a story the business wasn’t actually living.

DaimlerChrysler called itself a merger of equals and put both names on the door. Inside, nobody believed it.

The two ran as separate operations for nearly a decade while sharing a name. The brand promised integration. The operating reality delivered the opposite.

Sprint Nextel followed the same pattern. Two incompatible network technologies, two distinct customer bases, one combined name that signalled unity while the infrastructure underneath remained stubbornly separate.

The merger destroyed roughly $30 billion in shareholder value. The rebrand didn’t cause that. But it made the dysfunction legible to everyone watching.

The consistent thread across failed M&A rebrands is a brand announcing a reality that didn’t exist at the beginning, and never arrived.

When it goes right

Salesforce’s acquisition strategy is the clearest recent example of getting this right consistently. Tableau, MuleSoft, Slack, all kept their names.

The logic was the same each time: these brands had equity with specific audiences that the Salesforce master brand didn’t have and couldn’t replicate.

Slack’s users chose it partly because it felt like the anti-enterprise tool. Folding it into Salesforce’s identity would have hollowed out the thing that made it worth $27.7 billion in the first place.

If you acquired a company because of what makes it different from you, absorbing it into your identity destroys the asset you just paid for.

Tata’s handling of Jaguar Land Rover is the longer version of the same argument.

A conglomerate with no automotive heritage in the premium segment kept its distance, let the brand breathe, and watched it recover equity that a decade of Ford ownership had eroded. The parent’s restraint was the strategy.

HPE’s recent Juniper acquisition is looking to be another example of this. Rather than folding Juniper into HPE Networking, they’re running HPE Aruba Networking and HPE Juniper Networking as separate entities, segmented by customer type, led by Juniper’s former CEO.

That’s a strategist acknowledging that Aruba and Juniper sell to different buyers who trust different things, and that destroying either equity would cost more than the integration saves.

Most acquirers can’t hold this position because the pressure to simplify gets louder every quarter. If HPE actually holds it, this will be one of the better M&A brand outcomes of the decade.

What To Takeaway

The brand decision in M&A is almost never really a brand decision. It’s a mirror held up to the operating reality underneath. Get that right first, and the naming takes care of itself. Get it wrong, and no amount of good design makes the gap invisible.

That clarity has a deadline too. The window to get this right is about ninety days. After that, the market has already decided what the deal means and the brand work becomes catch-up.

Sorting that hierarchy out before anyone starts on the logo is the first thing a good strategist does. And usually, the last thing anyone wants to hear.

Pony Studio is the Emerging-Tech Brand Studio — a London-based branding and creative design agency specialising in strategic brand development for tech companies worldwide. If you’re building something bold and want a brand that moves at the same speed as your ambition, let’s talk.

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Then there’s most of the internet. Particularly, the part that raised a Series A in the last eighteen months. Where every homepage hero reads like it was written by the same committee:

Transforming how teams collaborate with next-generation AI-powered workflow intelligence.

Read that again. What does it do? Who is it for? You don’t know. Neither did the person who shipped it.

Confident brands use fewer words because they’ve already decided what they are. The copy is just the residue of a decision that was made earlier, in a room where someone said something specific and the rest of the room didn’t immediately try to broaden it.

Less confident brands use more words because they’re still negotiating with themselves on the page. Every clause is a hedge. Every adjective is a small apology. Powerful, intuitive, scalable is what you write when you can’t bring yourself to say what you actually do, or who it’s actually for.

When the iPod launched in 2001, every competitor was leading with specs. Storage capacity. Bitrate. Format compatibility. Apple shipped 1,000 songs in your pocket. Six words. Jobs reportedly settled on the line before the product had a name. The decision arrived before the copy did. That’s the sequence that matters.

The Patagonia ad that ran in the New York Times on Black Friday 2011 told people not to buy. The lesson everyone draws from it is about anti-consumerism. The lesson worth drawing is about nerve. Most brand teams would have written: In an era of overconsumption, we believe in mindful purchasing decisions that align with our environmental values. Same idea. Zero memory. Zero nerve. Zero risk.

Oatly’s cartons say things like it’s like milk but made for humans and wow no cow. In a category that was desperately trying to sound credible, health-conscious and scientific, they sounded like a person. That choice excluded people who wanted to feel sophisticated about their oat milk. It found everyone else immediately, that is the kind of trade a confident brand is willing to make.

Every extra word is a place to soften the claim, qualify the position, smuggle in another audience you’re not ready to lose. The first draft says something. The fourteenth says something to everyone.

This is where the work actually lives not in the writing, but in the deciding. The anxiety underneath most overlong, overqualified brand copy is always the same: what if we lose someone? What if a potential customer reads this and decides it’s not for them?

That’s the wrong fear. The right fear is what if nobody reads this and feels like it’s specifically for them?

Specificity is what makes people feel found. A brand that speaks to everyone creates the vague, uncomfortable experience of being in a room where nobody is talking to you directly. A brand that speaks to someone specific creates the opposite, the recognition of being seen. That experience means something. People send it to someone they know with a note that says this is exactly us.

You don’t get that with transforming how teams collaborate.

This is where AI is making things worse. A model trained on the average of all marketing copy ever written will produce, very competently, the average of all marketing copy ever written. Fluent, on-brief, forgettable. The hedges come pre-installed.

AI copy broadens because broad statements get fewer objections. It flatters the founder’s sense of what the product is rather than challenging it toward something more useful. It creates copy that feels like it was written by someone who understood the brief and wanted very much to be helpful.

Which is exactly what it was.

You can spot it in two seconds. Three adjectives where one would do. Language that could describe any company in the category. A headline that sounds like a job description. Confident brand copy does something different, it makes a claim specific enough that someone could disagree with it. You can feel the decision in it. The thing it considered and didn’t say. That’s not something you can prompt your way into without doing the harder strategic work first.

Just do it. Think different. Don’t buy this jacket. 1,000 songs in your pocket.

None of those would survive most brand workshops. Someone would ask if it could be a bit more inclusive. Someone would suggest adding “for everyone.” Someone would worry it’s too direct.

That’s the work. Holding the line against the second person in the room.

Pony Studio is the Emerging-Tech Brand Studio — a London-based branding and creative design agency specialising in strategic brand development for tech companies worldwide. If you’re building something bold and want a brand that moves at the same speed as your ambition, let’s talk.

In this step-by-step guide, you will learn exactly what to include, where to get aligned internally, and the questions that need to be answered before your brief reaches the agency.

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What Is a Branding Brief - and Why Does It Matter?

A branding brief is the document you provide to a branding agency before any creative work begins. It gives the agency the context, objectives, constraints, and creative direction they need to understand the problem you are asking them to solve.

But a branding agency is only as good as the information you give them. The most talented creative team cannot build a brand that resonates if they do not understand your business and what you are trying to achieve.

Done well, a brief aligns everyone on outcomes before a single concept is developed. It prevents expensive misunderstandings, reduces unnecessary revision rounds, and gives the agency creative permission to do their best work instead of spending weeks trying to guess what you actually want.

Before You Write the Brief: Do the Internal Work First

This is the step most businesses skip, and it is the reason so many branding projects go wrong before they have even started.

Before you can brief an agency effectively, you need to achieve internal alignment. If your leadership team cannot agree on what problem you are trying to solve, no agency can solve it for you.

Ask yourself and your team these questions before you open a blank document:

• Why are we doing this now? What has changed in the business, the market, or the competitive landscape that makes this the right moment for brand work?

• What is not working about our current brand? Be honest. Is it visual? Strategic? Is the brand simply no longer reflecting who you have become as a business?

• What does success actually look like? Not just deliverables, but in terms of business impact. Better sales conversations? Easier recruitment? Clearer differentiation from competitors?

• Who has sign-off? Identify the decision-maker before the process begins, not halfway through creative development.

If you cannot answer these questions confidently, you are not ready to brief an agency yet. You are ready for an internal strategy session first.

What to Include in a Branding Brief: The Eight Essential Sections

1. Company Overview

Start with the fundamentals. Who are you, what do you do, and where do you stand today? The agency needs to understand your business before it can help you build a brand around it.

Cover the basics: what your company does, how long you have been operating, your current market position, your size, your key products or services, and how customers currently describe you. If you have existing brand assets — a logo, a style guide, previous brand work — share them here, even if they are exactly what you are trying to move away from. Context is everything.

2. The Problem You Are Trying to Solve

This is the most important section of your brief

Be specific about the challenge. Are you rebranding because you have outgrown your startup identity and need to look credible to enterprise clients? Are you losing deals to competitors who appear more established? Have you expanded into new markets, and your brand no longer translates? Have you merged with another company and need a unified identity?

The clearer you are about the actual problem, the more likely you are to receive solutions that address it.

3. Objectives and Definition of Success

What does a successful outcome look like, creatively, as well as commercially?

Strong objectives are specific and measurable. “We want to look more premium” is not an objective. “We want to increase our average contract value by repositioning away from the SME market and toward mid-market and enterprise buyers” is an objective that an agency can actually target.

Include both business objectives (what you want the brand to do for the company) and brand objectives (what you want people to think, feel, and do when they encounter your brand).

4. Target Audience

Describe your audience as specifically as possible. The instinct is to say your product is for everyone, or to list five different audience segments without prioritising any. Think about who they are and what they care about. As well as why they chose you over the alternatives.

5. Competitive Landscape

List your three to five closest competitors and be honest about them. Where do you currently sit in relation to them? Where do you want to sit? What do they do well that you do not? What do you do better?

It also helps to share brands outside your category that you admire, as well as ones you actively do not want to be compared to. Both are equally useful.

Explain what specifically resonates. Is it the tone of voice? The use of colour? Without that understanding, agencies may take inspiration in ways you didn’t intend.

6. Brand Personality and Direction

If your brand were a person, how would they speak, dress, and behave in a room?

Provide three to five adjectives that describe the personality you are aiming for, and three to five that describe what you are not. “Confident but not aggressive. Warm but not informal. Expert but not arrogant” is a far more useful creative direction than “modern and professional.”

Be equally clear about what you want to avoid. If there is a tone of voice or brand conventions in your category that feel tired or that you want to deliberately move away from, say so explicitly.

7. Scope, Deliverables, and Timeline

Be precise about what you need and expect. Do you only want a logo? Or a full visual identity system? The more clearly you define the scope, the more accurately an agency can plan and price the project.

For the timeline, be realistic. Rushing a branding project to meet an arbitrary deadline is one of the most common ways businesses end up with work they are not proud of. If you have a hard deadline, such as a product launch, state it clearly, but also be honest if it is negotiable.

8. Budget

Share your budget. This is the section most businesses are reluctant to include, but it is one of the most important.

Without a budget, an agency cannot propose the right scope of work. They may come back with a proposal for a comprehensive brand strategy and identity system when you only have the budget for a brand refresh. Or they may underscope the project and deliver less than what you actually need.

A good agency will design the best possible solution within your budget. They will tell you honestly if what you want is not achievable within your budget, and they will help you prioritise. But they can only do that if they know what they are working with.

How to Know If Your Brief Is Ready

Before you send your brief to an agency, pressure-test it with these questions:

• Can someone who has never heard of our company read this brief and understand exactly what we do, who we serve, and why we exist?

• Have we articulated the problem we are trying to solve, not just the deliverables we want?

• Have we defined what success looks like in both business and creative terms?

• Is there genuine internal alignment on what is in this document, or are there competing opinions that need to be resolved first? If you can answer yes to all of these, you are ready to brief an agency.

What Happens After You Send the Brief

A strong agency will not simply receive your brief and send back a proposal. They will read it carefully, identify gaps or tensions within it, and come back with questions.

With a modern agency, this process usually moves quickly. You can typically expect a discovery call within a few days of sending the brief, followed by a proposal shortly afterwards.

The discovery call is an important part of the process. It gives the agency a chance to walk through the brief with you, clarify assumptions, challenge unclear areas, and properly define the scope, especially if you’re looking for a fixed-price proposal.

If an agency sends a proposal without speaking to you first, that can be a warning sign. It may suggest they are prioritising speed and volume over understanding your business properly, increasing the risk that important details, constraints, or strategic considerations have been overlooked.

A good brief is not a finished blueprint, it is the starting point for a dialogue. As the agency learns more about your business, market, and ambitions, the strategic direction may evolve. The best branding projects are collaborative, with agency and client building understanding together throughout the process.

What To Takeaway

• A strong brief shows you’ve done the internal thinking first

• Clarity upfront leads to better ideas and more committed teams

• The quality of your brief directly shapes the quality of the work

• Time spent refining the brief delivers the highest ROI in branding

• Make sure you can define the problem yourself before asking an agency to solve it

Pony Studio is the Emerging-Tech Brand Studio — a London-based branding and creative design agency specialising in strategic brand development for tech companies worldwide. If you’re building something bold and want a brand that moves at the same speed as your ambition, let’s talk.