Back to bascis: BRANDING

Week 22: The brainstorm that turns into your roadmap.

You get asked what your business is roughly four hundred times a week. Investors, partners, the person next to you at a dinner. And for months I gave a slightly different answer every time, depending on who was asking and how much time I had.

That’s usually a sign the problem isn’t your pitch.

It’s that you haven’t actually decided. Because when I started building RELINE, the hardest question was never who are we or what are we building. It was really, and most importantly, WHO and WHAT ARE WE NOT?

Sometimes taking things back to basics with a branding exercise is what you need to do, to get clear on your business.

Quick context if you’re not familiar with it yet. Branding is not just logo creation and font pairings. Yes, visual identity is the fun bit, and we’ll get there eventually, with some support from your branding agency pals or a solid graphic designer, but the work that actually moves your business sits underneath that. It’s really a massive brainstorming session across these five categories: purpose, positioning, audience, personality, voice.

With every single one of them there are two parts:
1. What we identify as 2. What we do NOT identify as. Which is essentially the thing you stand against. I believe that clarity comes from that second part, and that’s naturally what makes the whole exercise.

So, I wanted to break the pillars down for you here, so that you can apply them too.

1. Purpose

Why you exist, beyond the product. The reason you started and what you’re trying to change. Get this wrong and nothing built on top of it will hold.

It’s the one pillar you can’t reverse engineer later on. And we make X for Y isn’t a purpose; that’s a product line.

Ask yourself:

• What’s broken out there that made you start, and who’s paying for it being broken?

• If you disappeared tomorrow, what goes back to being hard?

• What are you NOT trying to fix? The adjacent problem you care about but aren’t solving.

Don’t go confusing the problem with the symptom. I thought rental’s problem was awareness. It isn’t, a lot of people already agree with renting. It’s access: four tabs open and that trip you’re packing for. Awareness is a marketing budget, access is a product.

HOT TIP: You’ll know it’s working when you can say it without naming your product.

2. Positioning

Where you sit in the landscape. Map your competitors out honestly, then find the space only you can own. Honestly is doing the work in that sentence.

Most competitor maps have axes chosen so the founder’s logo lands alone in the top right, which tells you nothing.

Ask yourself:

• What two dimensions does your customer actually choose on? Not the two you’d like.

• What’s the bigger, easier business you could pivot into tomorrow, and why aren’t you?

• What do you NOT do that would make you look bigger on paper?

For us, the NOT is that we don’t own inventory, not one piece. It closes doors and changes the margin story. It’s also the reason the rental platforms can collaborate with us instead of competing with us. Your constraint IS usually your position.

3. Audience

Who it’s for, and who it’s pointedly NOT for. Name the person you’re not building for. That’s what makes the person you are building for feel seen.

This is where founders flinch, because narrowing feels like shrinking. It isn’t. A waitlist full of people you need to persuade isn't traction; it’s a to-do list.

Ask yourself:

• Who’s already doing a version of this, and what’s their workaround?

• What do they already believe, so you don’t have to convince them?

• Who are you pointedly NOT serving this year?

Your audience is not a demographic. Women 25 to 40, urban, sustainability-minded, tells you nothing about what to build or say. GET SPECIFIC. The woman with three rental apps and a saved search she checks on the tube daily, that’s a brief.

The hardest no here is usually the sceptic, and courting her is the most expensive mistake available to an early brand. Write her down, let her go for now, and watch your copy sharpen.

4. Personality

The character behind the brand.

Decide what you stand for, and what you stand against. If nothing sits on the other side of the line, you haven’t drawn one.

Take your stand-for list and check whether a sane competitor would ever claim the opposite. Authentic, community-led, customer-obsessed. Nobody stands opposite those, which makes them furniture, not positions.

Ask yourself:

• What behaviour in your industry genuinely annoys you?

• What works in your category that you’ve decided never to do?

• What’s the compliment you’d hate to receive?

Don’t mistake tone for character. Playful is not really a stance. A stance is something you give up. Ours is no scarcity tactics, no countdown timers, no only 2 left, because the whole premise is that you don’t have to own it to have it. It costs us conversions, which is exactly what makes it real.

If your against list offends nobody and costs nothing, go back and write a proper one.

5. Voice

How you sound, and how you’d NEVER sound.

Your voice is a filter before it’s a style. It’s what makes your content recognisable instead of generic.

Three adjectives on a slide ARE NOT a voice. A voice is a set of yes or no calls you can make at speed, because you make hundreds of them a week.

Ask yourself:

• Who does your brand sound like? An actual person, not a vibe.

• What’s a sentence you’d never publish, even if it performed well?

• What are the words or phrases you’ve banned?

HOT TIP: Don’t write the way your category writes just because. If I were to look at my industry, I’d say the default is the sustainability report voice, conscious consumption journeys and carbon maths in a caption. It’s the easiest register to slip into, but you can innovate. Your category has its own version.

Create two columns, to identify what your voice is an IS NOT.

Direct, not blunt.

Warm, not gushing.

Funny, not quippy.

A Final Note

How to actually run the branding exercise? Four things I’d tell you before you start.

1. Do it out loud, with someone else as a sounding board. Your not-list needs a witness.

2. Fill the right column first. Counterintuitive, but the NOs are harder to come by and you’ll have more energy at the start of the exercise.

3. Expect it to stop being a branding exercise, because this will really turn into your roadmap. Every line in the NOT column was either a decision I’d already made and never said out loud, or one I’d been avoiding.

4. Don’t worry if you don’t finish it. We’re still reiterating ours, and I expect we will be for a long time. The point isn’t a final document, it’s that every hard no makes the yeses sharper.

If you haven’t already, sign up for our waitlist here → JOIN

xx KP

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