I love a good process. Seeing a messy brand come into focus is gratifying. Applying that same process to yourself? Sobering. While I’ve used my process for other brands across my career turning that same critical eye on myself to build and position my Vergency brand was intimidating. Here’s how that went.

Research what is there to see what’s missing

If you’ve read my previous article “What makes a ‘good’ brand?”, I discussed my approach of using the 5Cs of marketing. Here is what that looked like for me.

  1. Company – I started by digging deep into my own identity. I looked at things like how I message on my portfolio, LinkedIn profile, and Behance profile. I brought in what was in my resume. I wrote out what my story is, my values, my awards, and my goals. I looked at posts I had written about “Why You Need an Eric” and testimonials and references from people who like my work or at least working with me.
  2. Customers – Since I was starting a business, I didn’t have many customers but I did have 25 years of experience with employers and a bevy of freelance projects. I reviewed what roles, tasks, titles, and projects I had been fulfilling. This showed me where people found value working with me.
  3. Competitors – This was a little harder. I knew there were a few categories where I either couldn’t or didn’t want to compete. I didn’t want to go up against large agencies or enterprise in-house design teams. I also didn’t want to compete with people who used platforms like Upwork or Fiverr. Both of those would be a race to the bottom by competing on price. That left me competing with small to midsize advertising and marketing agencies. The final competitor was AI and its ability to deliver creative that was “good enough”. (My thoughts on that are here.)
  4. Collaborators – My immediate list of collaborators was small but focused. I could immediately lean into previous clients, employers, coworkers, and LinkedIn connections. I could also augment freelance marketers, copywriters, designers, content strategists.
  5. Climate – Evaluating the current climate was tough. There were a series of massive shifts in the job market for people like me that had left a glut of talented design leaders looking for work. Additionally, AI adoption was on a massive upswing (and still is). There was a prevailing attitude of good enough being better than great and fast being better yet. Creative direction was also being dismissed for prompt engineering. None of this looked great.
  6. SWOT analysis – Lastly, I put together a SWOT to uncover the Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats. This distillation tool uncovered the gap.

Build a business around what isn’t there

The biggest gap I saw was between “good enough” and a full service agency. I had solid experience working with companies that had messy brands either from neglect, fast growth, or just constant competing priorities. I performed messaging and design audits to understand where they were at and then cleaned up, clarified, fixed, formalized, and focused their brands. I kept whatever was good, whatever was working and then shed the things that were inconsistent. We didn’t have to redo everything, just the things that needed to be fixed.

A clear message in a messy landscape

With the research done and the gap identified, I just had to iterate on the messaging. Here’s what

  1. Positioning – Vergency Brand & Design creates clarity and consistency between business objectives and creative strategy to fuel growth and delight customers.
  2. Purpose – Vergency specializes in the strategic refocusing of brands.
  3. Tagline – Bring your brand into focus.
  4. Key messages –
    1. Avoid the cost of confusion and discover a focused, thoughtful approach to a better brand.
    2. Regain control of your brand – without the cost or chaos of a full rebrand.
    3. You probably don't need a rebrand.
    4. Save time. Save money. Increase consistency.
  5. Identity – I wanted to build a brand identity that was bold but approachable. I also knew that all of the imagery and assets had to be centered around focus, hence the eyeglasses in the logo. I chose to counter AI’s “good enough” with elements that felt crafted, using graph paper and an illustration-style that looked hand-drawn.
  6. Services – Finally, I built my product and services around craft, taste, and strategy – things that AI couldn’t replicate. My Focal Point Review audits messaging and design to look for clarity and consistency. From there I can recommend how to bring a brand back into focus whether that is through leadership, strategy, frameworks, or design solutions.

Getting the word out

Now that I knew who I was, what I offered, and what that looked like, I had to find the people who needed this service. Looking back at who had received the most value from my work in the past, I noticed a slight trend. There were three basic audiences:

  1. Founders (pre Series A) – Founders who really value brand need a good foundation as they gear up for the pains of hyper-growth that come with a Series A round of funding. This is a good time to establish who you are and formalize what you look like and sound like. With a good framework in place, growth can be a lot less chaotic since you’re set up to scale.
  2. Founders (post Series A) – Founders who made the hard choice of focusing on something other than brand often quickly understand how important a clear brand is once coming out of hyper-growth. It’s usually at this point that they notice that with growth comes a host of new voices, opinions, and expertise. This will get messy without any single point of truth to guide the company.
  3. Content directors – During this design contraction we’re in, many design leaders have been impacted by layoffs. This leaves the remaining designers in need of a leader. Unfortunately for a lot of companies, this ends up falling to the content director since most of the work intersects with their work anyways. The problem is that content directors aren’t designers. They don’t speak design. They aren’t trained to argue design. But they are asked to do these thing nonetheless.

Knowing my audience I could now figure out where to reach them. Since I have limited resources I wanted to focus on one or two channels. After some research I decided to pour my efforts into LinkedIn, where most of my audience was already. It seemed silly to try to build a community when one already existed that I could tap into. Lastly, I chose to leverage LinkedIn Articles over creating my own blog since LinkedIn favors links to articles over external links and a distribution network was already in place.

All together now

I wanted to pull back the curtain on my process a little more and show how it worked in real life, in my life. In the end, I created a brand that I’m proud of and excited by. I know who I am, what I’m offering, and who I’m trying to help. What techniques or processes have been helpful for you to keep your brand in focus?