Why get literal? And how does B2B branding work, anyway?

Brand is the beginning and end of every tech company's journey.

At the end you are — ideally — famous. Everyone knows you. Everyone knows your brand. You've made it!

If that's the goal, where should we start with branding?

There are the obvious touch points — a name, a logo, a website, a visual identity.

That's all great — it's what I help with — but that's table stakes.

You can pull the design lever as hard as possible, but no matter what you do, the best case is you'll have a beautiful box with no message inside.

Getting literal

That's why I always insist on getting literal first — what the core concept is, exactly who you're for and why it matters to them, and the catchy name/need association you're ultimately trying to plant in people's minds.

To be fair, a lot of agencies will ask similar questions, the founder will say "We're building agents for enterprise", the designer will say "Great!" and that's their idea of strategy.

But that's not how it works, and it's not how I work.

I push you to get far more literal and far more serious about the demand you're trying to tap, so you improve your chances of winning in the market.

This helps avoid the two common mistakes startups make with their branding:

1. Trying to slop your way to success: Don't insult your audience. If you want to be a famous startup, start acting like one. Engage with reality and write out your positioning and narrative properly. It's hard — it's meant to be.
2. Getting brand beautifully wrong: The other end of the spectrum is forking out six-figures (or close to) on beautiful brand work that makes for fantastic art but poor marketing. The brand world is notorious for optimizing for industry awards, not your sales, so plan accordingly.

The latter case isn't theoretical.

On X/Twitter, one early-stage AI founder caused a stir when he scrapped his beautiful website — and it really was beautifully designed — for something far simpler, built with Claude, that actually expressed their positioning.

Why scrap all that great design work? The startup's prospects didn't understand what they did.

That is: they had a beautiful box with nothing inside.

So they got literal instead.

(And to be fair, they still recycled a lot of their design work into the simpler form, but in a way that let them iterate fast while maintaining a consistent brand.)

To me, that's what getting properly brand-pilled as a startup requires — you need a strong, distinctive visual look, sure, but you need to make it abundantly clear what your product does and who it's for, and that's often easier said than done!

I have a super simple three-step process to help you do that, which goes:

• The one big idea you're putting on customers' radars.
• The clear differentiation you have relative to their existing solutions (which includes manual solutions or doing nothing at all).
• The new-world outcome for your customers — what success for them looks like after they've integrated your product into their world.

This simple framework of big idea -> parts and pieces -> new whole shapes everything I do. Homepages, sales decks, elevator pitches, all of it. It's based on how we fundamentally understand the world — we have to establish relevance, provide details for fit, and then evoke success.

It's that message that we're ultimately designing and building your brand around. And the end state is that all-important name/need association.

Start with the end

Need a CRM? Think Salesforce. Need payments? Think Stripe. Need a website? Think Squarespace. (Or Webflow, or Framer.) Need a meeting recorder? Think Granola.

This name/need association is how the smart B2C cookies define brand, and it provides the fundamental idea that drives all of branding — that brand is about memory.

Many designers think "Yes, that's why you've got to have the hottest, most memorable, most aesthetic, most timeless brand possible!!!"

And I get it — it's a nice cultural experience to live in a world where people give a shit about design. (It's part of the reason I'm a designer!)

However, brand in the B2B world is fundamentally about the commercial experience a potential buyer has with you as a company.

That commercial experience — especially if you're a startup — doesn't hinge on aesthetics or vibes. It hinges on giving someone a very literal reason why they should remember you.

That's how brand really works in B2B at its most fundamental level.

That reason eventually becomes an association, or a 'position' in the mind of the buyer.

If you can't get literal about why someone should buy you, you're NGMI.

Simple as that.

Ok, but how?

I have an extensive questionnaire and a ten-slide deck format I use to flesh out each of these steps in detail.

Again, it maps to how we integrate new information about the world.

(We take in new information on our right hemisphere, looking for what's 'out there', chop it up into pieces to compare on our left hemisphere, and then re-integrate it back on the right.)

You don't have to have this all figured out right away. It's fine if you just want a hot brand so you can have those conversations with customers and get them experimenting with your product.

But you need to know where you're heading.

You need to know what goal state you're aiming for.

Anything else (with brand at least) is just LARPing.

This is different

This requires a fundamentally different strategy than the typical branding process where those very literal specifics are an afterthought and "positioning" is about generic vibes and not your specific value proposition.

This is especially true if you're a startup.

Established brands have it much easier because those memory structures are already in place.

But as a startup, you have to be insanely literal about why people should choose you.

That requires both verbal and visual branding working together to tell your product story, on your homepage (both in copy and illustrations), in your ads, across your socials, everywhere.

Startups are a creative act, and so is branding. But it's creativity in service of a message that matters — not branding that insists on itself.

That's what ultimately helps — driven by your product, of course — to build a position in the mind of the buyer.

Being not weird to buy from

_"Ok but we REALLY want to look good and stand out too — we need to impress investors and talent, too."

That's totally fair — brand has a job to do that's not just buyer-facing.

You do need to look on-point for investors and talent to take you seriously. (Or at least feel good about putting their money and/or effort into your company.)

But there's a very simple mental model for this that, like memory, also goes to the heart of what you're trying to do with your brand.

It's this simple: be not weird to buy from. (Or invest in. Or work for.)

On the face of it, that sounds super obvious. Why would anyone buy or invest in a company when it was weird to do so?

But that's exactly it! That's the key!

99% of buyers (and investors) don't buy/invest in you for precisely that reason — it would be weird to do so.

Usually that's because they don't have a need or it's not a fit.

And that's the world's default state! We're all not buying (or investing) 99.9% of the time because that's the correct decision.

(Credit to Rob Snyder for this insight, by the way.)

When do we buy? When it's not weird to do so!

Put another way: when we have a very specific reason to do so.

There's a job we absolutely have to get done. There's a project that absolutely must happen. There's a company we must join. There's a proverbial river we have to cross and we want the least-fuss option to do so.

Therefore, your brand needs to associate strongly with this need.

• Maybe there's a big change in the world (agents!), and it would be weird for an executive to not consider your product as a solution for dealing with this case.
• Maybe you've made a fits-like-a-glove robotic solution for a specific construction challenge, and it would be weird for construction companies to not consider your solution.
• Or maybe you've got a mainstream solution to a common need, and you can hack distribution to drum your association into the heads of the populace such that it'd be weird if they didn't think of you. (Squarespace using podcasts.)

This extends to your visual identity, too.

The good news is, your logo or colors or font choices won't make or break you! (Your underlying positioning will, though!)

You just have to find the brand sweet spot.

The sweet spot

Branding folks tend to be connoisseurs who get VERY INTO the exact meaning of every design choice they make.

That's great on the one hand — in a world of slop, it's nice when people care! Thoughtful details are a good thing!

But there's still a sweet spot where it isn't weird to buy from you.

I mention this because this is exactly where some designers, again, can get brand beautifully wrong.

You obviously don't want to be poorly branded, but you don't want to be an inscrutable art experiment either.

In a nutshell:

• It WOULD be weird if you were completely unbranded or had lame slop branding.
• At the other extreme, it'd ALSO be weird if your brand was abstract art, which some AI companies go too hard for, such that you can't work out what the product is/does.
• Therefore, there's a sweet spot where it's non-weird, and that's what you want to aim for.

This includes having category-appropriate branding because the revealed preference of most folks is that they actually want to fit in more than stand out — standing out is usually a sign of weirdness. (E.g. it'd be weird if your SaaS startup looks like a hair salon... unless you're actually selling to salons.)

Non-weird messaging

This don't-be-weird approach applies to your brand messaging, too:

• It WOULD be weird if you spoke in high-level abstract aspirational language that a prospect didn't understand.
• At the other end of the spectrum, it'd be weird if you got down into the weeds of your features straight away before explaining the purpose of your product.
• Again, there's a sweet spot where it's not weird — where buyers understand what the product is or does as it relates to them.

A non-weird B2B brand process

Finally (and this is where I not-so-subtly sneak in my pitch)...

It WOULD be weird for a B2B tech company to get a brand designed by an agency using a typical B2C brand framework, but that's what usually happens!

Why? Most brand work is B2C, so agencies and brand designers naturally use brand frameworks from that world, where you're trying to sell snacks, loans, cars, or other commodities.

Here, the move is to go broad, aspirational, and universal.

That makes sense for B2C — it'd be weird if that wasn't the case when you're trying to sell a lot of product to a lot of people!

For B2B tech brands, however, these frameworks are a weird fit.

A startup B2B brand would be weird if it tried to sell everything to everyone — usually, you're focused specifically on a particular job or situation. That's why we need to get literal instead — it's the not-weird thing to do!

An industrial or manufacturing B2B brand would also be weird if it was trying to sound like a sneaker company or fast food joint.

B2C as the opposite of B2B

This is a problem because typical B2C brand strategies are often the OPPOSITE of what a B2B tech startup needs.

Again:

• B2C commodities are mature, known, broad, universal, and mass appeal for low-attention audiences.
• B2B tech products start unknown, niche, highly focused, and are sold to high-attention audiences.

And again, this is why I started Literally — we need better B2B-specific brand strategies that are built on, well, specifics.

Let's get literal

If that’s all true, what do we need to do instead?

BE BRUTALLY LITERAL.

That way it’s not weird for customers to buy from you.

Tell them literally what the product is and does. (Both in words and images.)

Tell them literally if it’s for them and what that means.

Tell them literally what their success will look like if they adopt your product, and what they can expect.

And let's wrap it up in a beautiful package that gets branding beautifully right.

Move fast and learn things

The sooner you can do this, the sooner you can get it in front of customers and prospects, get genuine market feedback, and learn and iterate in sync with it.

That is, the more literal you are, the clearer the feedback will be, the faster you can grow.

Typically, that starts with your brand fundamentals and your homepage, so that’s what I work on.

Sound like something you need help with?

Book a call and let's chat about your brand.

— Luke