How do I design a brand for a new business idea?

A brand at this stage is a small set of decisions: who this is obviously for, what you promise them, and how you sound saying it.

You don't invent those. You assemble them from things that already exist, which makes this a research job rather than a design one.

Your competitors tell you the minimum you have to clear. The other brands your customer already loves tell you what they actually respond to. Most founders only look at the first, which is why so many products in the same category sound identical.

1. Start with what you already like

Before you look at anything in your market, write down the brands you admire, the products that felt good to use, and the styles you are drawn to. They do not have to be relevant. A film, a bar, a magazine, a piece of software you enjoy opening — all fine.

The point is to get your own taste on the record before you spend a week absorbing everyone else's. For each one, write a sentence on why.

If you draw a blank here, skip it. Plenty of people have no ready answer and the next two steps do the heavy lifting.

2. Use competitors to find the floor, not the ceiling

Open the sites your customer is choosing between today. Pick the one that does the best job of appealing to them — not the one you personally like most. Those are often different, and the difference is informative.

Write down two things: what that company does well, and what you would never do. The second list matters as much as the first, and it is usually easier to fill in.

Then read their customer reviews. The complaints tell you what brands in this category promise and fail to deliver, which is the gap between how the market talks and what it actually does.

Now stop. The purpose was to find the bar a credible option in this category clears — the things a customer expects before they take you seriously. Clear it. Going further makes you the second-best version of a company that already exists.

3. Find the brands your customer already loves somewhere else

This is the step that makes you distinctive, and the one that takes real work.

You are looking for brands the same person already spends money on, in categories next to yours. Searching on the customer alone returns everything, so constrain it: take the customer, pick a nearby category, and apply the positioning you intend to have. If you are going to be the expensive option, look at what else that person buys expensively.

Liquid Death is the clearest case of this paying off. Mike Cessario was selling water — a category where every reference available to him was a picture of a mountain. He looked at what his customer already loved instead: energy drinks, and the music culture around them. The idea came from noticing at a festival that bands sponsored by energy drink companies were drinking water on stage, but had to drink it from a branded can. So he built canned water for people who like tallboys and heavy metal, and described the model as the Red Bull playbook with comedy instead of action sports — entertain first, sell drinks second.

None of his references were other water brands. That is the whole move.

Let roughly one in five references come from somewhere unrelated to your market. Those are the ones that produce something nobody in your category has tried.

Be prepared for this to be slow. You are searching for something you cannot name yet, and every promising reference sends you looking for three more. Expect several rounds before the pattern is obvious.

4. Write down why, not what

A reference you have not explained is a bookmark. The reason is the part that transfers.

"A bold, confident voice that never apologises for the price" is something you can act on. "Their site looks nice" is not. Push every reference up to the level of a quality rather than a detail — what it does to the person reading it, not what it is.

Do this as you go. The reasons are obvious in the moment and gone a week later.

5. Turn the references into a few decisions

Three or four sentences is the entire output:

• Who this is obviously for. Specific enough that the wrong person can tell it is not for them.
• What you promise them. One thing that changes.
• How you sound saying it. Two or three adjectives you could hold a draft against.
• What you would never say. This one does more work than people expect, because it is the rule that stops you drifting back to sounding like everyone else the moment you are under pressure.

Written down, those four are enough to draft a page that sounds like it came from somebody in particular.

What this won't fix

Brand does not rescue a promise nobody wants. If the ads come back flat, it is usually the promise, not the typeface.

That is worth holding on to, because brand work is enjoyable and it is an easy place to hide. The order that works is: settle who this is for and what you are claiming, do enough of this to sound like somebody, then put it on a page and buy a little traffic. If the result is weak across more than one message, go back to the promise. Nothing in this article will save a page that is offering the wrong thing.

The reverse is also true, though, and it is why the step exists: a page that reads as generic underperforms for reasons that have nothing to do with whether the idea is good — and you will read that result as a verdict on the idea.

Related questions

The brand exists to make a page worth landing on: what to put on a website built to test an idea. Then it has to survive contact with strangers, which is running ads to test a business idea. Both of those sit inside one sequence: the whole demand test, end to end.

Done properly by hand this is a few days of reading, several rounds of it, and a pile of references you have to make sense of yourself. Draper does this part with you — finding the competitors, hunting the parallels your customer already loves, and pulling the reasons out into something you can write a page from. Try Draper free →