When I was six years old, my family went to Disneyland Paris.
I remember walking into the gift shop with my brother, who was eight at the time. Within approximately sixty seconds, I’d selected two hats: one for me and one for my best friend, Sally Brown. Decision made. Shopping complete. I was ready to get on with my life.
My brother, meanwhile, spent the next two hours agonising over what to buy. He examined every possibility, reconsidered his options, changed his mind, and, as far as I’m aware, may still be pondering what to purchase to this day. Bless him.
My mum still tells this story.
Apparently, I’ve always been like this. Decisive to the point of being slightly ruthless. Once I know what I want, I have very little interest in entertaining all the things I don’t.
And after nearly two decades running a branding agency, I’ve come to believe that this particular personality trait might also be one of the most valuable skills in building a brand.
Not the ability to make decisions, necessarily. But the willingness to eliminate possibilities.
Because one of the strangest things I discovered during my years at Smack Bang was that most founders were perfectly comfortable telling me everything they wanted their brand to be.
The trouble started when I asked them to choose.
The problem with wanting everything
I couldn’t tell you how many brand strategy workshops began with a founder describing their ideal customer as a woman aged 18 to 35.
Sometimes she’d be 25 to 45. Occasionally she’d have a household income above $150,000 and an interest in wellness.
Wonderful. We’ve narrowed it down to approximately half the population.
I’d ask what she believed, what frustrated her, what she aspired to, what she was embarrassed to admit she wanted. What she was willing to spend money on. What she was tired of seeing. What kind of person she imagined herself becoming.
Then we’d start getting somewhere.
Perhaps our customer wasn’t simply a 28-year-old woman interested in beauty. Perhaps she was a culturally curious, design-conscious woman who had graduated from trend-chasing, was increasingly sceptical of performative wellness, and wanted fewer products with more intelligence behind them.
Suddenly, we had someone to speak to.
We could make decisions about language, design, pricing, packaging, partnerships and where the brand belonged in the world.
But this was often the moment a founder would become uncomfortable.
What about the other women?
What if someone older wants to buy it?
Are we limiting ourselves?
And I’d explain, sometimes at considerable length, that defining your ideal customer doesn’t mean erecting a security guard at checkout to turn away everyone else.
It means giving your brand a specific person to understand extraordinarily well.
Because when you attempt to speak to everyone, you tend to communicate at the level of what everyone has in common. And what everyone has in common is often not particularly interesting.
You end up with generic aspirations, broad promises and language so carefully engineered to exclude nobody that it struggles to resonate deeply with anybody.
The irony is that specificity often creates broader appeal than generality.
People outside your core audience can still recognise something compelling in a brand that knows exactly who it’s talking to. They might admire its confidence, identify with its values or simply want to participate in the world it has created.
But that magnetism has to begin somewhere.
You don’t have to be for everyone to be wanted by everyone.
The art of strategic subtraction
I think we tend to imagine brand strategy as an additive exercise.
We gather insights, identify opportunities, define audiences, develop values, establish personality, create messaging pillars and assemble an increasingly impressive collection of words describing what a business might become.
But the most transformative part of the process is often subtractive.
It’s the moment you stop collecting possibilities and start making choices.
At Smack Bang, we’d begin by looking at the competitive landscape. Who was playing in the category? What visual and verbal conventions had become so familiar that customers barely noticed them anymore? Which promises were repeated by everyone? What assumptions had the entire industry seemingly agreed not to question?
Then we’d look elsewhere.
What could we borrow from fashion, hospitality, art, tech or an entirely unrelated category? What would happen if we introduced a different cultural reference, emotional territory or way of communicating?
But identifying an opportunity was only half the work.
The other half was deciding which existing category conventions we were prepared to leave behind.
I wrote about brand bravery a few years ago, and I still believe something I argued then: bravery isn’t about being loud, weird or different for the sake of it. It’s about being distinctive.
There’s an important difference.
Being different is relatively easy. You can make a bizarre design decision tomorrow and guarantee that your brand looks unlike its competitors.
Being distinctive requires considerably more judgement. The difference has to mean something. It needs to reinforce an idea, create recognition or make the brand more relevant to the people it wants to reach.
And that means rejecting plenty of perfectly good ideas because they aren’t right for this particular brand.
I think of it as strategic subtraction.
Every decision to exclude something makes the central idea more concentrated.
Not necessarily simpler. Not smaller. Just clearer.
Like editing a photograph until the subject becomes impossible to ignore.
Pick a bloody lane
I was recently working with a supplement brand, and we reached a familiar crossroads in the strategy.
Did they want to lead with clinical science, authority and technical credibility? Or did they want to lead with an approachable, deeply human understanding of their customer’s experience?
The answer was immediate.
“Both, please.”
Of course.
And look, I understood why. Both qualities were important. Both were relevant to the customer. Both could contribute to a compelling brand.
But they couldn’t both be the dominant idea.
We spent another fifteen or twenty minutes discussing it, because I was determined to get them off the fence.
A clinically led brand can absolutely be warm, accessible and human. A human-first brand can be exceptionally rigorous, scientifically credible and evidence-based.
The difference is which wins the Oscar for lead performance, and which wins one for best supporting performance.
It’s a hierarchy.
And hierarchy is what gives a brand its shape.
Imagine meeting somebody who describes themselves as equally rebellious and conventional, playful and serious, understated and theatrical, accessible and exclusive.
You’d probably have a few follow-up questions.
Yet businesses routinely arrive at brand workshops with precisely this kind of personality shopping list.
They want ten different qualities, all represented equally, because every adjective sounds desirable in isolation.
But a brand isn’t an exercise in collecting desirable characteristics.
It’s an exercise in deciding which characteristics matter most.
And the moment you establish that hierarchy, an extraordinary number of subsequent decisions become easier.
You know what the website should feel like. You know how the copy should sound. You know which creative direction is more appropriate, which partnerships make sense and which ideas, however appealing, belong to somebody else’s brand.
There’s no denying a brand can have many dimensions. But to become great, it needs a specific centre of gravity.
The courage to be misunderstood
There’s a psychological reason founders struggle with this.
Most people don’t particularly enjoy the prospect of being disliked.
And when you’ve poured your savings, your time and a considerable portion of your identity into building something, the thought of deliberately making it less appealing to certain people can feel commercially irresponsible.
So you soften the language.
You choose the more familiar design.
You remove the slightly provocative idea.
You broaden the target audience, add another benefit and make the positioning just a little more inclusive.
Each individual decision feels sensible.
But collectively, those decisions can strip away the very characteristics that would have made the brand memorable.
In the early years of Smack Bang, I spent an enormous amount of time convincing clients to be braver.
We’d present a strategically sound creative direction with a genuinely interesting edge, and the response would often be some variation of We love it, but could we tone it down a little?
I understood the instinct. When something feels unfamiliar, it’s natural to question whether it will work.
But familiarity is a particularly seductive trap in branding.
The things that feel reassuring in a boardroom are often the same things that make a brand disappear into its category.
As Smack Bang evolved, something interesting happened. We became known for working with challenger brands, and increasingly attracted founders who were already comfortable questioning the conventions of their industries.
The conversations changed.
Instead of persuading people to take creative risks, we were collaborating with people who understood why those risks might be necessary.
That experience reinforced something I’ve come to believe quite strongly: creative conviction isn’t simply a design preference. It’s a leadership quality.
The strongest founders aren’t necessarily the ones with the most adventurous taste. They’re the ones who can recognise a strategically important difference and protect it, even when somebody else finds it uncomfortable.
And no, this doesn’t mean ignoring customers, dismissing feedback or pursuing an idea simply because it makes people uncomfortable.
Sometimes criticism is useful. Sometimes the idea genuinely isn’t working.
The skill is knowing the difference between resistance that reveals a problem and resistance that simply reveals unfamiliarity.
A brand that knows what it isn’t
One of my favourite contemporary examples is Sleep or Die.
Sleep is an interesting category because it comes with a remarkably established set of visual and verbal expectations.
Soft colours. Calm voices. Gentle reassurance. The promise of serenity. Something about restoring balance, probably accompanied by a woman in white linen looking peacefully towards a window.
And then there’s Sleep or Die.
Even the name is an act of rejection.
The brand sells sleep strips, mouth tape and accessories, but communicates through an irreverent universe of zombies, strip clubs, cheeky language and a decidedly un-serene sense of humour.
Its subscription proposition becomes the ‘strip club rate’. Customers are invited into the ‘zombie club’. The brand even has a sleepy little lamb called Persephone.
It’s playful to the point of unhinged, provocative and completely uninterested in sounding like the wellness brands we’ve been trained to expect.
What’s interesting to me isn’t simply that the copy is funny.
It’s that the entire brand appears to have made a very clear decision about what kind of relationship it wants with its audience.
It doesn’t want to be a soothing authority figure speaking in hushed tones.
It wants to be the cheeky friend who knows you’re exhausted and isn’t going to make the conversation more earnest than it needs to be.
Of course, a provocative identity doesn’t tell us whether a product is effective. That needs to be assessed on its own merits.
But from a brand perspective, the strategic distinction is compelling.
The humour isn’t randomly applied to an otherwise conventional identity. It informs the naming, language, products, accessories and customer experience.
You can disagree with the tone. You might find it juvenile, OTT, or simply not your thing.
That’s fine.
In fact, I’d imagine that’s rather the point.
Sleep or Die doesn’t appear to be spending much energy convincing people who want their wellness brands to feel like luxury spas.
It’s busy building a world for people who find that alternative more interesting.
And the resulting clarity is what makes it worth studying.
Why saying no is a commercial decision
This is where the conversation becomes more complicated.
Because it’s easy to celebrate creative conviction when you’re talking about typography, tone of voice or whether to use a provocative headline.
It’s considerably harder when the decision involves money.
And sometimes protecting a brand means declining an opportunity that looks commercially attractive.
At Land Lab, we’re constantly evaluating potential products, partnerships, retailers and collaborations. There are plenty of directions we could take the business, and many of them could generate significant revenue.
For instance, I’m particularly interested in the opportunity to develop something for women navigating perimenopause and menopause.
It’s a significant and untapped market, and one I’d love to explore.
But Land Lab is founded on evidence-led formulation. Our commitment is to develop products supported by the science, rather than simply responding to whatever happens to be commercially attractive or on-trend in the moment.
My business partner is a Doctor, and at present, she hasn’t yet identified a menopause-specific formulation with an evidence base that satisfies our standards.
That doesn’t mean the opportunity is permanently off the table. Research evolves, and so does our understanding of what may be useful. If compelling evidence emerges, we’d absolutely revisit it.
But for now, we’re not going to launch something simply because there’s demand for it.
And that’s a decision with a real opportunity cost.
There’s potentially money being left on the table.
But I think the alternative could be far more expensive.
Because every time a brand makes a decision that contradicts its central promise, it introduces a little uncertainty into the relationship it has built with customers.
Perhaps they don’t notice immediately.
Perhaps the product sells exceptionally well.
But over time, those contradictions accumulate.
And eventually the brand starts to mean less.
I don’t believe commercial ambition and brand integrity are opposing forces. I’m extraordinarily commercially minded, and I want to build a very successful business.
But I also understand that the commercial value of a strong brand is partly derived from the trust, recognition and expectations it creates.
If we undermine those things every time an attractive opportunity appears, we’re effectively spending down the asset we’re trying to build.
Sometimes the most commercially intelligent decision is to leave the money where it is.
The difference between evolving and losing yourself
Now, I want to be careful here.
Because there’s a version of this argument that suggests brands should identify one thing, commit to it and never change.
I don’t believe that at all.
Brands need to evolve. Customers change. Culture moves. New technologies emerge, new behaviours develop and entirely new categories appear.
A brand that refuses to adapt can become just as irrelevant as one that tries to appeal to everybody.
The distinction, to me, is between evolving the expression of a strategy and abandoning the strategy itself.
A strong brand might change its visual identity, expand into a new category, speak to a new generation or introduce an unexpected product.
But underneath those decisions, there should be a recognisable continuity of thought.
The expression changes. The underlying conviction remains.
That’s why I think the most useful question isn’t necessarily Does this look like something we’ve done before?
It’s Does this still feel like something only we would do?
That distinction creates room for enormous creative freedom.
It allows a brand to experiment, surprise people and challenge its own conventions without becoming strategically incoherent.
And it helps explain why some of the most interesting brands are able to operate across wildly different products and experiences while remaining instantly recognisable.
They’re not necessarily repeating an aesthetic.
They’re expressing a point of view.
