Clarity : The First Pillar of a Sticky Brand 

We introduced the 5 Pillars of Sticky Brands in the last blog and over the next couple of months we'll be going into each one properly.

Welcome to your Pillar one. Clarity.

Clarity is the one pillar every business owner thinks they've already sorted and believe us when we say, we've had this conversation dozens of times.

Someone will tell us their brand is really clear, and then we ask them to describe what they do in one sentence, and what comes back is a sort of gentle collapse. "Well, we do a bit of X, and we work with Y, and depending on the client we sometimes get involved in Z, but really what we're trying to do is..." That's not clarity it's you still working out what you think.

To be fair, this is not a stupid mistake. Most of us can't see our own business from the outside, Lindsay included. We know all the caveats and all the exceptions because we live inside them on the daily. But clarity is actually the discipline of leaving all of those out, choosing the one thing you want people to remember about you, and having the nerve to keep saying it long after you're bored of it.

The test that we use with clients is the pub test, more or less. If you describe your business to someone who's never heard of you, and they walk away and can tell their partner what you do without checking their phone, you've got clarity. If they say "some sort of marketing thing" or "she helps businesses with, um, something around branding?" then you haven't. That's really it. It's not clever, it's not academic, and any marketing consultant who charges you £10k for a positioning workshop and doesn't end up with something you could say to a stranger has taken your money.

The businesses that get it right make it look easy, but it isn't. Ronseal has been doing "does exactly what it says on the tin" since Lindsay was at primary school. Innocent Drinks has used the same voice on the back of their labels for so long that the copywriter changed and nobody could tell. Mailchimp became a verb because they said "email marketing for small businesses" in a hundred different ways for a decade. None of that happened by accident. They chose the words, and then they had the discipline not to change them every time a new marketing director joined.

Which brings me to AI, because obviously it does. Here's the paradox nobody's really talking about. AI is brilliant at generating plausible marketing copy. It'll happily give you a hundred versions of your positioning statement in a minute, and most of them will read fine. That's the problem. When everyone can generate fine writing on demand, the average sort of collapses. Everyone starts sounding the same. Every homepage in the country now says "empowering [insert customer] to [insert outcome]" in some slightly rephrased combination, and none of them mean anything.

Clarity is your way out of that. It's the thing AI can't do for you, because it depends on you knowing something specific about your business that a language model doesn't.

Why did you start this? Who did you build it for? What are you not willing to do, even for money?

Those answers are yours. Nobody else has them. If you can bake that specificity into how you describe yourself, you become impossible to averagely-generate.

Where we see businesses go wrong on clarity tends to be one of three things. The first is trying to serve everyone. This is the classic. You're the local plumber who does emergency call-outs and boiler installs and bathroom refits and new-builds. Fine. Except that when your website tries to say all of that at once, none of it lands, and you end up being nobody's first phone call. The plumber who specifically does old Lakeland houses with dodgy heating systems, on the other hand, gets a call the moment someone in Ambleside inherits a farmhouse.

The second is describing what you do instead of what you sell. "We provide marketing services" is a category. "We help family-run hospitality brands in the Lakes fill their tables in the shoulder season" is a promise. Those are very different sentences. The first is what you write when you're too close to it. The second is what you write when you've done the work.

The third, and honestly the most common with businesses over five years old, is just changing the words too often. Founders and owners get bored of their own message long before their audience has even properly registered it. If your website copy this year sounds nothing like your website copy last year, your customers have to keep relearning who you are, and many won't bother to do so. Consistency of clarity is where the compounding actually happens, and it takes about three years to really feel it working. Yes, really.

If you want a Monday-morning thing to try this week, open a blank page and write one sentence in this format: [your business] helps [specific customer] with [specific outcome]. That's it.

If you can fill the blanks in without adding "and also" or "or maybe" or "it depends," you've probably got the beginnings of your positioning. Say it out loud. If it sounds like something you'd genuinely say to someone at the bar at a wedding, keep it. If it sounds like it belongs on a slide in a board meeting, keep working on it.

Clarity is Pillar 1 for a reason. Every other pillar rests on it. You can't be consistent about the wrong thing. You can't get people to connect with something vague. Community forms around clear ideas, not fuzzy fluffy ones, and content is only ever as useful as the positioning underneath it.

Get this one right and the rest gets a lot easier!