Open Pinterest and you’ll find a tonne beautiful design work. It’s a great place for inspiration. It’s also a pretty flimsy place to start building a brand.
Founders often come to us with screenshots, saved posts and mood boards full of brands they love. And we absolutely want to see them (you’re talking to a bunch of people who have swipe files of screenshots that are challenging the memory limits of their devices on the daily). This reference material tells us plenty about your taste, ambition and the kind of businesses you admire. But personal preference can only take us so far. Because the question we need to answer isn’t what do you like? It’s: what creative choices will help this brand mean the right thing to the right people? That’s why one of the first things we do when creating a new brand is creative benchmarking.
Creative benchmarking is a research process that helps us understand the visual, verbal and broader creative world a brand is entering before we make decisions about what it should look, sound or feel like. We look at the category, the dominant players, the different positioning territories within it, the creative cues they use and what those cues are doing.
In other words: before we start making things, we work out the playing field.
Creative choices are doing more work than you think
Colour, typography, photography, language, packaging, layout, naming, even the way information is structured on a website all say something about the brand. Its a system of elements and together they help people make very fast assumptions about what kind of brand they’re looking at, who it’s for, what it probably costs and whether it feels relevant to them.
Take burgers for example. Within the category, there are plenty of options. And you can probably tell the difference between what’s on offer at McDonald’s, Grill’d and a $28 smash-burger joint before you’ve looked at a menu or tasted anything.
At the fastest, cheapest end of the category, you tend to see bold colours, big typography, bright product photography and straightforward value messaging (lookin’ at you Maccas, KFC, HJs).
Move slightly upmarket and suddenly there’s more emphasis on ingredients, provenance, freshness and craft (think: Grill’d, Schnitz). It’s pitching the idea that this is the better version of fast food. Still fast, but with more craft so to speak.
Head into the more premium end of the category and the whole thing might start looking more like a fashion label or record store than a traditional takeaway shop (a fave of ours is Spain-based cult burger brand Vicio who’s social-first campaigns are next level).
The product is still, broadly speaking, a burger. But the creative expression is telling you what kind of burger, what kind of experience, what kind of price point and, importantly, whether this place is for you. Nobody had to hand you a positioning statement. You’re picking up what the brand is putting down. That’s why understanding category codes matters so much. People already have associations with certain visual and verbal cues, whether consciously or not. A new brand can use those associations to its advantage.
Standing out isn’t always a smart play
There’s a persistent bit of branding advice that says the goal is to look completely different from everyone else in your category. Zig when they zag. Break the rules. Disrupt everything. Sometimes that’s exactly the right play. Sometimes it’s a spectacular way to make sure nobody understand what you sell. If you’re launching a completely new business, with a name nobody knows and little to no brand awareness, familiarity can actually do some useful heavy lifting. Certain cues help people quickly understand that something is premium, technical, sustainable, family-friendly, fast, affordable, luxurious, playful or serious. Of course, if you follow every convention in the category you can disappear into the wallpaper just as quickly. Which is why the useful question is actually not whether we should fit in or stand out? It’s why. What are the benefits and risks of each approach? Creative benchmarking helps us work that out.
We might find some category conventions that are worth keeping because they make the offer easy to immediately understand. Others might be so heavily occupied by competitors that using them would make it harder to build anything distinctive. And occasionally we’ll find a convention that presents a genuine opportunity to break with the category entirely. The smart play is usually a mix: lean into the elements that help people understand you, then make deliberate choices about where you want to create contrast.
We don’t just benchmark your competitors
Looking at direct competitors is obviously part of the process, but stopping there can make for pretty boring branding. We’ll usually break a category down into meaningful subsets and look at how the expression changes across them. Price point is one obvious vector, but there are plenty of others: mass versus specialist, heritage versus contemporary, functional versus emotional, affordable versus premium.
Then we look sideways. What other brands are targeting the same kind of person, even if they sell something completely different? What aesthetic worlds does your audience already spend time in? What signals are they responding to in fashion, food, technology, beauty, culture, hospitality or media?
Sometimes the most useful creative reference for a new health brand isn’t another health brand. Sometimes it’s a fashion label, a hotel, a magazine or a restaurant that understands the same customer beautifully. That broader view helps us avoid both obvious imitation and differentiation for differentiation’s sake.
The output isn’t a mood board. It’s a set of strategic creative territories.
Once we understand the landscape, we use the benchmarking work to establish cross-category positioning, where all the other plays sit in the field. Then develop a number of cohesive creative territories the brand could credibly occupy. These aren’t five piles of nice-looking things. Each territory is a different strategic answer.
One might lean more heavily into familiar category cues. Another might reinterpret them. Another might challenge the category more aggressively. Another might borrow relevant signals from an adjacent world the audience already understands.
Each route brings together visual and verbal references so we can explore the implications of that direction as a whole. What would this brand start to signal if we moved this way? What would feel familiar? What would feel new? What assumptions might people make? What would we need to work harder to explain? What could eventually become distinctively ours?
That gives us a much more useful conversation than debating whether someone personally prefers sage green or cobalt blue.
Personal preferences still matter (it’s just not the strategy)
None of this means personal preference is irrelevant. Quite the opposite. We want to know what you’re drawn to, what you can’t stand, what feels ambitious and what feels completely wrong. After all, you have to live with the brand day in and day out, you do actually need to like it and belive in it. But references become much more useful when we understand why you like them.
Maybe you love a particular fashion brand, but what you’re actually responding to isn’t its typeface or colour palette. Maybe it’s the confidence. The restraint. The way it makes premium feel unstuffy. The way it communicates a lot without saying very much. Those are much richer creative clues than simply borrowing the aesthetic. And this is really the difference between inspiration and strategy. Inspiration gives you material to react to. Strategy gives you a reason to choose.
By the time we start making decisions about typography, colour, language, imagery and the rest of the brand world, we’re no longer asking, what do we like? We’re asking: what do we want people to think, feel and assume when they encounter us? And from there, the creative work gets a hell of a lot more interesting.
That’s a much better place to start.
