Build a brand prospects want, whoever makes the work.
A brand system is more than just guidelines for colours, fonts and tone for copywriting.
It should define who you need to reach, why they should care, and how every contributor puts that direction into practice.
You've changed agencies. You've changed key staff. The work still feels the same as every competitor's. In our experience, changing who makes the work can leave the same question unanswered: why should a prospect want your brand?
The system needs to connect what your brand stands for with what matters to your prospects. That direction should guide the content that earns their interest, the reasons they prefer your brand and the brief each new contributor receives.
Your brand shouldn't depend on whoever you hand it to.
Why would someone want your brand?
A prospect can know what you sell without having a reason to prefer you.
Our view is that the brand system needs to connect what your brand stands for with what matters to those prospects. That connection should guide work for people who aren't shopping yet, as well as people deciding which brand to choose.
Before someone is shopping, the brand can earn their interest by helping them learn something, inspiring them or showing a life they aspire to. That content may have no product in it at all. The subjects should reflect what those prospects care about and what the brand can credibly contribute.
As someone becomes interested, the work should give them reasons to prefer the brand. Its values need to show up in the choices the business makes. Its benefits need to mean something in a prospect's life beyond the day they buy. Customer experiences can give those promises substance. A product characteristic needs an explanation of why it matters to the person using it.
A homewares and clothing example
For a homewares brand, that might mean ideas for making a small home feel welcoming, followed by an explanation of how its materials hold up in everyday use. For a clothing brand, it might mean inspiration for dressing with confidence, followed by customer accounts of how the clothes fit and feel. These are possible directions; the brand system should set out which prospects they are for and why those subjects matter to them.
Then a product ad can show the item, carry the brand's visual look and help close the sale. It can do that job well without retelling everything that made the prospect interested.
Think of someone who has watched the origin story, visited the site, read reviews and spent time on the brand's Instagram page. They later buy through a product ad. Chris's point in the video is that credit for that sale can make the product ad look as though it did all the persuading. The earlier work is easy to overlook.
The soccer-team analogy
Think of a soccer team. The striker gets the goals, so the striker gets the headlines. But the ball only reached the striker because the defenders won it back and the midfielders kept it and moved it forward. The product ad is your striker. The work before it is the rest of the team.
The gap we would look for is above that product ad. Is the work that creates interest and preference missing, too thin, or saying what every competitor says? A polished product ad cannot tell you the answer on its own.
That is what we want the brand system to protect: the work that gives someone a reason to want your brand before they are ready to buy. The next agency, staff member, creator or AI tool needs that direction in the brief: who the work is for, what should matter to them and what makes this brand a relevant choice.
You agreed the strategy. The next brief left it out.
Six months on, the work no longer reflects what was agreed.
In our experience, the reason a founder wants prospects to choose the brand can disappear from the next brief.
The strategy gets agreed in a room with the founder in it. Then it's handed on: to a marketing lead, who briefs an agency, who briefs a freelancer, who briefs a creator, who prompts a tool. Each person in that chain is capable, and each has their own priorities: this month's targets, the format they know works, the brief they wrote for their last client. The brief leaves out who the work is for, why those prospects should care and which parts of the strategy cannot move.
The last link is now often software. A tool can build a brand book from your website, but it can't tell what you agreed from what you compromised on.
So the work shifts a little at each step, and six months later the founder is looking at content that no longer gives prospects the reasons to care that were agreed. The usual move is to change one of the people, and the next one starts from scratch.
The numbers pull the same way. Ad reports tend to credit a sale to the ad someone saw or clicked last, which is often a product ad. The content that got the prospect ready to buy shows a weaker return and a higher cost per sale, even though it did much of the work. So the agency and the internal team are both rewarded for making more product ads, and the earlier work is the first thing to go. Each step makes sense on the dashboard. Six months on, the brand has stopped giving anyone a reason to prefer it.
44% of clients who ended an agency relationship said the agency "did not understand our business" · Setup, 2025 · US, large brands
The survey records why clients say they left; it does not explain how the misunderstanding arose. In our experience, an important place to look is the brief. Did it carry the strategy the founder agreed, or only the next deliverable, deadline and target?
In our experience, the handoff is where a founder's strategy is lost, not the briefing room. The brand system needs to carry that strategy into every brief, so the whole chain works from the same direction.
More approvals. The work still drifts.
Every extra sign-off takes time.
When the work drifts, the natural fix is another check: the marketing lead approves the agency, the founder approves the marketing lead, a second round catches what the first missed. It feels like control. It costs speed, which is the one structural advantage a founder-led brand has over a company ten times its size, and it doesn't stop the drift.
Approvals check work after it's made. Without a shared brand system, each approver checks it against their own sense of the brand, and the work passes if it looks good. Work can look good without giving the right prospects a reason to choose you.
14% and 17%: how much stronger ads made by people scored than ads made with AI, on Ipsos's short-term effectiveness and long-term brand equity indices · Ipsos and Syracuse University, May 2026 · US
Ipsos measured predicted effectiveness, not approval decisions. Our concern at sign-off is whether the work does the job it was briefed to do. Content for someone who is not shopping yet needs to earn their interest. Content for someone considering the brand needs to give them a reason to prefer it. A product ad can focus on the item and the purchase. The brand system should establish who the work is for and why they should care. Each brief then gives the piece a job, so reviewers can judge it against that direction. Without that, the reviewer's main evidence is the ad report, and work built to earn interest will often look like it is failing, because the sale gets credited somewhere else.
Big companies carry layers of review because of their size, and they are slow to change. When the Reserve Bank asked more than 100 medium to large Australian firms about AI in 2025, they said getting the gains also meant changing workflows, culture and skills. A founder-led brand doesn't have to carry that weight.
A shared brand system gives reviewers one direction to check the work against. They can ask whether it addresses the intended prospects and does the job in the brief, rather than rely on three separate ideas of what the brand should look like.
What should the next agency know before it starts?
A new agency needs to know who you want to reach and why they should choose you.
The brand system should set out who you need to reach, what matters to those prospects and why your brand is a relevant choice. Alongside how the brand looks, it sets out what should interest people before they shop and what should make them prefer it when they do. Every contributor works from that direction, and each brief gives the work a job in building preference or closing the sale.
Chris covers six parts in the video. There's a seventh we'd add, because it's where the work before the product ad starts.
- Story: what you believe, why you exist, the argument no competitor in your category is making.
- What you talk about: the subjects your brand knows better than anyone, for people who aren't shopping yet. Not your products, but the craft, the materials or the way of living your prospects care about. Where you can teach or inspire, and how you take part in their community as a member, not just a seller.
- Tone: how you sound, the words you always use and the ones you never would. It binds everyone, and you revisit it on a set schedule.
- Distinctive assets: the few things you always show, so people know it's you before they see the logo. Usually chosen from what you already own, not designed from scratch.
- Visual rules: how those assets flex across formats without breaking.
- Briefs: one shared brand direction for every contributor, naming the prospects the work should reach and a clear job for each piece: earn interest (from what you talk about), build preference or close the sale.
- Channel rules: how it adapts for a reel, an email, a product page or packaging without becoming something else.
The founder signs off the distinctive assets and the brief. The marketing lead helps build them, so both own the result. After that, the system holds the line: nobody has to defend the strategy from memory, and nobody is second-guessed for following it. It also protects the work before the product ad, so it isn't cut just because a report credits the sale to the last ad.
The important decision is what stays the same and what can change. A product detail might change with each launch, while the way you photograph it stays recognisable. Different creators can tell different stories while using the same voice and showing the same reason to choose you. The brief needs to make those distinctions clear. Otherwise, “be consistent” can produce identical-looking work, while “be creative” can lose everything that made it yours.
A brand prospects recognise, with a reason to prefer it, tends to rely less on discounts and makes its advertising work harder, over time.
The second test. Chris covers a second test in the video: three numbers your finance lead or bookkeeper can pull for each of the last few years. Your ad spend, how many new customers you won, and how much of your revenue came from customers who had already bought.
Going further. We help founders build this system with their team, and the logo test is where that conversation starts, if you want it to.
You can also request a logo test against your competitors.
To request a logo test, email your brand and up to three competitors to experts@intention.al. We'll take recent public ads from each, cover every logo and compare them side by side. The PDF shows our judgement of the words and visual details that distinguish your brand, and where the work looks interchangeable. You'll have it within 3 business days of us receiving those details.
We'll read each example in light of its job. A straightforward product ad can be doing exactly what it needs to do. Where the sample includes work intended to create interest or preference, we'll look at whether it gives someone a reason to care about your brand that a competitor could not just as easily claim.
This is an outside view of the work in the sample. If it contains only product ads, the earlier brand-building work remains a question to explore with your team. Recognition and preference need evidence from prospects; the logo test gives us a concrete place to start that conversation.
If we can't find enough of your public ads, we'll ask you to send a few. To add or change a competitor in your request, write to experts@intention.al.
Request your logo test ↗Add or change a competitor ↗Source notes
- Chris Fraser, Intentional, recorded walkthrough, 5 October 2026, attribution take 2 from 04:25.4 raw time. Australian practitioner perspective. The prospect journey in chapter 01 is an illustration of his attribution argument. The chapter presents Intentional's view of the work a brand should do before the sale.
- Setup, 2025 Marketing Relationship Survey, setup.us: reasons clients end agency relationships. US, large brands.
- Ipsos with Syracuse University's Newhouse School, "AI Ads Are Good Enough, and That's the Problem", ipsos.com, May 2026. US, 20 ads, 3,000 respondents; Ipsos Creative Effect and Equity Effect indices.
- Reserve Bank of Australia, Bulletin, "Technology Investment and AI: What Are Firms Telling Us?", November 2025.
- Google, Pomelli announcement, Google blog, 19 May 2026 (a tool that builds a brand book from a website; Labs experiment).