The words, defined once

Glossary

Every term the course uses, defined the way the course uses it. Where the industry uses a word loosely, this is the tight version.

Brand: What people understand, remember and believe about you. Design is how it becomes visible; the brand is the understanding underneath.
Brand strategy: The set of decisions that define what the brand is, who it is for, why it matters and how it behaves, made before design, marketing or growth activity.
Structure: How the organisation actually works: its functions, where decisions get made, and where brand strategy sits.
Offer architecture: How the things you sell relate: a ladder, lines, tiers, or one thing, and which offer people meet first.
Brand architecture: How many names carry your offers. Three common models: a branded house (one master brand for everything), endorsed (offers with their own names, visibly backed by the parent) and a house of brands (separate brands, each standing alone).
Stage: One of the five groups of decisions in the course: Orientation and foundation, Brand essence, Brand positioning, Brand expression and Action.
Essence: The internal core of the brand: purpose, mission, vision and values.
Purpose: The reason beneath the work. A specific wrong, gap or need the organisation exists to address, useful enough to change decisions.
Mission: What the organisation does to advance its purpose: the work, the audience and the value, in plain nouns and a strong verb.
Vision: The future the brand is working towards, for the world and for the company inside it. A good vision changes decisions now.
Values: The standards you refuse to abandon when abandoning them would be profitable, convenient or invisible. Each creates a real choice and has a behaviour beside it.
Positioning: The place you hold in the buyer's mind against the alternatives, at the intersection of their need, a gap in the market and an advantage you can prove.
Primary audience: The one group whose understanding and belief the strategy is built around. It sets the language, proof, channels and tone.
Persona: A specific person inside the primary audience, built from pressure, desire, doubt and the moment of decision. Demographics play a minor part.
Offer: What you are actually asking the person to say yes to, designed against them line by line: promise, mechanism, proof, risk removal, identity, first step and price shape.
Promise: What becomes true for the person if they say yes, written as their outcome.
Risk removal: What makes saying yes safe: a pilot, a first phase, a structure that keeps them in control, a way out.
First step: The smallest thing the person can do, matched to the moment they decide.
Price shape: The form the money takes: one-off, recurring, tiered, free then paid. The number itself is a separate decision.
Functional value: The practical job the product does. The price of admission.
Emotional value: What the customer needs to feel, usually safe enough to act. Delivered through behaviour, structure and tone.
Symbolic value: What choosing you says about the customer, to others and to themselves. A crown on the other two layers, which it needs underneath it.
Value proposition: What one person gets from your offer, in one working sentence: who it is for, what problem it solves, what value it creates, why it is different.
USP: Unique selling proposition. The sharpest claim you can make that a competitor cannot credibly make. One ingredient of your positioning.
Table stakes: What every credible competitor also offers. It earns a place on the shortlist and gives no advantage.
Default behaviour: What the customer does now in place of buying anything. Often the real market leader.
The doubt layer: In sceptical markets, the belief that nothing credible exists at all. Frequently the true competitor.
Competitive advantage: A capability that is hard to copy, what you have observed that others underweight, and the proof behind them. Includes the not-yet list.
Not-yet list: The claims you refuse to make today because your evidence cannot yet back them. Visible restraint is itself a differentiator.
Attributes: Three to five chosen qualities the brand consistently expresses, each with a named failure mode.
Archetype: A character pattern used as an internal alignment tool so the brand behaves consistently. The builder offers six: sage, guide, steward, caregiver, everyman and explorer. It reaches the public as three behavioural rules, and the label stays inside the team.
Costume: An archetype that changes the adjectives and leaves the behaviour as it was. Audiences detect it fast.
Tone of voice: How the strategy sounds in real sentences: rules written as this-over-that, a never-list, and before-and-after pairs.
Never-list: The specific words, punctuation habits and moves the brand avoids.
Look and feel: Visual direction derived from what the persona must feel on sight: feelings, principles, refusals and references, on one page.
Gap: The honest distance between where the brand is now and where a goal requires it to be.
Touchpoint: Any place the brand shows up in someone's experience, from the homepage to the invoice.
Channel: A route you use to reach people, such as email, events, a partner, the press or a social platform.
Channel job: The one thing a channel is for: reach, trust, conversion or retention. Most channels do one well and the rest badly.
Content pillars: The recurring themes the strategy says you should be known for, each carried by the channel whose job it serves. The strategy, serialised.
Can-wait list: The things you are deliberately leaving until later, written down so they cannot attack the ninety-day plan.
Research agenda: Section nine of the strategy document: what still needs evidence, what is being tested, and the claims not yet made.
Strategy snapshot: The single organising idea the whole strategy serves, in a sentence.
Confidence: Your own one-to-ten score for how sure you are of a decision. A high score on a market decision should be backed by recorded evidence.
FieldArc: The fictional nature restoration and biodiversity intelligence platform used as the worked example throughout the course.
Basis: Where a decision comes from, recorded as one of four options. Observed: you saw or heard it directly. Supported: evidence backs it, with some interpretation. Founder choice: a decision you are entitled to make yourself. Assumption: believed and still untested.
Assumption: Something you currently believe and have yet to test. Legitimate, as long as it is labelled.
Evidence: What actually supports a decision. For market decisions, something a customer said or did. For internal decisions, behaviour you can point to.
Validation: The specific test that could strengthen a decision or overturn it.
Buying group: The roles involved in a business decision: the user, the champion, the budget owner and whoever can block it.
Trigger: What changes and makes the problem active now.
Decision threshold: What must become believable before the person will act.
Category: The mental shelf customers place you on, and the shortlist that follows from it.