Welcome.
I am glad you are here, and I want to start by being straight with you about what this course is and what it asks of you.
This is the complete course for people who want to build the strategy before the brand becomes design, content, marketing, fundraising or growth activity. If you ran the brand diagnostic first, you have already found where your gaps might be, and probably two or three scores that made you wince a little. That is normal. That is the point. This course is where we do the work on those areas, and on everything around them.
Build the strategy before the brand
Here is the idea underneath everything we will do together. Most brand strategies are built too late. The logo arrives before the logic. The website goes live before the positioning is clear. The team starts communicating before anyone has agreed what the brand is here to do.
I have seen this happen with funded startups, with established companies, and with brilliant founders who could explain their technology in their sleep and stalled when asked to explain their brand in a sentence. The visible problem usually sits on top of the real one. The website that fails to convert, the deck that falls flat, the content that gets no response: these are usually symptoms. The cause sits underneath, in decisions that were never properly made.
So we are going to make those decisions. Slowly, honestly, and in the right order.
What this course includes
The course runs across five stages. Orientation and foundation comes first: we look at what you are building and how it is arranged. Then Brand essence: purpose, mission, vision and values. Then Brand positioning: who the brand is for, the person and the offer built against each other, and your place in the market. Then Brand expression: personality, voice and visual direction. And finally Action: goals, gaps, roadmap and channels. A channel is a route you use to reach people, such as email, events, a partner or the press.
That order matters. Each stage builds on the one before it. If you skip the essence work and jump straight to positioning, the positioning sounds clever and hollow, because there is nothing underneath it. So follow the sequence on the first pass. Then let evidence send you back: a customer conversation in Stage 3 can change the mission you wrote in Stage 2, and that is the system working.
Your four tools: workbook, worked example, AI prompts, strategy document
You have four tools for this work. The first is the Brand Strategy Workbook. On this site it lives inside each decision lesson, in the panel at the end, and it saves in your browser as you type. The workbook is the real product of this course. The lessons explain the thinking. The workbook captures your decisions. By the end, your completed workbook becomes the basis of a usable brand strategy document you can hand to a designer, a copywriter, an investor or your own team.
Second, you will follow FieldArc throughout the course. FieldArc is a fictional nature restoration and biodiversity intelligence platform. It helps landowners and estate managers turn degraded land into credible, investable restoration projects. I chose a serious example deliberately, because FieldArc faces the same problems serious founders face: a complex offer, a sceptical market, several audiences and a high trust threshold. You will see how FieldArc answers every question you answer. Use it as a mirror to check your own thinking against. Your answers stay yours.
Third, AI prompts. You will find them in the workbook. Treat them as thinking partners. The rule throughout this course is simple: write your own rough answer first, then use the prompt to sharpen it. If you let the AI write the first draft, you will get fluent, generic strategy that belongs to nobody. Your rough notes are worth more than its polished emptiness.
Fourth, your strategy document, where everything you decide gets assembled into one usable strategy document.
How to use the course
One more thing before we begin, and it might be the most important instruction in the whole course. Take this slowly. The course is self-guided, so you need no cohort, no live calls and no one's permission to move forward. It also means you are the one who has to create the pauses. Most lessons end with a decision to write down. Do it before you move on. A lesson you have read is information. A decision you have written down is a decision. Only the second builds a brand.
Set aside proper time. Be honest, even where it is unflattering. The clearer your foundation becomes, the easier every later decision gets: every design brief, every piece of copy, every pitch, every hire.
Let us begin.
Key takeaways
- The visible problem is usually a symptom. Look for the decision that was never made.
- Across the course you make seventeen decisions. Each one is written down with your confidence, and with the evidence or the rationale behind it.
- Write your own rough answer before any AI touches it.
Go deeperCommon mistakes, a self-check before you move on, how this differs by kind of company, and where the thinking comes from.
Common mistakes
- Treating the workbook as optional and reading the lessons like content.
- Skipping ahead to positioning or visuals because they feel more urgent.
- Letting an AI write first drafts, which produces fluent strategy that belongs to nobody.
Before you move on
- Have you opened the workbook and written your one-sentence intention?
- Do you have real, protected time blocked for this?
How this differs by kind of company
- B2B. Your buyer is usually a committee. The course still asks for one primary person; choose the one whose belief brings the rest with them.
- Consumer. Emotional and symbolic value will carry more weight for you than for B2B. Stage 3 is where that shows up.
- Services and consultancy. You are the product. The personality and voice decisions in Stage 4 will do more commercial work for you than for a product company.
- Non-profit and impact. Purpose will come easily and positioning will be hard. Resist the temptation to stop after Stage 2.
Set your company type in the dashboard and each lesson will lead with the note that applies to you.
Where this comes from. The sequence, from orientation and foundation to brand essence, brand positioning, brand expression and action, draws on Marty Neumeier's argument in The Brand Gap that a brand is what people understand about a company, and on the decision-first approach Aaron uses in client work.
Do this now
- Open the decision panel at the end of the next lesson and see how the workbook works.
- Open the completion tracker on the first page and look at the five stages ahead.
- Write the single thing you most want to be clearer about by the end of this course. There is a field for it on your dashboard, under Whose strategy. It is shown back to you at the end.
