And what’s Vision good for, anyway?   Inside every successful organisation, everyone knows the answer to two simple questions: Who are we? What do we stand for? When the CEO has articulated this Vision clearly and aligned everyone with it, there are obvious...

Give up the idea that your brand’s tone of voice is just a ‘tone of voice’:   It needs to be flexible enough to work in different channels It needs to deliver engagement to the attention you pay for It needs a more sophisticated definition than just 4 adjectives...

A lunch-and-learn with Chris West, Founder, Verbal Identity.   Do any of the following sound familiar? Your team is so successful that it’s now being asked to write more copy for more channels. The only problem is, there’s no more time and definitely no more...

Visiting Las Vegas is like taking a 72-hour, fully-immersive MBA. According to a recent Economist report1, the city is enjoying record tourism and fast employment growth. It’s easy to see why. Any Ops Director will be impressed by a 7 a.m. walk around the gaming...

Should SCQA and MECE be on your wall? Management consultants aren’t the cuddliest bunch, but they do deserve our respect. They have methods that make sense of difficult problems. MECE stands for Mutually Exclusive, Completely Exhaustive. It’s a technique that tests...

A linguists’ stroll down Lamb’s Conduit Street.   The full stop is a relic of WhatsApp-free years gone by. Or so it might seem, until you set foot on the achingly hip retail avenue that is London’s Lamb’s Conduit Street, where artfully placed full stops are this...

What happens when the 3 levels of your brand’s voice clash?   You might have noticed that Johnnie Walker recently released a limited edition ‘Jane Walker’ whisky. It’s received mixed reactions. Some people have criticised it as a ‘patronising’ and ‘lazy’...

Understanding the evolution of naming trends in cybersecurity As any industry matures, naming becomes a more and more challenging prospect. How do you develop a name creative enough to capture someone’s attention and memorable enough to keep it as consumer needs...

How to make people notice first time around To you, it’s obvious why your offering is going to change lives. But you don’t have time to talk every investor, partner or potential customer through all the reasons why. This is where an elevator pitch makes all the...

The best thinking on building C-Suite alignment with the CEO's Vision Inside any consistently successful company, everyone is pursuing one goal with one set of beliefs. This only ever happens because the CEO has set a strategic Vision specifically to inspire and guide...

How to define what your company stands for and avoid the most common pitfalls Over the last 25 years, the idea of what a strategic Vision is, what it should contain, and even whether you need one at all, has been questioned and refined. In a successful company,...

What the rest of the world can learn from how the luxury fragrance market uses language   A linguistic analysis of the fragrance market, showing how younger brands are using new positionings to stretch the market Who doesn’t want a 98% margin? The fragrance...

How smaller cosmetics brands are using language to beat big beauty companies.   A linguistic analysis of the boutique cosmetics market It’s 7am on Tuesday morning. You’ve just showered. You reach for your moisturizer. It’s an intimate moment between you, the...

A collection of facts and statistics on the benefits of good business writing and the cost of bad. Good writing doesn't just have implications for your marketing team, it has a powerful effect on your bottom line too. In fact, it could cost you $75m. And we can prove...

How challenger banks can use language to win customers, deepen engagement and survive shakeout There’s a serious threat approaching challenger banks: they’re starting to sound the same. The neo (‘challenger’) banks are approaching the equivalent of the pop star’s...

Vision is the thing that happens before strategy: we identify the two key questions that every CEO must be able to answer to build an aligned, efficient organisation and the 4 dominant challenges they face today.

Chris takes a look at and summarises the best expert opinion and research on Vision from the last 25 years. This is for those of you who want to take a deeper dive into its impact.

Vision can’t just stay with the CEO; it needs to be lived by every member of the C-suite. Chris examines a collection of practical advice on C-suite alignment.

The curse of knowledge: you know what’s special about your offering, but it’s so intuitive, you’re having difficulty explaining it to other people. The fix? An elevator pitch. Learn why you need one and how to make your own.

How do you deal with the business challenges you’re facing today? Chris explores how to define, grow, and align your company.

Chris’s article ‘A strong Brand Vision is the cornerstone to Start-up Success’, published in Just Entrepreneurs, looks at how a clear Vision right from the start can save fledgeling brands from failure.

Naming is a challenge for any brand, but especially when an industry starts to reach maturation. Chris examines different naming types, trends, and processes through the lens of the cybersecurity industry

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