Branding begins with knowing who you are

27 May

A reset on what branding actually is, and why no one can design it for you.

When you decided your business deserved to be taken seriously, the first thing you probably told yourself was "I need to sort out my branding", and with that, you meant one thing: you were going to choose new brand colours and fonts.

And if you’re anything like me, the next thing you did was open Pinterest and build a board of other women's websites as inspiration - the type of websites that looked expensive.

You chose a new colour palette that looked more elevated than what you had before, added a serif font that felt more sophisticated, and perhaps you paid someone on Fiverr for a logo which looked genuinely beautiful sitting on its own little white square.

Then you put all of it on your website. But nothing changed.

The enquiries didn't come.

Because all the work you put in… none of that was branding.

But please don’t take that personally – it’s not a failing on your part. You did exactly what you were told to do.

Every designer, every course, every "brand in a day" service has trained you to believe that branding is something you can see. A logo, a colour palette, a font pairing, a tidy little kit delivered as a PDF.

The industry frames it this way for a reason: visuals are sellable.

A logo is something that can be designed, packaged, priced, delivered, and shown off in a portfolio. You can put it on an invoice. You can point to it and say, “This is what I paid for”.

The real substance of a brand – aka who you are, what you believe and where you stand – can't be handed over in a file.

It's harder to sell or buy, and almost impossible to deliver in a day.

So the industry did the convenient thing. It let the word "branding" drift until it meant the part that was easy to sell: the surface. The part we can all see.

And it worked. There is now an entire generation of women in business who believe they've "done their branding" because they have a fancy logo, but are confused about why it did nothing for their business.

The Conversion Brief is a series I publish on Substack — conversion education for women who are done being told more visibility is the answer. This is where it started. If you wish to get notified when a new brief is posted, you can subscribe here.

Strong brands are built in a specific order

Branding is not something you design.

It's a series of decisions you make before anything gets designed. The visuals are just the final step – the point where those decisions become something people can see.

I see women business owners build their brand in the wrong order all the time. They start with the logo and the palette and hope a clear identity will assemble itself underneath. It never does. You don't build a foundation after decorating the surface.

A real brand is built in sequence:

It starts with your identity: who you actually are. Your identity produces your argument: what you believe about your work, and how it should be done. Your argument determines your position: where you stand, and who you stand for. Your position commits you to a promise: what you deliver, every single time.

Only then does design come in. The colours, the fonts, etc… they’re not the brand. They're the brand made visible.

First, you need to look into who you are.

Identity: knowing who you are

So… who are you?

When most people hear "personal brand", they think it means showing your face, being visible, and being "authentic" enough that strangers find you relatable. But showing your face is just exposure.

There’s so much more to your identity than your aesthetic. It isn't the colours you're drawn to, or a personality-quiz result, or a "vibe" you're trying to give off.

It's who you actually are. And it gets built in two layers.

Some of it arrived before you had any say in it. Your family. The place you were born. The body you grew into. The languages and beliefs you absorbed before you were old enough to choose them. That's the part you inherited.

The rest is what you've made of it. Books you've read, people you've believed, experiences that shaped you. The things you've kept and the things you've put down. The version of yourself you've slowly become.

Both are identity. The first is inherited. The second is built.

Here’s what the inherited part can look like.

I was born to Ghanaian parents who emigrated to Italy. Because of them, I speak two Ghanaian languages – languages of a country I never grew up in. I speak Italian because Italy raised me. I speak English, because I learned it from cartoons and from church and, later, from living in the UK. I designed none of it. I carry a whole country I've never lived in, and languages that were never truly mine, simply because of who my parents are and the decisions they made.

Now, your identity is not the same thing as your brand identity. But your brand identity is built on top of it.

So how does who you are become how you're known? Through your argument.

The core of a personal brand is not what you do. It's what you think – what you believe about your work, what you reject and what you'd defend. It's the thing that makes you you in a market full of people selling the same service.

This is the second layer – the parts you created yourself.

That’s where my own brand actually came from. Growing up, I loved watching the classic Barbie movies, and they taught me something I still carry with me: a woman doesn't need rescuing, and there is nothing a man can do that she can't. That belief is the reason I’m such a feminist today.

But I also noticed something those movies never showed me. None of those women looked like me. Seeing black women take centre stage wasn’t common – not in the stories then, and barely in my industry now.

That absence is what turned the belief into an argument. My brand doesn't just exist to back women. It exists to back the ones who have rarely seen themselves represented in their own field, because I know exactly what that absence feels like.

That is the foundation of my brand. Not my logo or colours, but a belief I inherited, sharpened by a life I actually lived.

And here's why almost nobody does this inner work: you can't outsource it.

A designer can hand you a palette. No one can hand you your identity. It's the one part of a brand that has to come from you, which is exactly why it's the part that gets skipped.

Because sitting down with "who am I, and what do I actually believe?" is uncomfortable. There can be a real fear beneath the avoidance; perhaps a fear that you've been rewriting your homepage for a year, not because the words are wrong, but because you don't yet believe in what you're trying to say.

If that's you, please understand this one thing: this is not a problem you can design your way out of.

It is the work. And it's where every brand that lasts actually begins.

Once you know who you are and what you believe, the next question is: where does that belief place you?

Your position: where you stand and the promise it commits you to

Your argument doesn't stay an idea. It places you somewhere – and that somewhere becomes your position.

Position is a word people use loosely, so let's be precise.

To position something means to place it deliberately.

Your position is where your argument has placed you: what you stand for, and the view you'd defend when someone pushes back on it.

If you’ve been on the internet these past few years, you've probably been told your positioning is a sentence that goes something like "I help [this person] achieve [this result] without [this pain]." Coaches teach it all the time.

It's a very useful statement – I use it too – but it’s not a positioning. It's a transformation statement.

What’s the difference?

A transformation statement describes the result you deliver and the method you use to get there.

Your position is something else: it's why you do the work the way you do. The belief underneath the method.

"I help service providers build websites that convert" tells you what I do.

“When it comes to conversion, I believe the website is the problem no marketing expert is willing to name because most of them don't sell websites – they sell the promise of more followers", tells you where I stand.

One is a service. The other is an argument.

And a real position always has an edge, a genuine stance that puts you at odds with someone: a common practice, a louder voice, a piece of advice the whole industry repeats. And being at odds isn't a flaw; it's the proof you've taken a position rather than just occupied space.

Now, you don't need to announce any of this in a tidy line on your homepage or your Instagram link in bio. When you own your position, it becomes a thread running through everything you write and every piece of content you create.

That’s why your position commits you to something. If you stand for a particular belief, your work will deliver on it. That is your promise – the specific thing a client can expect from you every time, because of where you stand.

A promise is a standard you've made that's impossible to walk back on.

For example, my argument is that a website should do the selling for you – so my promise is a site that qualifies your clients before they ever DM you.

The belief sets the promise. The promise fulfilled is the belief kept.

How does this decide whether your website converts or not

So why does all of this matter? Why go through the work of identity, argument, position and promise before you touch a single colour?

Two reasons.

One:

Once the foundation is decided, every choice that used to feel impossible, like the headline, the sections order, what goes above the fold… it all stops being a matter of taste and becomes a matter of fit.

You're no longer asking "do I like this?" You're asking, "Does this say what I stand for?"

And it's why you can stop rewriting and redesigning your homepage every few months: there's a fixed point to build against now, instead of a moving one.

Two:

A properly built brand is what enables a website to convert at all. Imagine a stranger lands on your site. Within a few seconds (not minutes, seconds!) she decides whether to leave or stay. In those seconds, she is trying to answer three questions:

What does this woman stand for?
Is this for someone like me?
And what is she actually promising me?

Your foundation is what answers these questions. Identity and argument tell her what you stand for. Position tells her whether she's the right fit. Promise tells her what she'll get. A logo and colour palette answer none of these.

So let's go back to where we started.

You decided your business deserved to be taken seriously… and you played with new colours. Now you know why that changed nothing.

The colours are only the surface. The real brand is underneath.

The real work is quieter, and it doesn't fit in a PDF.

It's knowing who you are. It's knowing what you believe about your work strongly enough to call it an argument. It's knowing where that argument places you, and what it commits you to deliver.

When you get that right, design finally has something true to express. If you skip it, you'll be back here in a year, choosing colours again.

But you can know exactly what you stand for and still get your brand wrong. Because standing for something is only half of a position.

The other half is knowing who you stand for. And the most expensive mistake I see women make is trying to stand for everyone.

So before you touch your brand colours, sit with that one. We'll pick it up in the next post.

If your website isn't doing the work it should be, the Website Reset is where most people start — a full audit of your design, copy, SEO, and sales journey, with a recorded feedback call and a detailed PDF report.