Here’s what’s going on:

Most brands start with instinct. It could be a founder’s point of view, a feeling, a taste level, an innovation or product. Early on, that’s enough.

But as the brand grows, instinct alone stops scaling. Messaging begins to feel generic. Everyone has a different opinion about the brand.

What often happens is that everyone on the team senses the brand’s essence, but no one can quite put it into words the same way. What used to feel intuitive is now impossible to express to the rest of the world in a way that is immediately understood and felt.

The brand story lives in fragments: a mood here, a phrase there, a campaign that worked once but can’t quite be repeated.

You’ve outgrown your original brand story.

The Iconic Brand Story Architecture exists to make the implicit explicit, to articulate what the brand is truly about at a level deep enough to guide decisions, communication, and growth where you are now, and over time.

That sense that something is “off” is rarely random. It’s often the first sign a brand has outgrown its original instincts. What once felt intuitive now feels fragmented. Different teams interpret the brand differently. Decisions take longer. Messaging starts to feel generic or strained.

I created the Iconic Brand Story Architecture to resolve these issues by clarifying what the brand is really about, at its deepest level — and giving everyone a shared foundation to work from.

Because copy is an expression of clarity, not the source of it.

Copywriters can only work with what a brand has articulated. When a brand’s story, position, and voice haven’t been fully defined and codified, even very good writers are just taking stabs in the dark. The result is copy that sounds competent, but not quite right or copy that some team members like and others don’t.

When brands repeatedly revisit copy — rewriting websites, refreshing language, searching for “the right words” — it’s usually a signal that the underlying story or voice hasn’t been fully defined yet.

When the brand has a clear spine — a defined point of view, emotional territory, understanding of its community, and way of speaking — a copywriter can really sing. They can write with confidence because they’re no longer inventing the brand as they go, which isn’t their job.

It’s yours, and mine.

That’s why I offer copywriting only as an add-on, after the brand’s story and/or voice have been crystallized and codified. The goal isn’t just to write better words, it’s to be a brand that knows what it is about.

This is a very common experience, especially for brands at a turning point.

Agencies are often brought in to solve a specific problem — a campaign, a launch, a refresh — without being given the mandate or space to define the deeper logic of the brand. As a result, the work can look good and even perform well in the moment, but it doesn’t create lasting clarity.

When the foundation isn’t fully articulated, each new agency or partner ends up reinterpreting the brand slightly differently. Over time, that fragmentation becomes exhausting.

My work focuses on creating the underlying structure — the story and voice that agencies, creatives, and internal teams can then build from with confidence. Once that exists, outside partners become far more effective, and the brand stops resetting with every new engagement.

Yes and yes.

AI is an incredibly useful tool when it’s trained on the specific parameters of your brand’s voice and story. I can create a tailored AI workspace that understands your brand’s unique guidelines and helps your team maintain consistency.

Clients often tell me that once they have a brand platform or voice guide, the challenge is getting everyone — from internal teams to agencies — to actually follow it.

By training an AI workspace on your brand’s parameters, you have a living, shareable reference point that everyone can access. It helps ensure that your brand voice is consistently applied, reducing some of the burden on your team to manually enforce guidelines.

In short, the AI becomes a brand-savvy assistant that keeps everyone on track, making it easier for all partners to maintain the integrity of your brand voice without constant oversight.