You Don’t Have a Branding Problem, You Have a Thinking Problem
A great brand lands across audiences when three things overlap: who you serve, what you do differently, and whether your established expertise can pull it off.
Written by Bryan Zorn, Content Strategist at Hype
The symptoms of an underperforming brand usually get blamed on the wrong thing: the copy isn’t landing, the launch underperformed, the community didn’t show up the way the deck said it would. The instinct is for teams to plug the leaks: realign with the copywriter, rerender the visuals, edit the manifesto.
But branding (read: storytelling) doesn’t work that way. Storytelling can’t paper over operational sloppiness or a lack of intellectual heft. Marketing is the vessel in which a brand delivers itself to consumers, but without any actual substance? The storytelling falls flat.
A great brand lands across audiences when three things overlap: who you serve, what you do differently, and whether your established expertise can pull it off. The central point between these is where users see themselves. When branding fails to pave that natural path of invitation, you force people to think about where they could fit. But no one wants to think about where they can fit. They want to be shown.
So when a brand feels empty, it’s because it is. The copywriter wasn’t the problem and neither was the mission statement. It was the lack of thinking (on the founder’s end) underneath.
Narrative is your thesis. Storytelling is the transmission.
These two pillars of marketing get conflated constantly and their unintentional overlap is where most startups muddle their message when getting their brand out in the wild.
Narrative is what a company believes about the market, about the user, about where things are going. It’s the part that doesn’t change from the pitch deck to VCs and the eventual App store debut or token launch. Storytelling, on the other hand, is how that belief gets out the door: which details lead, which framing holds, which features get the spotlight and which gets a one-line mention.
In short, if narrative is the script, storytelling is what’s left to the director.
Most teams we’ve helped refine are already deep in their storytelling, because storytelling is the visible part. The deck, the logo, the launch video, the threads. But narrative is the part founders need to decide on before those get produced so they all work in harmony with little to no supervision later on.
Cementing this early on matters, as the coherence of what you publish becomes a proxy for the coherence of what you’re building. A founder with a brilliant thesis who can’t make someone feel it in less than a few minutes has a problem. A founder with no thesis but sharp delivery can have a bigger one down the road. And what both are missing is that the brand itself is the instrument of private valuation and public evaluation: it’s what VCs, customers, users, and its community all use to decide whether you’re value add, or to just keep on scrolling.
Our VP of Narrative and Market Strategy, George Keenan, brings this together. “Most startups that think they have a storytelling problem actually have a thinking problem. They haven’t decided what they believe about their future, so no amount of polish can compensate for the absence of a coherent thesis underneath.”
Let’s dive in.
Expectation Debt
When that preplanning isn’t established internally, the brand storytelling runs ahead of the substance, and the audience starts subconsciously determining what they want the brand to be. Where they think they can fit in. Our Head of Partnerships, Alex Bell, calls this expectation debt: the gap between what the brand seems to be promising and what the product has actually done to earn it.
Debt is a great tool if you can service it, but when it comes to branding, that debt compounds. The audience starts writing the character arcs themselves, and when they don’t land on time, the check gets cashed. The brand value bounces and public skepticism compounds.
Many brands choose to keep things vague at the start to try and emulate the greats: Apple tells you to “think different.” Nike tells you to “just do it.” McDonald’s knows you’re “lovin’ it.” These work because decades of customer satisfaction, global distribution, and cultural integration have already paid the bill in advance. Startups don’t have those receipts yet, which means every slogan, every manifesto, every “we’re building the future of X” can work against them as an overdraft.
The shortcut most teams reach for is that imitation: force a trending theme, borrow a meme, retrofit the product to whatever the social algorithm rewarded last week. It’s creating expectation debt from the beginning, and the audience you wish you had can tell. The barrier of entry to getting your product out there has never been faster and cheaper, don’t cheapen your message.
People want to be shown where they fit in.
It’s the practical answer to brands’ thinking problem. Initial clarity and uniqueness compound. Keyword stacking and imitation doesn’t.
Chris Ruz, our Business Strategy Director, argues that “a simple, effective message will take you further than any keyword dump because people will understand you. When people understand you, they relate to you. When they relate to you, they follow you, and the product gets adopted.”
Build for the customers you haven’t captured yet
The trap many fall into is building a narrative that’s so narrow only the earliest users fit inside. Privacy-focused projects, for example, have it easy as they don’t have to spend much time explaining their fundamentals; the people who need or want privacy were already searching for it. Lots of privacy focused apps or projects take this route, which ultimately neglects most of their future audience, who are left wondering where (or if) they fit in.
Stablecoins on the other hand take a simpler, more universal approach. On paper, they’re one of the most boring assets in crypto. But in practice, they’ve quietly positioned themselves as financial infrastructure: the new rails that allow more people to pay, save, and invest on whether or not they ever even think of themselves as users. All they see is better savings rates, faster settlement, and frictionless international experiences.
Whether it’s advocating for the right to privacy or competing with banks, readiness is key in developing your brand’s narrative and story. There’s no way to predict whether cultural moments will line up with your product, but you can decide in advance which associations you might want to own if they do occur. The brands that show up well in the moment aren’t reacting and redefining, they already know how they’ll respond.
Sharpen the axe before chopping the wood. Then measure twice, and cut once.
Luck is when preparation meets opportunity. Make your own luck.
Or, let us show you the way during our upcoming Founders’ Bootcamp starting July 7, registration is open. Limited scholarships available only through June 24.
