Quite often, the most useful thing for a business leader is to chat with someone who knows the world of brand, inside and out.
DoubleShift is offering a 30-minute brand review to a limited number of Open Letter readers: a direct conversation with Kurt Schröder, our Founder and Strategy Lead, focused entirely on your business and where your brand stands.
In high-trust, high-complexity markets like fintech, medtech, energy and regulated B2B, brand isn't decoration. It's the infrastructure that makes people trust you enough to say yes. In these markets, most brands losing ground are stuck on one of three problems.
A brand is decided inside the building before it's designed on the outside. The first job isn't the logo. It's getting everyone inside the company to agree on who they are, what they stand for, and just as importantly, what they refuse to be. Without that, design just puts a nice face on a decision nobody's made yet.
An ideal customer is a person, not a market segment. The real question isn't “who could buy this,” it's “who would see themselves in us.” Once that person is named specifically, everything else, including visual identity, tone and messaging, can be built so they recognise themself in it fast, and the wrong customer rules themselves out just as quickly.
Customers, partners, regulators, colleagues, investors and even an eventual acquirer all need to draw the same conclusion from your brand. That's the real test: does your identity hold up across every room, not just the ones you control. Most brands built in fintech and financial services have a gap here, and it costs them more than they realise.
This is exactly the ground Kurt covers in a brand review, giving you a straight, expert read on where your brand stands against these three problems.
This is not a sales call. There is nothing to buy at the end of it, and no follow-up pitch waiting in your inbox. It's a straightforward conversation with an expert about your brand.
Kurt has spent his career working at the intersection of brand and commercial performance in high-trust, high-complexity markets, and for 30 minutes, that focus is entirely on you.
