How to Start Building a Brand World: For Newbies, By Newbies

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Feb 17, 2025

As a marketing professional who has crafted countless go-to-market strategies, I recently faced an exciting new challenge: building a brand completely from scratch for our start-up Ponnd. Through conversations with my co-founder Bell, we discovered something the brands we truly loved had in common - they don't just sell products, they create entire worlds for their customers to step into. One brand that immediately springs to mind is Late Checkout, which masterfully creates an ecosystem where their audience feels like they're part of something bigger than just a transaction.

We wanted to create this immersive brand experience for Ponnd and as complete newbies we wanted to share our process with you. Here's some things that worked for us:

Finding Your Creative Headspace

Like many entrepreneurs, we're juggling full-time jobs while building our dream. Switching from day-job mode to visionary founder mode isn't always easy, but we found some effective exercises to spark our creativity and maintain our momentum.

One particularly powerful exercise was creating future newspaper headlines for our business at different milestones: one year, five years, and ten years out. This wasn't just a fun creative exercise - it helped us align our long-term vision and ensure we were both working toward the same goals. More importantly, it got us excited about the future we're building.

Defining Your Brand's Personality

Next, we developed what we call our "personality scales" - a series of contrasting descriptors with sliding scales between them. We each independently marked where we thought Ponnd should sit on each scale, then compared notes. This led to some fascinating discussions about our brand's identity.

For instance, while we wanted Ponnd to be bold and distinctive, we also wanted to ensure our messaging remained accessible to a broad audience, not just Gen Z. These conversations helped us fine-tune our brand voice and create clear guidelines for how we should communicate with our community.

Creating Your Brand Universe

With our foundation set, we dove deeper into building Ponnd's unique world. We worked through a series of thought-provoking questions that helped us visualise and articulate our brand's universe:

"What cultural influences shape our brand?"

"If Ponnd were a physical store, what would walking into it feel like?"

"What three words do we want people to associate with Ponnd?"

"How does Ponnd change the world for our customers?"

"What visual elements capture the essence of our brand?"

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This deep-dive exercise transformed our abstract ideas into a cohesive brand vision that will influence everything from our visual identity to our customer communication. It will become our North Star for decision-making and will help us maintain consistency across all aspects of our brand.

The beauty of building a brand world lies in its ability to create something bigger than just products or services - it's about crafting an experience that resonates with your audience on a deeper level. While we're still early in our journey with Ponnd, these foundational exercises have given us the clarity and confidence to move forward with purpose.

Remember, there's no one-size-fits-all approach to building a brand world, but we felt this was a really good starting point for us that helped with clarity. The key is to remain authentic while being intentional about every element of your brand's identity.