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Deep dives into design thinking, creative process, and the intersection of business and aesthetics.
A version of this email reaches us most weeks, usually from a business in Limerick or somewhere else in the Mid-West: "Our website looks dated. We need a new logo and a fresh design to help us stand out."
It's a reasonable thing to ask for. When growth flattens or the enquiries get weaker, the packaging is the most visible thing you can change, and a sharper look does feel like progress. But a tired logo is rarely the real problem. More often what's missing is commercial clarity, meaning a settled, shared answer to who you're for and why those people should pick you over the firm down the road in Raheen or Castletroy.
Without that answer, a new colour palette has nothing to hold on to. The identity ends up expressing a mood, and a year later the business is back where it started with nicer stationery. That's what we mean when we say a rebrand without a strategy is expensive decoration.
The signs show up in the numbers first
A strategy problem rarely announces itself as one. It shows up as symptoms, and they're usually financial.
The most common one is price pressure. If your website and your proposals read much like those of three other firms in your sector, a buyer comparing you has very little to go on except the figure at the bottom of the quote, and price becomes the thing you're judged on whether you chose that or not.
Close behind it is an inbox full of the wrong enquiries. You spend evenings writing proposals for people who were never going to buy at the level you work at, because the marketing was written to avoid putting anyone off, and so it doesn't put off the people it should.
There's also a test you can run in-house this afternoon. Ask your managing director, your head of sales and whoever answers the phone to describe the company in one sentence. You'll probably get three different sentences. That inconsistency is already leaking into your marketing, and a customer can't be expected to understand your value more clearly than your own team does.
Referrals still win work here, but the buyer checks you first
Doing business in Limerick has real advantages. The commercial network is small enough that reputation travels, and plenty of established firms here were built largely on word of mouth.
What has changed is the step after the referral. Even when a trusted colleague has recommended you, the first thing the prospect does is look you up on their phone. They want to know the recommendation was sound before they spend any time on it.
Buyers of B2B and high-value services are cautious by nature. They'd rather hire the safest pair of hands than the most impressive one. A site that's vague, or that undersells the standard of work you deliver, gives them a reason to hesitate, and hesitation is often enough to lose the job to a competitor who looked more certain of themselves. So the brand has to do some of the work a good face-to-face meeting would do, and it has to do it before you're in the room.
What happens in a strategy workshop
This is why we won't start a complex design project without a strategy workshop. We can't design a good answer to a question nobody has agreed on yet.
There are no trust falls, and nobody will ask you what animal your company would be. What happens is more useful and a bit less comfortable. Your key decision-makers sit in one room and agree, out loud, on the facts of the business: who buys from you, what those buyers actually care about, and where you sit in the market.
Our part is to ask the questions an insider can't. There's an old line about not being able to read the label from inside the jar, and it's true of messaging. After years in a business you stop hearing how your own description sounds to someone new. We strip back the industry language you've got used to and push on your assumptions about what your best buyers care about. The aim is to get the knowledge out of your head and into a form the whole team, and the design, can work from.
What you should leave with
Nobody commissions a strategy session to receive a thick PDF that never gets opened again. The value is in a small number of decisions you can use.
The first is a clear position in your market. Are you the considered, bespoke option or the fast, high-volume one? You can't credibly be both, and a business that tries ends up with neither kind of buyer being sure it's for them. Picking one is uncomfortable, which is why it rarely happens without someone in the room insisting on it.
Then a clear picture of who you're for, meaning the buyers with the budget and the intent to hire you at your level. Agreeing who you're not for is just as useful. Turning away poor-fit enquiries early saves your sales team a great deal of time on proposals that were never going to land.
From those two, the messaging follows. We build a framework that sounds like a capable person talking, with the generic corporate phrasing taken out, so sales and marketing are working from the same words.
The fourth is less obvious, and it's pricing. When the positioning is clear and the messaging speaks to what the buyer is worried about, you're far easier to see as an investment than as a cost. That gives you solid grounds to charge what your expertise is worth. It won't do the negotiating for you, but it means you don't start on the back foot.
Agreeing the brief before anyone designs anything
Think of the workshop as insurance on the budget you're about to spend. Commissioning a rebrand or a new website without an agreed strategy means hoping the designer happens to guess the right commercial angle. When the guess is wrong, and it often is, you pay for it in rounds of revisions and a project that drags on while the team argues about what it was meant to achieve.
Settling the core message and the audience with your leadership team on day one changes the rest of the project. Design and development decisions get quicker, because there's something to test them against. The conversation moves away from whether a layout "looks nice", an argument nobody wins, and towards whether it does what everyone agreed it had to do.
You know the industry better than we do
We've run these sessions for years with businesses around Ireland, and we go into each one confident in the process and modest about your side of it.
We won't pretend to understand your industry better than you. You've spent years learning the trade and building the business, and nobody in the room knows it as well as you. What we bring is translation: taking knowledge that's detailed and mostly never written down, and turning it into a brand identity your customers understand quickly and have reason to trust.
Before you brief a designer
If you're tired of being compared on price, or your website no longer reflects the standard of the work you do, the strategy probably needs attention before the visuals do. Run the one-sentence test on your own team first. If the three sentences don't match, settle that before anyone opens a design file.
A first call with me is short. We'd look at how you're positioned now and what you want the business to be doing in a year or two, and work out whether a strategy workshop is the right next step. Book a call with Dave.
Related Brainstorm services and work
Branding and identity in Ireland · Selected brand and website work · Discuss a brand or website project
Updated 24 September 2026. Dave Curtin, founder and Creative Director of Brainstorm, leads website strategy, brand direction and technical delivery for Brainstorm clients.
A version of this email reaches us most weeks, usually from a business in Limerick or somewhere else in the Mid-West: "Our website looks dated. We need a new logo and a fresh design to help us stand out."
It's a reasonable thing to ask for. When growth flattens or the enquiries get weaker, the packaging is the most visible thing you can change, and a sharper look does feel like progress. But a tired logo is rarely the real problem. More often what's missing is commercial clarity, meaning a settled, shared answer to who you're for and why those people should pick you over the firm down the road in Raheen or Castletroy.
Without that answer, a new colour palette has nothing to hold on to. The identity ends up expressing a mood, and a year later the business is back where it started with nicer stationery. That's what we mean when we say a rebrand without a strategy is expensive decoration.
The signs show up in the numbers first
A strategy problem rarely announces itself as one. It shows up as symptoms, and they're usually financial.
The most common one is price pressure. If your website and your proposals read much like those of three other firms in your sector, a buyer comparing you has very little to go on except the figure at the bottom of the quote, and price becomes the thing you're judged on whether you chose that or not.
Close behind it is an inbox full of the wrong enquiries. You spend evenings writing proposals for people who were never going to buy at the level you work at, because the marketing was written to avoid putting anyone off, and so it doesn't put off the people it should.
There's also a test you can run in-house this afternoon. Ask your managing director, your head of sales and whoever answers the phone to describe the company in one sentence. You'll probably get three different sentences. That inconsistency is already leaking into your marketing, and a customer can't be expected to understand your value more clearly than your own team does.
Referrals still win work here, but the buyer checks you first
Doing business in Limerick has real advantages. The commercial network is small enough that reputation travels, and plenty of established firms here were built largely on word of mouth.
What has changed is the step after the referral. Even when a trusted colleague has recommended you, the first thing the prospect does is look you up on their phone. They want to know the recommendation was sound before they spend any time on it.
Buyers of B2B and high-value services are cautious by nature. They'd rather hire the safest pair of hands than the most impressive one. A site that's vague, or that undersells the standard of work you deliver, gives them a reason to hesitate, and hesitation is often enough to lose the job to a competitor who looked more certain of themselves. So the brand has to do some of the work a good face-to-face meeting would do, and it has to do it before you're in the room.
What happens in a strategy workshop
This is why we won't start a complex design project without a strategy workshop. We can't design a good answer to a question nobody has agreed on yet.
There are no trust falls, and nobody will ask you what animal your company would be. What happens is more useful and a bit less comfortable. Your key decision-makers sit in one room and agree, out loud, on the facts of the business: who buys from you, what those buyers actually care about, and where you sit in the market.
Our part is to ask the questions an insider can't. There's an old line about not being able to read the label from inside the jar, and it's true of messaging. After years in a business you stop hearing how your own description sounds to someone new. We strip back the industry language you've got used to and push on your assumptions about what your best buyers care about. The aim is to get the knowledge out of your head and into a form the whole team, and the design, can work from.
What you should leave with
Nobody commissions a strategy session to receive a thick PDF that never gets opened again. The value is in a small number of decisions you can use.
The first is a clear position in your market. Are you the considered, bespoke option or the fast, high-volume one? You can't credibly be both, and a business that tries ends up with neither kind of buyer being sure it's for them. Picking one is uncomfortable, which is why it rarely happens without someone in the room insisting on it.
Then a clear picture of who you're for, meaning the buyers with the budget and the intent to hire you at your level. Agreeing who you're not for is just as useful. Turning away poor-fit enquiries early saves your sales team a great deal of time on proposals that were never going to land.
From those two, the messaging follows. We build a framework that sounds like a capable person talking, with the generic corporate phrasing taken out, so sales and marketing are working from the same words.
The fourth is less obvious, and it's pricing. When the positioning is clear and the messaging speaks to what the buyer is worried about, you're far easier to see as an investment than as a cost. That gives you solid grounds to charge what your expertise is worth. It won't do the negotiating for you, but it means you don't start on the back foot.
Agreeing the brief before anyone designs anything
Think of the workshop as insurance on the budget you're about to spend. Commissioning a rebrand or a new website without an agreed strategy means hoping the designer happens to guess the right commercial angle. When the guess is wrong, and it often is, you pay for it in rounds of revisions and a project that drags on while the team argues about what it was meant to achieve.
Settling the core message and the audience with your leadership team on day one changes the rest of the project. Design and development decisions get quicker, because there's something to test them against. The conversation moves away from whether a layout "looks nice", an argument nobody wins, and towards whether it does what everyone agreed it had to do.
You know the industry better than we do
We've run these sessions for years with businesses around Ireland, and we go into each one confident in the process and modest about your side of it.
We won't pretend to understand your industry better than you. You've spent years learning the trade and building the business, and nobody in the room knows it as well as you. What we bring is translation: taking knowledge that's detailed and mostly never written down, and turning it into a brand identity your customers understand quickly and have reason to trust.
Before you brief a designer
If you're tired of being compared on price, or your website no longer reflects the standard of the work you do, the strategy probably needs attention before the visuals do. Run the one-sentence test on your own team first. If the three sentences don't match, settle that before anyone opens a design file.
A first call with me is short. We'd look at how you're positioned now and what you want the business to be doing in a year or two, and work out whether a strategy workshop is the right next step. Book a call with Dave.
Related Brainstorm services and work
Branding and identity in Ireland · Selected brand and website work · Discuss a brand or website project
Updated 24 September 2026. Dave Curtin, founder and Creative Director of Brainstorm, leads website strategy, brand direction and technical delivery for Brainstorm clients.