Brand strategy and copywriting lessons from Smith & Diction

Executive overview

Most founders treat brand as a logo, a color palette, and a typeface. Brand is actually every interaction a customer has with your company — and if you don't define it, your audience will define it for you.

Mike and Kara Smith run Smith & Diction, a small Philadelphia studio behind rebrands of Perplexity, Gamma, Exposure, and Anterior. Their approach combines brand strategy, verbal identity, and design under one roof — with the founders doing the work directly.

A brand isn't something you buy; it's something you live every single day.

What brand actually means

• Brand is simply how people see you — whether you've invested in it or not.
• Choosing not to develop a brand doesn't mean you don't have one; it means your audience decides it for you.
• Every customer service interaction, every moment inside your product, is part of your brand.
• A brand toolkit is the starting point — you still have to go out and live it.
• The test: would someone put a sticker of your brand on their laptop? Good brands become part of people's identity, not just a transaction.

The mistake of shallow branding

• Reducing brand to logo + type + color is dangerously shallow — your product must then be flawless to compensate.
• Photography, art direction, motion, texture, and 3D effects are all brand levers most founders ignore.
• A shallow brand gets seen through quickly; depth buys you forgiveness and loyalty.

Verbal identity: more than a tagline

• Verbal identity covers all external-facing words: website copy, ads, social posts, headlines, tone of voice.
• Brand strategy is an internal document for your team; verbal identity is how that strategy reaches your audience.
• A verbal identity doesn't deliver every word you'll ever need — it sets the tone so every future word feels consistent.
• Words change constantly; a logo doesn't. Make sure the overarching personality is defined so writers can stay on-brand without a rulebook.

Finding the right audience frame

• For Gamma, the useful exercise was ruling out who it's not for: not the non-technical parent, not the professional designer.
• Identifying the right audience means putting yourself in their shoes as if they're a character in a novel.
• For Contra (freelancers + hirers), the unifying concept was "get more creative" — a phrase that means something different but equally relevant to both sides.
• Write for your audience's emotions and desires, not at them with instructions to buy.

Copywriting: emotion over information

• The gap between fine copy and good copy is emotion — does the reader feel something?
• AI messaging dominated by efficiency claims misses the point: no one wakes up wanting to be more efficient.
• People don't read because they lack time; they don't read because the writing doesn't make them feel anything. Game of Thrones is long — people read it anyway.
• The edge humans have over AI-generated copy: genuine emotional judgment. A human writer knows which headline makes your heart hurt; a language model doesn't.
• Don't write "buy now." Make people want it first.

The Perplexity brief: positioning when your audience is everyone

• Perplexity's audience is literally everyone — the same challenge Google faces.
• The differentiator that emerged: citations. Unlike ChatGPT, Perplexity turns a conversation into a portal to knowledge, not a dead-end answer.
• The strategic frame: giving someone a fish vs. teaching them to fish. Perplexity opens doors; it doesn't just close questions.
• That insight crystallised into the headline: Where knowledge begins.

Logo and color: the 10% strange rule

• Push logo concepts to far extremes first, then simplify. The Perplexity spinning door and Exposure globe-with-star both came from this process.
• Every logo should have a "10% strange" quality — something that makes it ownable and not interchangeable with generic geometric marks.
• Color deserves deep thinking: light mode, dark mode, Pantone matching. The most exciting combinations are two colors that almost don't work together but create vibration.
• Generic trend-following (three circles, flower shapes) produces logos that no one can own.

Staying small by design

• Smith & Diction is intentionally a five-person team. The founders lead every project and do the majority of the work — the opposite of a traditional agency.
• At a traditional agency, career progression means moving away from making things. Mike's goal is to have the title "designer" forever.
• Minimal meetings, no time sheets, no mandatory team events. The team's job is to design for eight hours, then go home.
• Scaling past a certain point means the founders stop doing the work — which defeats the reason the studio exists.

Failure as practice

• The skateboarding ethos applies: you fall 60 times to land one trick. Not fearing failure is what keeps creative risk-taking alive.
• Having no backup plan removes the option of playing it safe. That constraint is a feature.
• In an age where AI can generate answers instantly, the beauty of working through failure and genuine craft is more valuable, not less.