What a room full of people can tell you that a brief never will
There’s a moment in every brand project where the real work begins. And it rarely starts with the brief.
For us, it was getting into a room with the Pelion team. We’d been brought in to help the Glasgow-based IoT company stand out in a crowded, jargon-heavy B2B category. And very quickly, the real answer came not from desk research or audits, but from the people themselves.
That’s the thing about workshops done properly. They’re not a box-ticking exercise before the “real” strategy starts. They are the strategy. And for us, they help find the Unfair Advantage™ for our clients.
Uncovering insights – effortlessly
Leadership absolutely matter in strategic brand projects, but so do the people across the business who often claim to know nothing about brand – without appreciating that they actually embody and communicate it every day. The people in sales who hear customer questions first-hand. The people in HR shaping culture and attracting talent. The teams closer to the day-to-day reality of how the business behaves, speaks and solves problems. They all have a huge role in defining what makes a company distinct, whether they’d call it branding or not.
With Pelion, that was where things got interesting. In a category full of complexity, corporate jargon and cliched tech branding, their team described themselves really differently: straight-talking, anti-corporate and passionate. They don’t try to overcomplicate things to look clever. They just try to make connections – and business – feel effortless. And they go to extremes to make it that way.
That wasn’t just a nice observation. It was their differentiator.
Finding the confidence to stand out
We used brand archetypes and a few other exercises to unlock how Pelion saw themselves and the world around them. What came through wasn’t just a useful strategic direction. It gave them clarity and confidence in what they do.
And that matters, because it allowed us to create something meaningfully unique – not just one that plays to category tropes and cliched visual identity, but one that genuinely stands out and starts conversations. Enter a bright pink world of oversized basketball hoops and headlines that compared their IoT connectivity to listening to Enya…
Instead of following the usual B2B tech playbook, we could build a brand with real personality. Something bolder, warmer and more memorable. That confidence came from the room that day.
Simplifying & supercharging the process
We kept pushing for the simplest possible way to explain what Pelion actually does. The answer was beautifully straightforward: they connect anything to anywhere.
From putting heat sensors on train tracks to trackers in farm animals, their work is fascinating and varied. But the promise is really simple – they make the complicated happen, without making it feel complicated.
That kind of language doesn’t come from an agency trying to sound clever. It comes from listening closely enough to reflect back what’s already true.
It also supercharged the brand development process, getting us from brief to creative platform in just two months. Because we had the right people in the room, we were able to align on the proposition there and then, together, rather than losing weeks to back-and-forth documents and stakeholder ping-pong.
It also helped get them bought into a creative direction as a collective, which reduced friction further down the line. There were fewer surprises, fewer rounds of re-explaining, and far less energy spent trying to sell in something they had already helped shape.
And when you’re creating a brand designed to stand apart from the category, that kind of shared conviction is everything.
More than a workshop
Too often, the brief is treated as the starting point. But sometimes the most valuable thing you can do is step back, get everyone in a room, and work out what actually makes a business distinct before you start dressing it up. That’s what happened with Pelion. We didn’t invent their positioning, we uncovered it together.
And the results matter. Since launch, the new brand has helped Pelion significantly grow high-intent leads, converted millions in committed value, and build a level of confidence and cut-through that wasn’t there before. More importantly, it gave them a brand people could believe in internally and respond to externally.
In a market where so many brands still look and sound the same, that kind of clarity can be the difference between blending in and being remembered.