Strategy Note 4: The Concept You Own
The brands that live rent-free in your mind share something in common: they have made themselves synonymous with a single concept and built an empire inside it.
Volvo became shorthand for safety. Tesla, for innovation. These associations did not happen by accident—they emerged from years of consistent repetition until the link became automatic, almost invisible, the way you don’t notice your own breathing.
What concept belongs to you?
If you have to think about it, you are competing in a category rather than owning territory. Category competitors fight over market share. Territory owners make competition irrelevant because they have defined the terms of engagement.
The concept you own should be specific enough to mean something and expansive enough to contain multitudes—a single word that opens into an entire world.
"Marketing" is too broad. Everyone in your industry could claim it. "Email marketing automation for e-commerce brands using Klaviyo" is too narrow. There is no room to grow, no space for the concept to breathe.
The sweet spot is a concept that captures the essence of what you do and why it matters, that differentiates you from competitors, and that has enough space inside it for your business to evolve.
For me, the concept is "worldbuilding." It is specific enough to be distinctive—most brand strategists do not think about branding through the lens of creating immersive worlds. It is expansive enough to contain everything I do—strategy, storytelling, identity, experience design, mythology. And it attracts the right people—founders who want more than a logo and a tagline, who want to build something people actually want to inhabit.
Finding your concept requires understanding what you do that others do not, what your best clients value most about working with you, what you could talk about forever without getting bored.
It also requires discipline. Once you have your concept, you must resist the temptation to add more. To hedge. To say "we do worldbuilding AND operational efficiency AND rapid scaling." The more concepts you claim, the fewer you own.
The process of finding your concept is not a brainstorming exercise where you generate options and pick the best one. It is an excavation. The concept already exists. It is embedded in the work you do, the clients you attract, the problems you are uniquely suited to solve. Your job is to uncover it and then go all in.
Ask your best clients what concept they would use to describe working with you. Ask yourself what concept you would fight to keep if you could only keep one. Look at the patterns in your work and ask what single idea holds them all together.
Then claim it. Repeat it. Build everything around it. Refuse to dilute it.
The concept you own becomes the filter through which every decision passes. Does this reinforce our concept? Does this expand what our concept can mean? Or does this muddy the water and weaken the association?
It takes years to own a concept. It takes a moment of weakness to give it away.
Stay Curious,
