Brand Consultancies Editing and Proofreading Services

Brand consultancy delivers a document and charges for a decision. The client is paying to be told what the organisation stands for, in a form that resolves arguments rather than continuing them — and the deliverable that arrives is frequently a positioning statement composed of words nobody would dispute, arranged in a diagram, presented beautifully. It gets approved because there is nothing in it to disagree with, and six months later the same argument about what to say is happening in a different meeting.

We edit what brand consultancies and strategists produce — positioning statements and brand strategy documents, brand architecture and portfolio documentation, purpose, vision and values articulations, brand and messaging frameworks, tone of voice guidelines and writing guidance, naming rationale and nomenclature documentation, brand guidelines and usage documents, research findings and stakeholder interview synthesis, competitive audit and category convention analysis, rebrand rationale and internal launch material, brand measurement frameworks, proposals and credentials, and workshop material and facilitation documents. Our editors work on whether the document decides anything.

The positioning statement is the deliverable everything else derives from, and its test is simple: does it exclude something. A statement claiming the brand is innovative, customer-focused, trusted and forward-thinking has excluded nothing, which is why it survives every review and changes no decision. We write these so the statement makes a choice a competitor could credibly make differently, so it names what the brand is not and will not do, and so it is expressed in language the organisation actually uses rather than in the elevated register these documents attract. We then test it against the decisions it exists to resolve — whether to take this client, sponsor this event, price above or below the category, hire this person, say yes to this partnership — because a positioning that cannot settle any of those is a description rather than a strategy. And we make the guidelines show the choice in use, with examples of copy that is on-brand and copy that is plausible and wrong, since a team can pattern-match from examples and cannot apply an adjective.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including unannounced rebrands, research and client material. We are editors rather than brand strategists, and we offer no view on positioning, naming, architecture or any strategic recommendation. What we can do is make the document say something specific enough to be acted on.