on fishbowls & brand strategy
Remember those old fishbowls where everything looked warped when you viewed it through curved glass, or the way a bubble window bends the world when you approach it from the wrong angle?
Branding was like that for us.
Natalie and I decided to start Lazuli House last year, and as a full-service marketing and PR agency, we highly contemplated doing our own visual branding. Throughout our combined twenty years in the field, we’ve had our content on billboards, flyers, TV, in magazines, events–anywhere designs go. Our clients love what we come up with.
But when we started looking at it for ourselves, it got a lot harder. Founders will relate to that moment when the work becomes personal. How is it so easy to produce clear, effective work for clients, while feeling strangely stuck when it is time to package our own expertise?
That’s the fishbowl. For LAHO, we reached a point where trying to puzzle out the visual branding decisions was keeping us from doing the actual work. We needed fresh eyes to execute our vision.
It was the best decision we’ve made. The direction we landed on embodied the bold, punchy look we wanted, and it also gave us a usable system for visibility, content, and day-to-day decisions.
What external help did for us:
It removed pressure when we as founders already had a full plate, which gave us bandwidth to focus on operations, client delivery, and growth.
It reduced decision fatigue because we had clear rules for visuals. That, paired with our written branding, guided all posts, pages, and pitches.
It made content faster to produce because templates and a defined style reduced the need to redesign from scratch each time.
It made our visibility cohesive because the message and the visuals moved together across platforms in a way people recognize quickly.
It upped our professionalism immediately because the materials matched the caliber of the work behind them.
We still owned the strategy underneath the visuals.
Visual branding was so successful because we built it on the same strategy that led to our written positioning and messaging. We started where we always start for clients: clarifying why the business exists, who it serves, and what it needs to be known for.
Reason: why we started the business, what need we fill, and what we believe the market deserves.
Audience: who we serve best, what they care about, and what they need to understand quickly in order to trust the work.
Feeling: how we want people to feel after encountering us, including the emotional tone that fits the outcomes we deliver.
Perception: what we want to be known for, including the specific qualities we want associated with our work and our standards.
Offer: what we actually do, in plain language, with clear outcomes and boundaries.
Voice: how we sound when we write, including the rhythm, vocabulary, and level of directness that fits our audience.
After that, knowing what we wanted for visual direction was easy. Creating our website was a major part of the refinement process. Another was our continued client work. Every client we take refines the edges even more, because real work reveals what you do best and what you want to specialize in, especially when you pay attention to what generates results and what you want to be hired for.
The takeaways: Being too close to your own business makes it harder to build a visibility strategy, and having a strong strategy in place makes everything that follows easier to execute.
Marketing, branding, and public relations are unique fields because most founders already understand the core of who they are and what they want to offer. What they benefit from is an outside perspective that brings structure and experienced guidance to that vision. Letting someone outside the fishbowl take on that work takes a weight off and lays a foundation for growth and success.
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LAHO is a marketing and communications agency helping founders, businesses, and creators grow relevance and revenue. Think PR with punch, marketing with mood, and the strategy a vision board would hire. We execute cohesive strategies across earned, owned, and paid media to build influence with intention through senior-led storytelling and smart distribution. Need strategy, content, PR, or ads? Reach out here.
