Six branding words that are used to avoid a decision

Most complaints about branding jargon are complaints that the words are pretentious. That is not the problem. The problem is more specific and more interesting: each of these words has a real, useful, decidable meaning, and each is routinely used in a way that lets somebody avoid making the decision the word names.

That is a different failure from being pretentious. A pretentious word is annoying. A word being used to avoid a decision is load-bearing — it is doing work for the person saying it, and the work it is doing is helping them not commit to anything.

We publish a glossary with a paragraph definition of each of these. This post is the other half: not what the word means, but what people are usually doing with it when they do not mean that.

1. Brand strategy

The decidable version: who this is for, what it claims, why that claim is credible, and how it differs from the alternatives. Four answers. The full definition is here.

The version that avoids a decision: "our brand strategy is to be the most trusted name in X." That is not a strategy. There is no audience in it, no claim that could be false, no alternative it beats. Every competitor in the category could put their name in it unchanged, which is the test.

What it is avoiding: naming who you are not for. A strategy that excludes nobody has not been made yet. The moment you write "for solo founders, not agencies", you have lost the agencies and gained the ability to say something specific. Most brand strategy documents are long precisely because they never do that.

2. Brand positioning

The decidable version: the choice of what you stand for, for whom, and against which alternatives, stated clearly enough that the choice excludes things. Definition.

The version that avoids a decision: "premium but accessible." "Enterprise-grade, built for everyone." These are not positions, they are the refusal of one, and the giveaway is always a conjunction that undoes the first half.

What it is avoiding: the loss. Every real position costs you a segment. "Premium but accessible" is what you write when you want the margin of premium and the volume of accessible and have not decided which one you are actually building.

The practical test is one sentence: name the customer you are happy to lose. If you cannot, you do not have a position, you have a preference.

3. Brand voice

The decidable version: the consistent way you sound — vocabulary, sentence rhythm, formality, humour, and the things you refuse to say. Definition.

The version that avoids a decision: "friendly, professional and approachable." We have seen this exact triple in more brand guides than any other phrase. It describes roughly ninety per cent of all commercial writing in English, which means it constrains nothing.

What it is avoiding: the refusal list. A voice is defined by what it will not say far more than by what it will. "We do not use exclamation marks", "we never call the user a rockstar", "we do not open with a question" — those are decisions a writer can follow and be wrong about. "Friendly" is not.

This is why our brand voice examples print a "does not say" column next to every "says" column, and why a card cannot be published without one. A voice card with only the positive half is a mood board.

4. Brand archetype

The decidable version: a stock character borrowed from narrative theory — the Sage, the Rebel, the Carer — used as shorthand for how a brand should behave when it has to choose. Definition.

The version that avoids a decision: the archetype as the output. A workshop ends, everyone agrees the brand is a Sage, the slide goes in the deck, and nothing downstream changes. The archetype was supposed to be an input to a hundred small decisions and instead became a conclusion.

What it is avoiding: the hundred small decisions. An archetype earns its place only when you can say what it forbids. If "we are the Sage" does not tell you whether to write a joke into the error message, it has not been applied to anything.

We are wary of this one in our own product. The engine assigns an archetype and we noticed, when we looked across twenty generated kits, that the archetype line resolved to only a handful of distinct sentences across all of them. So we stopped rendering it on those pages. A field that says nearly the same thing for every business is not information, whatever its label claims.

5. Brand guidelines

The decidable version: documented rules governing how the brand may be expressed — logo clear space, exact colour values in every space they will be used, the type scale, and what happens at the edges. Definition.

The version that avoids a decision: a beautiful PDF that shows the logo on six coloured backgrounds and never says which one to use when. It documents that decisions were made without recording what they were.

What it is avoiding: the edge cases, which is the only part anyone ever actually needs. Nobody opens the brand guide to find out the primary colour. They open it because the logo has to go on a photograph and they do not know what to do. A guide that answers the first question and not the second has documented the easy half.

The test: pick the most awkward thing your brand has to appear on. If the guide does not answer it, the guide is a portfolio piece.

6. Brand consistency

The decidable version: the degree to which everything you produce reads as coming from the same source. Definition.

The version that avoids a decision: consistency as a synonym for "using the logo file". Colour and mark stay fixed, and the writing wanders across formality, sentence length and who it is addressing, post by post, until the archive has no single author.

What it is avoiding: the fact that voice drifts faster than visuals, and is harder to notice. Nobody ships the wrong hex. Everybody ships a post that sounds like somebody else, because each individual post seemed fine at the time. That accumulation has a name — brand drift — and the reason it is hard to catch is that no single piece is the culprit.

We wrote about the mechanism separately in how to catch brand drift. The short version: you cannot see it in one piece, so it has to be checked across a body of work, and almost nobody does that on purpose.

The pattern

Look at the six failures next to each other:

| Word | The decision being avoided |
| --- | --- |
| Strategy | Who you are not for |
| Positioning | The customer you accept losing |
| Voice | What you refuse to say |
| Archetype | What the archetype forbids |
| Guidelines | The awkward edge case |
| Consistency | That voice drifts faster than colour |

Every one is a refusal. That is the pattern, and it is why the vague versions are so durable: the specific version of each of these words costs something, and the vague version is free.

It is also why our own brand persona is a long structured description rather than a short summary, and why we would rather a field be visibly thin than quietly generic. A brief that has not refused anything will produce work that could belong to anyone, and that is true whether the work is produced by a person or by a model. The model just does it faster.

If you want the terms themselves rather than the argument about them, the glossary has all twenty, each defined in a paragraph you could quote without the page around it. If you want to see the refusal half applied to actual writing, the voice examples are the place, and every card there carries what it will not say.

And if you want the same argument applied to the format where vague words do the most commercial damage, how to read a comparison page, including ours works through what a comparison table hides, ending with what ours hides.

The practical counterpart is writing in a voice that is not yours, which is about executing a decided voice rather than deciding one — and which is where the refusal list turns out to do nearly all of the work.

Three of those six words have since had a piece of their own, because a definition with nothing arguing for it is a page nobody cites: content pillars are not content categories, the style guide nobody opens, and the point where a brand becomes a system.