I Spent Years Inside Branding Projects.
Then I Built the Tool I Wished Existed.

I spent years working on and around brand strategy — inside organisations, alongside consultancies, and as an outside advisor. The pattern I kept seeing was remarkably consistent: a brand would invest significant time and money into defining who they were. Workshops, positioning documents, brand books, tone-of-voice guidelines. All of it thoughtful, often genuinely good work.

And then the document would land, get shared with the marketing team, find its way into a Notion page that nobody updates — and the organisation would go on publishing content in roughly the same way it always had. A year later, the gap between the intended identity and what the market actually perceived was just as wide as before.

The frustrating part wasn't that the strategies were bad. It was that nobody was measuring whether they were working. There was no feedback loop. Brand coherence was either felt, or ignored.

Every organisation has an intended identity — the anchors it wants to be known for. Innovation. Reliability. Human-centred design. Whatever it is. And then it has an expressed identity — what it actually says, consistently, across its website, its press releases, its social presence.

Those two things are often already misaligned. Companies say they're about one thing and then publish content that signals five other things. But then there's a third layer: how the market actually reads that expression. Because language doesn't land the way you intend it to. A word your team thinks signals "innovative" might be read as "risky" or "unstable" by your audience.

IDpulse measures all three layers and the gaps between them. That's what "identity intelligence" means — not just what you say, but what you're heard to be saying, and how that compares to what you meant.

There was a project I was involved in around 2021 where the European Parliament had just received a shiny new brand archetype from a world leading company in market research. Months of work, yet nobody really knew what to do with it. Why? Because as I just mentioned, a brand identity is subjective. Someone would write a piece thinking the archetype was well-anchored in it, but others taking widely different approaches genuinely thought they were compliant too. I was kind of caught in the middle of all this, charged with ensuring proper adoption, but quickly I realised that it was all just a question of perspective. I couldn't look at someone straight in the eye and say "you're wrong about this". Because there was no way to measure objectively.

This experience was really something for me, and I just starting noticing it everywhere: entirely subjective discussions with clients on creative campaigns, subjective feedback on copy,... Everything felt abstract. I started working for a social data intelligence company, and I realised this all comes down to a data problem masquerading as a creative one. If you can quantify the gap, you can close it systematically. I set out to create IDpulse, and here I am 3 years later.

The core idea is that brand identity can be decomposed into what we call identity anchors — structural values, themes, and narrative commitments that a brand is built around. Things like "craftsmanship," "accessibility," "performance leadership," "sustainable futures." Not marketing slogans — structural orientations.

We then scan the brand's full expression corpus: owned website, press, social, AI surfaces, brand newsroom. We extract how strongly each anchor is present in what the brand actually says. We compare that to the target profile. And we compute where the gaps are — which anchors are under-expressed, which ones are over-represented relative to intent, and which are creating internal tensions with each other.

Then we do the same scan from the perception side — how does the market narrate this brand? How do competitors occupy the same semantic space? Where are you getting crowded out or conflated with others?

The output is a Coherence & Resonance Index — a score with a breakdown you can act on, not just a number to put in a board deck.

I understand the concern. Brands are not spreadsheets. The creative and cultural dimensions of brand are real and they matter enormously. But here's the thing: measurement doesn't replace judgment — it informs it.

A doctor uses an ECG to understand what the heart is doing. That doesn't make cardiology mechanical — it means interventions can be precise rather than guessed. IDpulse works the same way. The insight might be "your Resilience anchor is under-expressed in press coverage but very strong in your social presence — there's a channel coherence issue." That tells a creative director something specific they can act on.

Authenticity is actually easier to protect when you have a clear picture of drift. The worst outcome for authenticity is when a brand slowly migrates away from its core values without anyone noticing until it's too late.

Profoundly. Five years ago, brand perception largely lived in press and social. You could monitor it with effort. Now every time someone asks ChatGPT or Perplexity about your category, your brand is being characterised, positioned, and compared by a model trained on signals you didn't control, in ways you often can't see.

That's a new and urgent dimension of the expression/perception gap. AI surfaces don't update the way press does — they bake in a characterisation based on historical training data. If that characterisation is out of date, or wrong, or tilted by what competitors have said about you, you don't get a correction cycle. You get scale.

We monitor how AI assistants represent brands and surface the divergence. It's one of the most consequential blind spots in brand management right now, and almost nobody is tracking it systematically.

Primarily for organisations where brand coherence is a strategic asset — typically mid-to-large companies with established brand positions, CMOs and brand directors who are tired of defending intangibles with gut feel, and consultancies who want to offer a measurement layer to their identity work.

The tool itself is not for startups still figuring out what they stand for — they need positioning work, not just measurement, which is why we also offer pistioning strategy based on competitive intelligence. From thereon, IDpulse as a SaaS is for brands that have invested in their identity and want to protect and operationalise that investment. To know whether their brand is landing as intended, catch drift before it becomes a crisis, and justify identity decisions with data.

We're deepening the Brand Shift Simulator — a smart AI and data-backed assistant that will enable our clients to test a brand shift or new campaign before it starts, to get a better grasp ofhow audiences will react and the risks involved. It's the brain of IDpulse, and the more we feed it with real life data, the better its gets at predicting likely outcomes

We're also expanding the persona intelligence dimension. My three years in social data intelligence taught me the importance of conversation tracking and ecosystem building on social media, and how it can help brands explore entirely new territories. Our persona database is feeding for these ecosystem analyses to tell our clients which identity anchors are best suited to appeal to these new audiences. Knowing that your brand resonates with a certain audience profile is one thing — understanding which of your identity anchors drive that resonance, and which are actually creating friction with the audiences you want to reach, is where the real strategic leverage lives.

And longer term: I want IDpulse to be the instrument that makes "brand coherence" as measurable and manageable as any other strategic KPI. Not a report you commission once a year. A living signal.