Skip to content

Engagement No. 241 — Brand Diagnostic

A paid 60-minute diligence session on the brand you’ve outgrown.

S Design Unit’s Brand Diagnostic is a working session, not a discovery call. For $1,200, you sit with a partner-level strategist who walks you through the first 18 points of our proprietary 47-point Brand Audit, scores your brand across positioning, narrative, visual system, and sales-enablement alignment, and delivers a written readout within 72 hours. The fee is credited in full toward any engagement booked within 90 days.

Book a Brand Diagnostic — $1,200 Preview the 47-Point Audit →

Hosted live on Zoom. Delivered to Series A–D founders, CMOs, and PE portfolio leads. Cohort capacity: 14 diagnostics per quarter.

01 — Fit

This diagnostic is engineered for four specific buyer profiles.

The wrong-fit diagnostic produces a vague readout no one acts on. We pre-qualify aggressively so the session lands on someone who can sign a check inside 90 days.

I.

Series A–C founders who have just closed a round and are about to enter a category-defining sales motion.

You raised on a deck. The next raise — or the next enterprise deal — will be won or lost on whether your brand reads as a category of one or a feature of someone else’s category. You need the brand to compound, not to be rebuilt every 18 months.

Typical ARR: $4M – $40M. Headcount: 25 – 220. Sales team in market or about to be.

II.

CMOs and Heads of Marketing hired in the last 9 months to professionalize a founder-led brand.

You inherited a brand built around a charismatic founder’s taste. The board wants a system. The sales team wants assets that close. You need an audit that maps exactly what to fix, in what order, and what to leave alone.

Typical tenure: < 9 months. Mandate: build the marketing function, not just run campaigns.

III.

PE and growth-equity operating partners running a value-creation plan on a portfolio company.

The brand is a line item on the 100-day plan. You need a third-party, defensible assessment of where the brand sits today and a credible roadmap for the rebrand that will support the exit narrative.

Typical check size: $50M – $400M. Hold period: 3 – 5 years. Exit window in sight.

IV.

Solo agencies, freelancers, and pre-seed founders.

This diagnostic is not for you — and we’d rather tell you now than waste the hour. If you’re under $2M ARR, still validating ICP, or want “a logo and a website,” we aren’t the right studio. We’ll happily refer you to three trusted partners who are.

Looking for a logo refresh, a Squarespace site, or a free pitch deck review? Keep moving.

02 — Scope

The 47-point audit, previewed.

Every diagnostic walks the first 18 points live, then delivers the remaining 29 in your written readout. Below are four of the seven category clusters. The full rubric ships with the readout.

Cluster 01

Positioning & Category

  • 01. Category of one vs. feature-of-X — ownership test
  • 02. ICP specificity, 3-tier buyer mapping
  • 03. Competitive frame & named alternatives
  • 04. Price-anchoring language vs. value-anchoring language
  • 05. Founder narrative & quotable thesis
  • 06. POV on the problem — insight density test
  • 07. Category-creation potential & risk

Weight: 28% of total score

Cluster 02

Narrative & Messaging

  • 08. Tagline clarity & recall test
  • 09. Homepage hero — message hierarchy audit
  • 10. Voice & tone consistency across surfaces
  • 11. Objection-handling copy — F-pattern scan
  • 12. Social proof architecture (logos, quotes, case studies)
  • 13. Founder-written content signal vs. ghostwritten noise

Weight: 21% of total score

Cluster 03

Visual System

  • 14. Logo scalability & lockup integrity
  • 15. Color system — semantic, not decorative
  • 16. Type system — pairing, hierarchy, performance
  • 17. Photography direction & casting logic
  • 18. Iconography & illustration grammar
  • 19. Motion language across web, product, social
  • 20. Spatial system & grid discipline

Weight: 19% of total score

Cluster 04

Sales-Enablement Alignment

  • 21. Deck-to-website message continuity
  • 22. One-pager efficacy (sent without the founder attached)
  • 23. Battlecards & competitor positioning artifacts
  • 24. ROI / case-study architecture for the buyer’s CFO
  • 25. RFP response template alignment
  • 26. Outbound sequence language & reply rates proxy

Weight: 17% of total score

Clusters 05 (Digital Product Surface), 06 (Employer Brand), and 07 (Brand Operating System) make up the remaining 15% and are delivered in the full readout.

03 — Inside the Hour

What happens across the 60 minutes.

A predictable structure. No surprises, no ambush discovery questions, no “let me check with my team and get back to you.”

  1. Chapter I

    The 20-minute pre-read.

    Forty-eight hours before the call, you receive a 4-question pre-read. Most clients spend 25 minutes on it. We read every word. This is how we avoid wasting the live hour on context the deck already covers.

    Questions cover: the deal you’re trying to win in the next two quarters, the competitor you most want to displace, the brand decision you keep deferring, and the metric the board pressures you on.

  2. Chapter II

    The 25-minute live audit walkthrough.

    Your strategist shares screen, walks the first 18 audit points against your live surfaces — site, deck, one-pager, LinkedIn. You see exactly where you score and why. Senior copywriter joins for the narrative cluster; questions are answered as they come up.

    No pitch deck from us. No “here’s what we could do.” The audit is the audit.

  3. Chapter III

    The 10-minute scoring & gap callout.

    We close the live session by ranking the three highest-leverage gaps and the three we explicitly recommend you do not touch. The latter is as important as the former — it prevents a six-month rebuild when a six-week polish would have shipped.

  4. Chapter IV

    The 72-hour written readout.

    Within three business days you receive a 14-to-22-page PDF: full 47-point scorecard, cluster weights, gap prioritization, comparable benchmark against your funding-cohort peers, and an honest read on whether a full engagement is justified. If it isn’t, we say so.

    The readout is yours regardless of whether you book a project. About 11% of diagnostics end with our recommendation to do nothing for 6–12 months.

04 — Objections, Answered Plainly

What founders and CMOs ask before they book.

Why is this paid when most agencies offer a free pitch?
Because the diagnostic produces a real artifact you keep — the 47-point scorecard and written readout — regardless of whether you ever book a project. Free pitches are designed to sell you; the diagnostic is designed to tell you the truth, including when the truth is “don’t rebrand yet.” The fee filters for buyers who intend to act on the readout, which is why 89% of diagnostics convert to a scoped engagement within 90 days.
How does the credit-toward-project mechanic actually work?
If you book a full engagement (typical entry: a 6-week Brand Foundation sprint, $48K) within 90 days of the diagnostic, the $1,200 is credited dollar-for-dollar on your first invoice. The diagnostic fee is not a deposit; it is paid work that becomes a credit. If you book outside the 90-day window, the fee is non-recoverable, but the readout still belongs to you.
Who exactly attends the 60 minutes on your side?
A partner-level brand strategist (one of the firm’s 6 partners) and, for narrative-heavy audits, a senior conversion copywriter. Two people, never more. We do not run the diagnostic with account managers, junior strategists, or business development reps. The Brooklyn HQ also staffs a Lisbon or Singapore partner for APAC and EMEA clients; you will know who you’re meeting in the calendar invite.
Is the diagnostic confidential? Will you use my brand as a case study?
Yes, strictly confidential. We sign a mutual NDA on request before the pre-read is exchanged. We never publish case studies without explicit written permission, and roughly 38% of our 240+ engagements are confidential by client request. The only data we aggregate publicly is anonymized cohort data (e.g. the 2.3x pipeline velocity figure across 87 engagements).
What is the refund policy?
Full refund if you cancel or rebook more than 14 days out. 50% refund inside 14 days. No refund inside 72 hours of the session unless we cancel, in which case you choose between a full refund or priority rebooking. The fee is also refunded in full if your strategist is unable to complete the live audit for any reason on our side.
What happens after the readout? Am I being walked into a sales process?
No. The readout is the readout. If a full engagement is the right next step, we send a one-page scope outline within 7 days and let you decide. If the right answer is “fix your deck and come back in Q3,” we say so plainly. About 11% of diagnostics end with an explicit “do nothing yet” recommendation; we have walked away from seven-figure engagements on that basis and lived to tell the tale.
Is there a guarantee on outcomes?
On the diagnostic itself: yes — if you don’t find the readout valuable, we refund the fee in full inside 30 days of delivery, no questions asked. On project outcomes post-engagement: we cite cohort averages only (e.g. 2.3x pipeline velocity lift across 87 measured engagements, 2022–2024) and never promise specific revenue figures for individual clients.
Can I bring my CMO / head of marketing / co-founder to the session?
Up to three attendees from your side. We’ve found that more than three dilutes the working session into a status meeting. If your whole exec team wants to attend, we recommend booking a separate 30-minute readout walkthrough post-delivery, which we provide at no additional cost.

05 — Book the Session

$1,200. Sixty minutes. A readout that survives the next raise.

Cohort capacity is 14 diagnostics per quarter. In 2024, the average booking window closed 23 days from first inquiry to first session. If your next enterprise sales motion or your next board meeting is inside two quarters, the diagnostic is the cheapest hour you will spend this year.

$1,200

Fee, credited in full toward project ≤ 90 days

47

Audit points, weighted across 7 clusters

2.3×

Avg. pipeline velocity lift, 87 engagements, 2022–24

89%

Of diagnostics convert to a scoped engagement

Book a Brand Diagnostic Read the Brand-to-ARR Framework →

Or write directly: [email protected] · +1 (646) 555-0182 · 68 Jay Street, Suite 415, Brooklyn NY 11201