Brand strategy that gives you one clear message.

Before it, by about three weeks. Design work briefed against an unsettled position produces rounds that are really arguments about what the company is, held in the most expensive room to hold them in. Where a position already exists in writing and the team agrees on it, the two can overlap and often should. We ask to read that document before agreeing to overlap them, because knowing what you stand for and having written it down are different states. Where the two run as one engagement, the sequence is set out on branding.

Usually not a separate one, but it does need localising, and that is a piece of work rather than an edit. The group's claim was written for a market it was won in; here it meets a buyer who can read your licence, a committee that decides on credibility, and a proof set that is still mostly somewhere else. What changes is the evidence and the emphasis, so the group stays recognisably one company. We start from the group's document and mark exactly which lines this entity can stand behind.

No, and it is the quickest way to lose a shortlist you were winning. The activities on the licence are what the entity is permitted to sell, a mainland buyer can read them, and a claim past that edge is contradicted by a document they already hold. Where the ambition is genuinely wider, the answer is structural rather than verbal: a mainland branch, a distributor, or a permit route, decided before the claim is written. That is why we ask for the activity list on the first call.

Separate, and accepting that early costs less than discovering it late. The promise usually travels; the proof does not, because a Saudi buyer wants Saudi references and local-content expectations sit differently there. A claim written to be true in both markets tends to end up broad enough to be safe in each and persuasive in neither. We write the UAE position so it stands on its own, and scope the second market as its own work when you are actually entering it.

A written position, the claims underneath it with the evidence for each, the rule for which licensed name carries which claim, the messaging pillars and voice, and a brief the next piece of work is built from. It arrives as files your team edits rather than a presentation we deliver and take away. Where naming is in scope you also receive the name dossier, including the Arabic rendering and what it clears; the registry detail behind that sits on our Dubai branding page. The strategist who wrote it is named on it.

No, and it will never be less work than it is now. At five people the position is a decision; at fifty it is a renegotiation with everyone who has spent two years describing the company their own way. The scope is smaller at this size: the claim, the evidence under it, and the words the founders and the first salesperson use. What we would not run yet is a full architecture exercise, because there is one entity and one thing to sell.

Five weeks, and about six hours of your time. Two weeks read the licence, the market and the buyers, two weeks choose and pressure-test the position, and the fifth turns it into the brief. From you we need the trade licence with its activity list, an introduction to two or three clients who have bought, and one person who can decide rather than collect opinions. That last one sets the pace more than anything we do.