Brand positioning
Where you sit in a crowded category, who you are genuinely for, and the single claim that makes the choice obvious.
Four to six weeks
Digital card
Marin Okafor
Independent brand strategistI help founders say the true thing about their company clearly enough that everyone else can repeat it. Positioning, identity direction and the words a team actually uses on launch day.
- Practice
- Strategy studio of one
- Working with
- Early-stage teams
- Availability
- Two projects per quarter
Studio hours — weekday mornings
About
Twelve years of listening before writing anything down
I spent most of my career inside brand teams, watching good ideas lose their shape somewhere between the founder's head and the homepage. Now I work alone, on a small number of projects, close enough to the decision-makers that nothing gets diluted.
Most engagements start as a positioning question and end with a team that argues less about wording, because they finally agree on the point.
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Listen first
Conversations with the people who built the thing and the people who bought it, before any framework appears.
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Find the true sentence
One claim your team can defend and your competitors cannot borrow. Everything else hangs off it.
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Hand it over properly
Language, direction and examples written so the next designer or writer can run without me in the room.
Services
Three ways people usually bring me in
Each one is a focused engagement with a clear end point, not an open retainer.
Identity direction
The brief your designers wish they had: tone, texture, references and the boundaries that keep the work coherent.
Three to four weeksLaunch narrative
The story your team tells in the first ninety days — site, deck, announcement and the answers to the hard questions.
Two to three weeks
Selected work
A few engagements worth describing
Names withheld where clients preferred it. Happy to walk through any of these properly on a call.
Positioning
A climate software team that kept explaining the wrong half
Six founder interviews, one afternoon of hard editing, and a category sentence the whole company now uses in its first meeting slide.
Identity direction
A design studio rebuilding its own brand last
A written direction, a reference set and three things they agreed never to do again — handed to their designers, not competing with them.
Launch narrative
A cooperative bakery going from one site to twelve
One story that worked for staff, members and the press, written so each new location could say it in its own voice.
Before you write
The two questions everybody asks first
How does a project usually start?
With a short call, no brief required. If it looks like a fit, I send a one-page outline covering the question we are answering, what you will receive and when it lands. Work begins once that page is agreed — there is no long proposal stage.
What does an engagement look like week to week?
Interviews and reading in the first stretch, a working session with your core team in the middle, then written deliverables with a walkthrough at the end. You will hear from me weekly, and everything I write stays yours to edit.
Contact
Tell me what you are trying to say
A paragraph is plenty. If there is a deadline or a launch date attached, mention it and I will tell you honestly whether it fits.
- studio@marinokafor.example
- Reply time
- Within two working days
- Next opening
- Early next quarter