The entire input is a brand name. What comes back is a six-dimension read of the brand, scored against written rubrics, run through a stack of checks built to disprove it — and honest about what it can't see from the outside.
This is the proof of work. If you're the kind of operator who wants to know how a score got to be a score, or you've seen enough AI-generated "brand audits" to be suspicious on sight — both instincts are right, and this page is built for them.
No questionnaire, no data room, no homework. A brand name — and a URL if you have one — is enough to start.
Everything below is that arrow, slowed down. None of it is "ask a model what it thinks and format the answer." Each stage has a defined input, a defined output, and — the part most AI tools skip — a defined way to be wrong on purpose, so the wrong thing gets caught before it reaches you.
The real pipeline, not an idealized diagram. Research and drafting are the bulk of the work; judgment stays with people, and with gates that exist only because something once slipped past.
Two feeds. The brand's public signals — homepage, packaging, social, reviews, category forums, retailer listings, search presence — read directly, never guessed from a footer. And the Design-Strategy OS: 240+ concepts and methods wired by 5,000+ connections, distilled from 80+ books and case studies and the field's best thinkers (Rumelt, Dunford, Christensen, Neumeier, Wheeler, Sharp, Aaker, Binet & Field), sharpened by 17 years building brands. It's what tells the engine what "good" looks like.
Runs alongside the whole thing. Real brands scored as acceptance tests, a fixed regression brand that must reproduce its result, and gold-question checks on the knowledge base. A change that regresses them doesn't ship.
The brand is scored on Clarity, Consistency, Differentiation, Resonance, Availability, and Credibility. Each dimension is broken into written criteria scored against anchored rubrics — the score is computed from cited evidence first, then explained. Not the other way around.
Before anything reaches a slide it runs a stack of passes built to disprove the read: an assumption audit that flags what public signals can't see and what could already have killed an idea inside the company; a disconfirming search on any fact an insight leans on; a senior-strategist critique; a red-team that makes competing insights fight until one survives; a fact-check against primary sources; a claim-source-scope trace; and a two-way regulatory sweep.
The read becomes a deck. Competitors run through three labeled lenses — the shelf set you're actually chosen against, the size-and-structure peers you resemble (so we benchmark what's achievable, not what a giant does), and a scan of anyone running your same strategic move. Every comparison says which lens it's using. Two closes: a funnel version for the brand, and an eyes-on version — no pitch, just the work — for advisors and referrers.
Brady walks the low-confidence findings one by one — keep, kill, or reshape — and does the final read before anything goes out. The engine does the reading and the arithmetic; the judgment about what's worth saying, and what's too thin to stand behind, is his.
A deck where every number points to the criterion behind it and every fact points to its source. If it can't show its work, it doesn't ship.
The engine reads the outside of a brand well. It's deliberately unwilling to pretend the outside is the whole story. Where it can't settle a question, it says so — and says what would.
A read that can't see internal data and pretends it can is the tell of a slop audit. Naming the limit — and what would resolve it — is the difference between a diagnosis and a horoscope.
This section exists because a numerate founder asked us, plainly: how does evidence become 55? What defines 100%? What are the weights? Fair question — and the honest first answer was that the old number couldn't fully show its work. So we rebuilt it. Here's the version that can.
| Swap / onliness test | 40 · verified |
| Defensible asset vs. adjective | 70 · verified |
| Distinctiveness (recognisable as itself) | 75 · verified |
| Point-of-parity vs. point-of-difference | 45 · inferred |
| Competitive-frame correctness | 55 · verified |
The number comes from the rows. The story is written to explain it — never a story with a number bolted on to look precise. Every point on the radar chart traces back to a table like this one.
A strategic read is a judgment; we mark it as one, with a confidence level. But every external fact — a competitor's rating, a distribution number, a quoted line of copy — lands in a dedicated appendix with its source and date. The deck is the argument; the appendix is the evidence you can click through and check.
This is the single thing that separates the read from a confident-sounding guess. Before a claim reaches a slide it carries a machine-checkable triple — the claim, its source, and its scope — and an adversarial pass runs after the deck is built to catch anything that drifted from its source while being written into a headline. A number that can't name where it came from doesn't ship as a fact; it gets softened to a clearly-marked opinion, or cut.
Scope is the quiet one that matters most: a stat that's true nationally but presented as local, or true in 2024 but presented as current, is the kind of error that survives every check except this one. So it gets its own.
Every gate in the pipeline is a scar. It's there because a specific thing once went wrong — and rather than hope it wouldn't happen again, we built a pass that makes it fail loudly. A few of the real ones:
An early build pulled the top stock image for a keyword sight-unseen and put a bowl of chips on a chocolate brand's cover. Every mechanical check passed — it existed, it rendered, the aspect ratio was right. A machine that never looks at the picture can't know it's wrong. Now a vision pass looks at every image before it ships.
The engine once suggested "harmonizing" a product descriptor for consistency. The variance was legally required — a compound-coating product can't be labelled "chocolate" under Canadian rules. Recommending that to a 17-year operator would have been worse than saying nothing. There's now a two-way regulatory sweep: don't advise a violation, and don't invent a rule that isn't real.
A rigorous-looking matrix compared a founder-led brand to giants that shared its aisle. The retailer stocks both and private-labels neither — so it doesn't treat them as substitutes. A perfect analysis inside a wrong frame is still wrong. That's why competitors now run through three labeled lenses instead of one.
The scoring section above is the receipt for this one. A fair question we couldn't fully answer became the rebuild that means we can.
A tool that admits its wrong customer is worth more to its right one. This is a diagnostic read of a brand from the outside. That makes it powerful for some jobs and wrong for others.
A real system changes when the field tells it to. Most of these came from an operator or a designer catching something, and us fixing the engine — not the deck.
Everything you just read is what stands behind the number. If that's the kind of rigor you want pointed at your brand — or you'd like to see it run on one you already know well — that's the offer.
Get your Brand Size-Up · $499This page describes the live engine. It's a moving system — the version above is where it stands today.
To learn more about Brand Size-Up please check out the System Map and the Inside the Engine