I'm Brandon Sturgis, a Fractional Brand Director. I find the gap between what your company claims to be and what customers actually experience. Then I close it from the inside, at the roots.
The fix is NOT more.
Most companies think they have a marketing, sales, or growth problem.
So they keep fixing the symptoms:
More marketing.
More sales outreach.
More meetings.
More content.
More more more!
But every quarter, another version of the same problem shows up.
Because the real issue is beneath the surface.
That's the work...at the roots.
Everything else, marketing, sales, HR, ops, etc., is just a branch.
Roots grow branches. Branches don't grow roots.
Brand problems don't look like brand problems.
Masquerading as marketing, advertising, sales, and even HR and operational problems, brand problems are sometimes difficult to spot.
You're amplifying a confused message to a broader audience. More content = more static noise.
Marketing is louder, but not clearer.
Brand is a company-wide practice, not a marketing deliverable.
That expensive agency deliverable is collecting dust in Marketing's Google Drive.
Without clear guidance and governance, everyone fills in the blanks differently. Brand drift becomes inevitable.
Departments and agencies interpret the brand differently.
You're trying not to offend anyone internally, so you end up meaning nothing externally.
Positioning sounds safe, generic, or committee-approved.
Your intended brand isn't matching real experience. This gap is where trust, preference, and growth are lost.
Customers don't describe you the way leadership does.
You're spending more to overcome internal confusion, unclear differentiation, and weak brand signals. That's a tax on every growth initiative.
Growth feels expensive, inefficient, and harder than it should.
BRANDS ROT FROM THE INSIDE
How I Work
1
Discovery Call
We sit down (virtually or in-person) to dig into the real problem in your business.
2
BRAND ASSESSMENT
I conduct a thorough audit of your brand ecosystem: visual identity, posistioning, messaging, personality, internal alignment, and competitive landscape.
3
STRATEGIC ROADMAP
You receive a clear, actionable roadmap with priorities, timelines, and the brand decisions that need to happen NOW versus later.
4
EMBEDDED LEADERSHIP
I step in as your Fractional Brand Director, working alongside your teams to execute the strategy, make the calls, and ensure the foundation doesn't crumble.
Find the gap.
Bring the brand to life.
Make it stick.
1
Brand Friction Diagnostic™
Identify the disconnects between leadership vision, customer perception, messaging, and organizational behavior; the source of the friction before anything else. The Diagnostic is the entry point and the first thing we do together
2
Brand Essence & Expression
Define who the company is at its core, then bring it to life with character. Positioning, differentiation, identity, and personality - all built from the company's truth.
3
Brand Systemization & Activation
Turn truth into systems your organization can actually run without you in the room. And put them into motion. Enabling your entire company to move as one brand instead of individual departments guessing.
4
Brand Governance
Protect what's built. Ongoing oversight, stewardship, and guardrails that keep the brand consistent as the company scales, and confusion from creeping in.
My methodology combines brand truth, expression, systems, and governance, so the brand scales with the company instead of drifting away from it.
Businesses need brand leadership. Agencies need sharper strategic firepower.
Companies develop a gap between what they claim to be and what customers actually experience. It's a clarity problem, rooted in organizational behavior, leadership courage, and whether anyone in the building has the authority to hold the line.
My work closes that gap, from the inside.
For founder-led and growth-stage companies, PE-backed organizations, and agency teams that need brand leadership, alignment, and oversight.
Businesses
Internal Leadership
I step in when growth creates brand drift across sales, marketing, leadership, and customer experience. Usually around the time the founder can't be in every room anymore, and nobody else has picked up the brand to carry it forward.
Founder-led companies
Growth-stage teams
Investor-Backed Businesses
Unsexy, overlooked, hard-to-differentiate categories
Retail, Product, Service, and B2B Brands
Agencies
Brand Integrity Check
Agencies bring me in BEFORE the big work starts, to make sure the brand underneath it can hold. AFTER delivery, I make sure it doesn't get shelved. And if an agency's taken on more than they bargained for, I make sure the work still lands.
High-stakes engagement backup
Brand implementation support
Creative direction backup
Positioning and narrative systems
Character and voice definition
Brand clarity moves the numbers.
Strong brands make decisions faster, sell with less friction, and waste less money explaining themselves. Strong brand leadership improves decision-making and strengthens the systems that hold the organization together.
$2.5 M
big-box purchase orders influenced by retail brand presense
97%
retention connected to scalable brand infrastructure
8
national retailers reached through brand scaling
+15 yrs
brand, creative, and marketing systems leadership
Decisions get made faster, because everyone's working from the same brand.
The brand shows up the same way everywhere. From the sales floor to the shelf.
What gets built compounds. It doesn't reset with every new campaign or hire.
Four ways to engage
Every engagement begins by evaluating brand clarity, organizational alignment, and governance gaps before recommending a level of support. So the question is: What's the real problem?
Brand Friction Diagnostic™
AA focused 2-week engagement to find the real source of brand friction. I'll assess messaging, positioning, product, organizational behavior, and anything else that surfaces along the way.
Think of it as an executive checkup before any other work begins. After it, you'll know:
-
What to stop doing.
-
What to fix first.
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What to protect.
Before strategy, scope, or any retainer, The Brand Friction Diagnostic™ finds the real source of the problem, so the solution is built on diagnosis, not assumption.
Brand Oversight Subscription
Advisory
Best for companies with a solid foundation that need senior brand judgment on retainer, without a full-time hire or embedded seat.
Embedded Brand Director
Structured / Ramping up
Best for founder-led or growth-stage companies that need a real brand leader inside the operating rhythm. Serious gaps to close, but not under the gun.
Interim head of brand
Sprint / High-Tempo
Best for investor-backed, post-acquisition, or transformation environments where brand is tied directly to enterprise value, and speed is non-negotiable.