The Exodus 25 origin story

What happens when a brand expert rebrands.

I just rebranded

TL;DR the consultancy business I co-founded in 2011, Sufu, just officially renamed and rebranded to Exodus 25. Why did I bother with all that faff after 13 years?

A quick rewind to set the scene. In 2020 I pivoted Sufu’s services away from marketing and towards branding. I updated the visual identity at that point, but kept the name.

I’d become deeply frustrated, by the late 2010s, with the banality of digital marketing and my career in it. I felt that volume had overtaken quality, quantitative assessment had replaced qualitative, and no one was really interested in inspiring anyone anymore. Just bludgeoning them into purchase submission.

I could sense this no longer working on me and I was sick to death of making marketing assets I thought were at best boring, at worst disingenuous. I could see generative AI would only make this worse, not better, completing the democratisation of creative technology until anyone could produce vast reams of blandly-professional mush.

My problem was that I spent a long time coming up with my own intellectual answers as to why and how a renewed focus on brand strategy and creative development solved this. Good answers, original answers, perhaps.

But answers to questions others hadn’t even started asking themselves yet. The situation wasn’t yet broken enough for many to want fixing, via the medium of this word, brand.

Branding is just still a matter of visual identity to many people. It put me in a box that most people only want to take off the shelf and look inside every few years. And that wasn’t what I intended. I found a few kindred spirits to work with. Just not enough, often enough. And the drain of individuals from agencyland to freelance was only growing. Brand strategy was starting to feel a cluttered area. And I dislike crowds.

Consultancy vs Agency

A compounding issue was the battle between these two words. I was told at one stage:

“You’re thinking like a consultancy, but charging like an agency”

There was truth in this, which I fixed in terms of pricing, but with hindsight I’m not sure I needed to consider it a binary choice in terms of offer. I’m capable of being both, I like being both. I’m just not sure others could perceive that, when I had a “brand strategist” label stuck to my chest. I need to break out of it and just be a little more me.

The twin spectres of “offer” and “hustle”

The idea of a perfectly-packaged offer is a difficult subject for creatives, strategists and intellectuals. We’re not fast food, why wouldn’t you want to chat and explore what we can do for you? I’ve beaten myself up for being offerphobic, but I’ve also cleaved to those who think it only applies to tactical and implementation work, in relation to services.

I do feel strongly, on this issue, I must follow my gut. Just because others are putting a pretty bow on their services and serving them up as a 16-week, neatly-dissected, cohort-based program doesn’t mean I have to. I don’t like learning that way, I don’t want to deliver my value that way. I am at heart a do-er, a practitioner. I want to output stuff, not vibes.

My other fear is a nagging doubt about “doing what it takes”. These days that seems to mean relentless self-promotion, relentless personal brand focus. “Building in public”. Problem is, I find all that stuff mind-numbingly boring. Look at me, I’m over here today, now I’m there, hustling away, here’s another selfie…. fuck all of that.

I’m an ideas guy. I need time to think. I don’t like noise and crowds. I don’t want to be on the train to London every day, chatting small talk at endless events. I want to be at home, in the countryside, reading, filtering, having ideas, chatting via Zoom, with the people who need me.

Is this folly, a dealbreaker, a barrier that will forever keep my pipeline of work impoverished? Might all the repositioning in the world not make any difference if I maintain this stance? That’s the question the devil on my shoulder asks of me.

New commandments

What underpins my work remains the same. A belief that we have lost the ability to frame our value, signal our empathy and ultimately persuade each other positively, by being:

Psychologically powerful, emotionally intelligent, and culturally resonant.

In our societies, these behaviours are not new. They have underpinned every ideology we have ever created: Religious, secular, national, digital, or economic.

In business, the roots of that are still within brand. But the application of these things can happen at any time, with every new ad campaign, piece of content published, or sales conversation we have. Some of my commandments to myself are:

Make empathy your guiding principle
Know that behaviour is the truest signal of intent
Put others’ acceptance of your value ahead of your own intent
Observe that want is more powerful than need
Respect the cognition of others’, in a world of overwhelming information
Prize salient impact over efficient volume

There I go, intellectualising again, stop it! Worse, this is now becoming theologising. It’s OK, I know I need resist putting these commandments out front of my new brand. Blank faces will ensure. But I do want that hint in there, that persuading someone to buy from you isn’t so very different from converting someone to a religion, or a political movement. It’s all the same foundational stuff.

The key will be to try and trickle these principles down into a sense that I need people to grasp. That my expertise in persuasion, across media, is of everyday use. And that’s why Sufu has become Exodus 25.

The new elevator pitch for Exodus 25

The problem I really want to fix is getting people to see me as “everyday useful”. Doesn’t mean I have to be a cheap commodity, but does mean I need to be more swiss army knife, less ceremonial sword. Here is my opening gambit:

A few humans will never believe in you, or value you.
A few will love you automatically, without hesitation.

Everyone else can be persuaded either way.

It’s not about forcing a change in what they believe they need.
It’s about nudging them to see why they want to.

Receive from those whose heart prompts them to give
Exodus 25

That last line (from Exodus 25:2), is the primary reason why the business is using that name, the central theme is getting people in the B2B world to embrace a change from addressing need and pain via logical lecturing. Most of Exodus 25, the specification of the Ark of the Covenant, reads like a brand brief. Because that’s exactly what it is. A landmark description of persuasion via representation.

Will it work?

We’ll see. No rebrand completely changes fortunes in and of itself, it’s just a foundation for new behaviours. But if it can help my ideas be given more attention then the rest is up to me. I’ve come to the conclusion that Sufu’s intellectual strategy-based offering doesn’t represent the energy of my work. Want is more powerful than need, so I hope this rebrand will make that more connective.

Clearer, more specific services, all delivered with quality and speed, with the aim of making people stand out as persuasive in a very unpersuasive world. It’s what I want to get out of bed to do, each day.

I shall begin, and keep you informed. Here’s the new Exodus 25 website if you’d like to take a look.

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