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Phill Keaney-Bolland· Co-founder and Designer, Yaya2 min readWith Adam Yaya-Durrant (Opens in a new tab), Co-founder and Design Director, Yaya
A 2024 episode, recorded before the cybersecurity focus, and the foundation still holds: positioning and audience decide whether an identity lands, and both are settled before anyone opens a design tool. Security founders tend to arrive asking for a logo and leave having rewritten who they are for. Part one of three, and the same sequence we run in the Cult Products Programme.
The opening argument is the one we make in every project. Branding begins with a defined value proposition, and the visual work derives from it. Reversing the order produces something that looks considered and says nothing, which is the most common failure in the category.
The formula we keep returning to is simple enough to write on a napkin. We help X to achieve Y by doing Z, unlike everyone else. If a founder cannot complete that sentence, no amount of design will fix the gap.
The hosts are candid that clients almost always want to see visuals early. It is understandable. A logo is tangible, and strategy is not. The job is to hold the sequence anyway, because a logo approved before the positioning is settled becomes a constraint on the positioning.
Phill Keaney-Bolland
Co-founder and Designer, Yaya
Co-founder and designer at Yaya, and host of the Cult Products podcast. Fifteen years designing products, brands and UX across multiple industries before narrowing to cybersecurity, and lectures on design at Imperial. Works with cybersecurity founders on positioning, strategy and the website that has to carry a launch, across identity, cloud security, AI agents and software supply chain, including Twine out of stealth and Geordie AI, which won the RSA Innovation Sandbox in 2026.
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Detailed personas do more work than demographic summaries. The complication covered here is that the person who buys and the person who uses are frequently not the same, and their needs conflict. In enterprise security this is acute: the practitioner lives in the product, and the CISO signs for it.
The episode is honest that buyer personas usually take precedence in branding, and about what that costs.
The closing thread treats a brand as a living thing rather than a delivered artifact. Markets move, categories norm and form, and a brand set once and never revisited drifts out of alignment with the business it represents.