Building Brands Before Categories Have Language
Why the first job of brand strategy is making the unfamiliar legible
Most brands are built after audiences already know what they’re looking at. Categories and expectations are baked in. Shared language and signs are second-nature.
But some brands pre-date category.
Categories emerge when a product is real, but the market lacks the language to understand it. In those moments, brand strategy is more than naming, identity, or design—it’s the work of making the unfamiliar understandable before it becomes obvious.
I’m particularly interested in emerging and complex categories, where the first job isn’t to decorate an answer, but to create the conditions for people to understand, trust, and repeat it.
The category often exists before the language does
A category does not become real simply because a product exists. It becomes real when people can explain it to each other.
reUntil language stabilizes, markets remain unstable. People are interested but cautious, investors see opportunity without clarity, and institutions recognize change before they can classify it. This is especially true in categories shaped by new behavior, regulation, technology, or cultural permission.
Cannabis is a useful example because the product wasn’t new—its legitimacy was. As it moved from a subcultural association to a regulated market, the branding challenge was not to make it look trendy, but to create a language of care, access, professionalism, and trust.
When I named, positioned, and launched Curaleaf in 2013, the work was not simply to create a logo or visual identity. The deeper question was categorical: what should this market borrow from, and what should it refuse? Obvious cannabis codes were available, but they carried too much baggage for a regulated medical context. Healthcare, pharmaceuticals, and patient access were more useful reference points. The brand needed credibility before the category had a shared language.
The bet was that legitimacy, not subculture, was the actual competitive advantage. Curaleaf won its license with the highest marketing score among sixteen applicants, and the identity later became the master brand for what would become the country’s largest cannabis operators by public-market value, retail footprint, and geographic reach.
This is often the real work of emerging categories: not inventing from scratch, but identifying the adjacent worlds that can help make the unfamiliar understandable.
Do not only look inside the category
One mistake companies make in early category work is looking too directly at their own field. They study immediate competitors, repeat the same tropes, and end up reinforcing the confusion they need to solve. The better move is often lateral.
A familiar example is streaming. The category became legible not by looking only at television, but by borrowing from the familiar culture of film and the language of libraries. Netflix didn’t just introduce a new technology—it helped people understand a new behavior through familiar cultural forms.
Generative AI is another example. The tools arrived before the public had settled on what authorship, originality, labor, creativity, and trust would mean in that environment. The category’s shared language is still being built in public. Even the word “prompt” has moved from technical instruction into cultural behavior, carrying questions about who directs the work, who authors it, and who can claim the result.
When I wrote a graduate course at SCAD in fall 2021 that focused primarily on AI and design — before generative AI had a mainstream public language of its own — the question I gave students was not what the tools could do. It was what happens to the designer’s role when the tool can generate.
A strong brand in that environment cannot only say, “Here is what the tool does.” It has to help people understand their role in relation to the tool. Are they using, authoring, directing, editing, operating, or collaborating? The answer changes how the product is understood.
Old categories can face new language problems
Not every category-language problem belongs to a new market. Sometimes an old institution reaches a moment that requires new interpretation.
Fenway Park’s 100th anniversary was that kind of challenge. Baseball was not new. Fenway was not new. The power of the project came from the opposite condition: it was the first American professional sports venue to reach 100 years.
The question was not how to make the brand feel modern in the usual sense. It was how to make history active. A centennial identity has to hold memory and civic pride without becoming sentimental or decorative. It needs to give people language for why the moment matters.
Sometimes the thing is new and needs legitimacy. Sometimes the thing is old and needs renewed meaning. In both cases, the problem is not only visual. It is interpretive.
Five jobs before design
Before a brand system can work in an emerging or complex category, several strategic jobs need to happen first.
1. Name the behavior
What are people actually doing that they weren’t doing before? A category often becomes clearer when the behavior is named before the product is described.
2. Reduce the perceived risk
Emerging categories carry uncertainty. The brand must understand the fear sitting underneath the opportunity. Design cannot resolve those anxieties unless strategy identifies them first.
3. Choose which codes to borrow and which to reject
Every category inherits signals from somewhere. The question is whether those signals help or hurt. A medical cannabis brand may need healthcare more than counterculture. A streaming platform may need cinema more than software. A sports network may need live ritual more than static media branding.
Borrowing is not imitation. It is translation.
4. Make the unfamiliar repeatable
A good category idea must be repeatable. If only the founder can explain it, the brand’s not ready. If the sales team explains it one way, the product team another, and the public a third, the category has not stabilized.
Language matters because repetition matters. The right phrase can become a handle people use to carry the idea forward.
5. Build a system that scales
Early brand decisions should not only solve launch. They should anticipate growth.
A strong system can stretch across products, audiences, geographies, and campaigns without losing its center. It should be recognizable enough to carry meaning and flexible enough to survive the category’s evolution.
This is where design becomes more than expression. It becomes infrastructure.
The work before the work
The visible parts of a brand are the easiest to discuss: the name, the logo, the typography, the palette, the campaign. But in emerging categories, the most important work happens before those decisions become visible.
It is the work of deciding what world the brand belongs to, which language to borrow, which fear to reduce, and which old associations to leave behind.
A logo can identify a company. A campaign can create attention. But language, trust, and legitimacy are what allow a category to form.
The product may exist. The opportunity may be real. But until the market knows how to talk about it, the brand’s job is not finished.
Michael Mikulec is a brand strategist, creative director, and writer whose work focuses on identity systems for emerging and complex categories. He named and helped launch Curaleaf, and his work has included brand and design systems for NBC, ESPN, Fenway Park’s centennial, and other sports, media, and cultural organizations. He served as Chair of Graphic Design at SCAD and writes American Alchemy, an essay series on memory, design, and American identity. More at michaelmikulec.com.