Building a brand isn’t just about your logo, name, or colors. Even small businesses and solo entrepreneurs need a well-conceived brand if they want to grow and stand out from the competition. So, where should you start? We asked Tomáš Petrek, brand consultant and director of GoBIGNAME, who believes every business should invest at least 10–20% of its budget in its brand from the very beginning.
In this interview, Tomáš explains when it makes sense to build a brand around your own name, how to find your tribe, and what role AI should and shouldn’t play in marketing.
Do small businesses and solo entrepreneurs, such as bakers and handymen, really need their own brand?
The thing is, these days we all have a brand if we’re in business. We just don’t always realize it because we’re too busy with day-to-day tasks to think about it. So the question isn’t whether you should have a brand or not. The real question is what happens when you start managing it consciously and intentionally. Can it actually improve your business results?
Based on what we see in practice and what the research shows, the answer is yes. That’s why it pays to think about your brand and learn the basics of how branding works. A brand isn’t just there to make you visible. Its job is to make customers remember you when they’re ready to buy a product or service. That’s the main reason companies invest in marketing: to be the first choice when a customer is making a decision.
How important are a name, logo, and colors to a brand?
They’re important elements, but they don’t make up the brand on their own. A brand is much broader than what people can see. Pricing, for example, plays a major role. It determines whether you’re affordable and accessible to everyone or position yourself as a premium service. That has a huge impact on how people perceive you.
Would you recommend that a small business owner build their brand around their own name or choose a separate name?
Both approaches can work. Building a business around your own name is also becoming increasingly popular. Various studies show that personal brands are becoming more powerful, particularly in Western Europe. People like seeing real faces and hearing real stories, and it’s easier for them to connect with a person than with an anonymous company.
But there are limits. Imagine you build the best beauty salon in town and then decide you want to grow, perhaps by opening another location, hiring more people, or expanding your services. At that point, customers may expect you to be personally involved in every service, because the brand is tied directly to your name.
It can also make selling the business more complicated. A name linked to a specific person isn’t always easy to transfer to a new owner. That’s why I wouldn’t start by asking what the right name is or what colors my logo should use. I’d start by asking what my goals are.
So when should you start thinking about your brand?
Most people start with the name, logo, and colors because it’s creative and fun. It also quickly gives you the feeling that “something is happening.” But I’d recommend starting with something less exciting: an analysis, ideally looking five or even ten years ahead.
The important thing is to answer questions that most business owners never stop to ask themselves in the middle of their daily routine: Where do I want to go? Do I want to grow? Will I want to hire employees? Do I want to expand internationally? Only then does it make sense to work on the brand, because your brand should help you reach those goals as quickly and efficiently as possible.
Isn’t a five- or ten-year vision too long-term these days?
These days, it’s hard to say what will happen two weeks from now, let alone ten years from now. But it’s not really about predicting the future accurately. It’s about stepping away from your day-to-day operations for a moment. Consciously stepping back from execution and asking yourself why you’re actually in business and what you want to achieve.
It’s easy to lose sight of your original vision. Maybe you wanted freedom, but instead you ended up becoming a slave to your own work. That’s why it makes sense to take a long-term view and use it as the foundation for your brand as well.
What’s the most common mistake you see clients make when setting their vision?
They set their goals too low. Instead of asking whether and how they could grow beyond their home country, perhaps across Europe, they stick to very local goals like “I want to earn 20% more next year.” That’s a shame, because small goals can limit both your ideas and your brand.
Then, when the business does eventually grow, you may find yourself needing to rebrand after a few years because the original brand can no longer support that growth. Even if I’m a local hairdresser or beautician, thinking bigger can still help. It doesn’t necessarily mean expanding around the world. It means building a mindset where my service is strong, high-quality, and world-class, even in a local market — without limiting the people around me or my future growth opportunities.
Want to go deeper into building a brand that doesn’t hit a ceiling?
In the first episode of Built From Scratch, Tomáš unpacks how to find the right audience, make bold decisions early, and set a foundation your brand can actually grow into. Watch the episode on YouTube or listen to it on Spotify.
When does it make sense to hire an agency to build your brand?
A lot of branding work can be done yourself. That’s one of the reasons we created our Yellow Book of Brand Building, which helps small business owners develop their name, strategy, and visual codes in a way that can have a real business impact. But even that requires time, attention, and a willingness to really get into it.
An agency makes sense when it can save you time, money, mistakes, and when you can afford it. At the beginning of a business, the first priority should be finding out whether the business actually works. Once it starts gaining traction, that’s when it makes sense to bring in experts. And as we’ve already discussed, the creative work on the brand should come as the result of a clearly defined strategy.
Let’s look at that creative work in practice. You have a new client and are starting a project together. Where do you begin?
We always start with analyzing the brand’s current position and how it connects to the business goals. Then we take a deep look at the competition: how they communicate, how they look, and how they sell their services. The goal is to find an opening that can help the client grow faster and smarter.
Interestingly, recent studies show that the growth of the category a brand operates in can have a major impact on its growth. If there’s a strong trend — AI, for example — companies in that space can often grow simply because they’re in the right category. The trend carries them along.
That’s why we also look at what category the client is in, and sometimes gently steer them toward another one with greater growth potential. But the opposite can work too: a brand can deliberately choose to ignore a trend.
My friend is a yoga teacher, and there are countless yoga teachers today, just as there are in many other professions. How can she stand out and succeed in such a competitive market?
One approach that has worked very well for us in practice is what we call “finding your tribe.” A few years ago, a client from the Netherlands came to us. He was selling international nutritional supplements in Europe, but his supplier suddenly stopped shipping his products, and his business collapsed.
He wanted to start again and build his own brand in an extremely competitive market dominated by large companies. Instead of trying to appeal to everyone from day one, we looked for a smaller, clearly defined group of people — a tribe that the product could be built around.
How did you choose them?
In his case, it was biohackers over 50, people with both the time and money to invest in high-quality supplements. That allowed us to position not only the product but also the pricing and the entire brand as premium.
That’s how NoordCode was born: a brand combining a Nordic, contemporary, premium feel with a connection to biohacking, even though a large portion of its supplements are manufactured in Slovakia and sold in the Netherlands.
The entire visual identity and communication were built around minimalism and Scandinavian aesthetics, which strongly reinforce the perception of quality. Today, six years later, the client also sells supplements to mothers with young children. But in the beginning, the goal wasn’t to be original or appeal to everyone. It was to find a community that could help get the company off the ground and drive its growth.
When I’m coming up with a company name, is the first idea usually a cliché that belongs in the trash?
At our agency, one final name typically comes from around 800 to 1,000 ideas, so most of them automatically end up in the trash. The process is creative, but it’s also highly technical and systematic because we check legal risks and domain availability, which is becoming increasingly difficult.
We often say that anyone who thinks company names are invented over coffee underestimates how structured the process really is.
How do I know if a name is good?
Our Yellow Book has a whole checklist. The domain should be available, the name shouldn’t cause problems in other languages, for example because it sounds vulgar, which matters if the brand expands internationally. It should also be legally clear and scalable.
People often think the name has to make it obvious what the company does, but that isn’t true. Businesses often change over time, and a name that’s too descriptive can limit the business and tie it to a single category.
How would you approach marketing investment for smaller businesses?
For small business owners, I think education is key. Go to a conference or get a basic overview through a workshop, so you can understand what makes sense and what is simply “bullshit” — for example, some of the woo around logo colors.
In our region, most small businesses put up to 90% of their budget into performance advertising, essentially, immediate sales. That works at first, but growth eventually slows down because there isn’t enough investment in the brand.
That’s why I recommend investing at least 10–20% in your brand from the very beginning. This investment works like compound interest: over time, it increases the effectiveness of everything else you do. In the long run, a healthy split is roughly 60% brand and 40% performance marketing.
Do we overestimate the role of color in branding?
I’d say it’s not quite as straightforward as people often claim. At least, there isn’t scientific evidence to support many of the claims about how colors influence us.
We do know that certain colors can make a brand feel more premium or more accessible — royal blue, muted earthy tones, or emerald green, for example. But it always depends on the overall brand context, including the logo, typography, and visual style. Color alone doesn’t make a brand.
The problem is that people often choose colors based purely on gut feeling. That’s one reason why brands can end up looking so similar. Around 80–85% of companies across industries use similar colors and styles, typically blue or red.
At our agency, we often work on how a brand can claim a particular color or visual territory and make it recognizable. In our case, for example, it’s yellow. Even if nobody on the team likes it, it can still make sense to use it if it helps the business grow and customers start associating that color with our brand.
What’s the cheapest yet most effective marketing you’ve seen work?
I have a funny example from a client in Switzerland who sold black socks — a completely ordinary commodity product. He didn’t have a big marketing budget, so he had to come up with something simple but attention-grabbing.
He came up with the idea of shortening his trousers at events in Zurich where the dress code was a suit, so that his socks would be clearly visible.
The effect was surprisingly powerful. The combination of a formal suit and deliberately shortened trousers immediately caught people’s attention. The socks themselves weren’t anything special, but people remembered him, shared photos on social media, and journalists even wrote about him.
Do mascots work in marketing, and does every brand need one?
Marketing and brand building are heavily driven by emotions today. Our brains process tens of thousands of decisions every day, and only a small percentage of them are rational. Most are made by our “autopilot,” which relies on emotion.
That’s why research suggests mascots can be up to five or six times more powerful than other brand elements. People form relationships with them because they have a face or personality that’s easy to remember. You can see this in practice, too. Relatively few companies use mascots, but those that do can become incredibly memorable, even to young children. Just look at Alza, a major Czech online retailer whose alien mascot is instantly recognizable.
At first, using a mascot takes courage because it can feel unconventional. But that’s exactly why it works — it sets you apart. And when a brand is built around its founder, the founder can often become the mascot themselves: their face, style, way of communicating, or ownership of a particular topic that nobody else is talking about.
What role does AI play in branding and marketing, and how much should we rely on it?
AI is making it possible to launch more businesses, while the amount of content is growing exponentially. Competition and marketing noise are increasing, and people have less and less ability to hold their attention. For online advertising, the figure is said to be less than two seconds.
AI is a great tool when we use it as an assistant — for example, to understand a process or structure. The problem comes when you let it create your entire business plan or brand strategy for you. Because AI learns from large datasets and tends to produce what’s statistically typical, the result can be average solutions that all start to look alike.
That’s why humanity, authenticity, and courage will become increasingly important in branding — things that stand out from the average. The ideal approach is a combination: use AI as an advisor and a tool, but build your key decisions and brand identity around who you are.
How important is a website as part of a brand?
It’s one of the tools that make up a brand. I actually have a funny story about that. Even though I’m a co-owner of a branding studio with people who are great at high-end design and websites, I ended up building my own personal website myself using Webnode.
I needed it quickly for international conferences where I speak, and our team was fully occupied with long-term projects. One Saturday morning, I sat down with Webnode and, over a coffee and in about an hour and a half, the website was done.
It looks professional enough and did exactly what I needed — without requiring a lot of technical know-how or a big budget.
Since then, I’ve been telling smaller clients that you don’t always need to invest in a complicated solution right away. Today, you can do a lot yourself quickly and effectively, even without a big budget or a team.
Quick Q&A: Tomáš Petrek and Webnode
How do Webnode websites help you in your business and creative work?
Alongside working on international and local projects at GoBIGNAME and running the company and our team, we often focus on educating entrepreneurs around the world. Over the years, we’ve trained thousands of people through various communities and events, including AI For Good summits organized by the Swiss government and the United Nations.
For these opportunities, it’s important for every speaker to have a professional online presence where participants can quickly find information about them and their work. Webnode provides an effective way to create and manage exactly this kind of website.
Why would you recommend Webnode to others?
Mainly because it’s so easy to use. You can literally create your first website in just a few minutes, even if you have no previous experience.
What do you like most about Webnode?
When I was creating my website, I simply described what I needed, and Webnode’s AI features suggested several great templates. I only had to make a few adjustments to match my preferences.
I also really like how easy it is to add new sections to an existing website or change its structure and appearance.
Jana LeBlanc is a Czech publicist, author, and blogger. She publishes in the magazines Moje psychologie, Respekt, Deník N, Reportér. She is the author of the book “Moje bejby Amerika”. She writes the blog “Co mi udělalo radost” – about life in foreign countries and the experiences of a mother of bilingual sons – comiudelaloradost.cz.
