A challenger that stopped
shouting at customers.
A series-C fintech swapped its breathless tone for one its compliance team approved on the first read.
We hired Blackgeek to write our positioning. We kept them on because they made our legal team faster.— Devi Ramanan, CMO, Meridian Bank
Three competitors, one tone, no differentiator.
Meridian was the fourth challenger bank in a market the FT called "saturated by neon and exclamation marks." Their product was actually patient — a savings account for people who'd been burned. The voice didn't reflect that.
The pitch deck used the word "reimagine" eleven times. We counted.
We rewrote the home page in a notebook before opening Figma.
A week of interviews with customers who'd recently churned. Three with their head of compliance. Two with the regulator's relationship manager.
The strategy paragraph fit on an A6 card. The tone-of-voice document was nine pages — most of it the words to stop using. We installed a pull request template that flagged "reimagine" before merge.
The series-C bridge closed two weeks early.
Onboarding completion lifted 41% on a hold-out test. The CMO's team reported nine hours a week saved on copy reviews — that's almost a hire.
More important to us: the founders sent us the new investor deck before the next round. We red-pencilled it in an evening. They closed early.