Aidan Harbinson Of Horrible Brands On Five Things You Need To Build A Trusted And Beloved Brand

As part of our series about how to create a trusted, believable, and beloved brand, I had the pleasure to interview Aidan Harbinson, one half of the award-winning Horrible Brands.

Aidan Harbinson is a Brand Strategist and Project Manager at Horrible Brands, the agency he co-founded with creative director Kris Byers. With 16+ years of experience guiding brands from confusion to clarity, Aidan helps purpose-led businesses position for success, connect with their audience and create standout digital experiences. He has worked with many household names including Barbour, LIDL, Kingspan, SSE, Subway and Dale Farm. This year, he has also delivered a number of practical Brand Masterclass workshops across Ireland, working alongside world-renowned Marketer and author, Seth Godin.

Thank you so much for doing this with us! Can you tell us a story about what brought you to this specific career path?

I have always been a geek at heart. When I was a kid, all I wanted to do was watch movies and play with computers. My cousins were starting out in what became very successful athletic careers and this was very much the norm across several generations of my family (Mum was even all-Ireland fencing champion and represented GB in the Commonwealth Games). I suppose I was a bit of a black sheep!

As I got older, I found I had a knack for business studies as a school subject. At the same time, I was always told computers were the future, so I ended up studying Computer Science at Uni. Then, after a few months in my first job, they realised I could talk a hell of a lot better than I could code! Not only that, but all my ideas were around systems and processes. The feeling was that I could level up really quickly in a client-facing role and so I became a Technical Project Manager. It was like my whole career lit up! I felt great bringing all this new value to the table, as someone who could understand how to approach solutions in the abstract and act as a sort of translator between client and delivery team.

Fast forward the guts of 14 years and decent stints in a large digital agency then as Technical Director of a large ad agency, I was working in a corporate tech job as a Programme Manager…and tearing my hair out. I had an excellent team of 13 very senior people, I was responsible for and 150+ in-flight projects at any given time. It wasn’t actually the pressure that got to me though, it was the lack of a creative outlet. I felt increasingly frustrated that we couldn’t offer better solutions and do more for clients.

That’s when my business partner, Kris Byers, contacted me. He had been one of my most trusted contractors when I was at the ad agency. Now, like me, Kris has always been an optimist, but I had never seen him so excited! He had just come back from New York with this amazing idea for a new, disruptive agency where everything was Brand-led and focused on storytelling. It blew me away (still does!) and, unable to contain my excitement, I immediately told him I wanted to be involved in taking it global. We shook hands on a partnership deal in principle at the end of that meeting. I often look back on that meeting as the day my life changed forever and can’t help feeling emotional. There’s also a really significant learning in this too: one meeting, or one phone call, can completely transform your life!

Can you share a story about the funniest marketing mistake you made when you were first starting? What lesson did you learn from that?

Around ten years ago, I got drafted in to present a clickable prototype with a suite of website designs to an international airport. The agency presented me as a specialist in UX (User Experience) and technical project management (I was still getting there at the time, but more or less).

As the client SMT got more and more excited about the transformation they were about to undergo, the number of people attending the meeting went up and up. Soon, they ran out of chairs, as stakeholders from all teams decided they needed to be included and packed out the room.

In the digital and tech world in those days, presentations or any kind of live demo could always be a nervous affair. Between equipment, Wi-Fi and in the solution itself, something minor (sometimes something major…) often tended to glitch or fail to load, no matter how many times you tested it beforehand. In this case though, everything ran completely smoothly and my presentation was seamless (if a bit nervy due to the size of my audience). At least right until the very end, when I was giving examples of airlines and how their information was being presented.

The atmosphere in the room completely shifted and you could feel it. The saltiest look I’ve ever seen came across the face of the CEO as he began to glare at me. What I didn’t know was the last airline example I called out were the very airline that had announced they were pulling out of the airport just the day before!

The lesson I received that day was very simple and highly effective, and it can be summed in the only three words he spoke to me that day: Know your customer.

Anyway, the prototype was approved and the website got built in the end. It might even have gone on to win an award or two…

What do you think makes your company stand out? Can you share a story?

We’re not in the business of looking cool for the sake of it and I believe it shows in the vibe we bring to every meeting or communication. We always try to see ourselves as a brand, rather than a business.

When it comes to clients, everything we do is brand-led too. The reason we exist is to help businesses find truth at the core of what they do and express it with personality. We then help develop people and teams to be able to step into and own that new brand. This means looking ahead at what our clients can become, that future state when their potential is fully unlocked.

One client recently told us, “You gave us the words we didn’t know we were allowed to say.” That sums us up really. We give people permission to be bolder than they think they can be and use their story to stand out to their target audience.

We worked with a tech startup that had incredible science behind their product, but their brand was non-existent and the information they had gathered to brief us felt a bit like a textbook. We helped them find a more human tone, reframe their messaging to focus on real-life impact. Suddenly their audience started engaging, sharing and most importantly, buying. The science didn’t change though. The story did.

Are you working on any exciting new projects now? How do you think that will help people?

Oh there are lots! We’re currently working with a chain of gyms in the greater New York area and Canada. They have a fascinating approach to slowing down weight-based exercise that cuts down on time spent in the gym and guarantees better results. They even have their own specially designed machines that shift weights as the motion changes to push your muscle groups to positive failure. What I love about this one is that the project is all about human empathy and alignment. Not just between us and the client though. It’s between them and their customer as well. They have all the bio-science, but you have to feel your way to better health and attractiveness, with less overall commitment. They had been burned with a previous agency, but bringing them back to a place of clarity in messaging and credibility in social proof is absolutely going to transform their fortunes going forward.

We also have a Surfing brand in Hawaii that is a particularly fun partner to work with from an aesthetic point of view. Their waterproof parkas and drysuits are really premium, to the point where they are the preferred product for US Special Forces and even the Navy Seals! Perhaps by coincidence, they have a little seal as their brand mascot and we’ve had a blast using AI to generate iconography based on him. The really impactful work though is in the storytelling, where we’re using Donald Miller’s StoryBrand framework to write content that speaks to their customers pain-points and guides them on a journey. The landing pages we’re designing with this in mind will serve to make them stand out massively from competitors as they enter the EU market for the first time.

We’re also evolving Horrible Brands itself, with new content, workshops and templates to help brands get the clarity they need. I’m also hoping that soon we’ll be able to announce more Masterclasses working alongside the Godfather of Modern Marketing (as I like to call him), Seth Godin. He still leaves my mind blown every time I hear his thoughts on strategy and it’s been really special working alongside Treena Clarke, of the Big Marketing MeetUp, and Andi Jarvis, of Eximo Marketing, to help bring his teachings to Irish businesses. Perhaps we’ll do a workshop in New York this time around…

In a nutshell, how would you define the difference between brand marketing (branding) and product marketing (advertising)?

Product marketing gets you seen, clicked and, ideally, bought. It’s the tactical, attention-grabbing work that says, “Here’s what we do, and why you should care right now.” It’s built to drive immediate action: sales, sign-ups, downloads, conversions etc. It’s measurable, reactive and often short-lived by design.

Brand marketing, on the other hand, says, “Here’s who we are, and why we’ll still matter next year, or five years from now.” It’s about building long-term emotional connection and cultural relevance. It helps audiences form a gut-level understanding of what your business stands for. Not just what you sell, but why you exist.

The difference is urgency versus longevity. Advertising gets you noticed, but branding makes you remembered.

If you stop product marketing, your results stop too. But if you’ve invested in brand, that investment keeps working. Your brand walks into the room before your next campaign does, making the next sale easier, cheaper and more likely.

You can think of it like dating versus marriage: product marketing is the first impression, the witty text, the great dinner. Branding is what makes someone stay. Without brand, you’re always starting from scratch.

The smartest companies we work with treat their Brand Strategy as vital infrastructure. Not just a logo or colour palette, but the strategic foundation that shapes voice, culture, customer experience and future growth. It’s the glue between the things you do today and the reputation you want to have tomorrow.

Why is it important to invest resources and energy into building a brand, in addition to the general marketing and advertising efforts?

Because ads stop the minute you stop paying. Brands don’t.

Seth Godin put this really well in our most recent Strategy Masterclass together: We make buying decisions based on the story we tell others, or the story we tell ourselves. Even in a business-to-business model, it’s about the story someone tells their boss. An optician for example doesn’t sell glasses, they sell “changing in your face” and in a way that people often notice straight away. Without the story, your product is actually just a commodity. And, if you’re just a commodity, you’re in a race to the bottom. And, the danger with a race to the bottom is that you just might win!

A strong brand is a multiplier (and contrary to popular belief, it can be measured!). It makes every ad work harder, every post more engaging, every product launch more believable. When people feel something about your business, they start talking about it when you’re not in the room and that’s where true loyalty begins.

We’ve seen clients with modest media budgets outperform flashier competitors because their brand voice was sharper, their values clearer and their message easier to remember. Branding is the difference between being chosen once and being chosen always.

Can you share 5 strategies that a company should be doing to build a trusted and believable brand? Please tell us a story or example for each.

1. Say less, mean more.

The best brands know what they stand for and don’t need to shout to be heard. Strip away the noise and take things back to the one thing you want to stand for, making sure every decision ladders up to it. When you simplify, you amplify.

A local organisation we worked with recently had a range of vastly different services that were designed to appeal to lots of different audiences. Their team was passionate, their mission was important, but their messaging was scattered. The risk here is that your patrons get lost in the clutter. People didn’t know where to look or what to care about.

So, we pressed pause. We ran a series of Brand Strategy workshops to get to the heart of their values and what they were really trying to create: a community space that made people feel welcome and supported. That became the story. Not a menu of services, but an invitation.

In tightening up their Brand Strategy and customer personas, it was easy to find commonality and what the story needed to be: one of a warm and welcoming environment that says “come on in and explore with us”. That sense of inclusivity was the core message they needed to share. The shift was simple, but powerful. That’s what people connected with, and what they remembered.

Focus on the one thing you want to own in your audience’s mind. When you say less, and mean more, your message hits harder and goes further.

2. Be relentlessly consistent, but not robotic.

Trust comes from familiarity. That means using the same tone, visual language and values wherever your brand shows up.

Consistency doesn’t mean being boring or repetitive. It’s not about copy-pasting the same content across every platform. It’s about staying recognisably you, while adapting to context. Like a great musician on tour: the venue might change and the setlist might shift, but you know it’s their sound. That’s the energy brands need to capture.

We worked with a large event planning business that was fully bought into using ChatGPT to scale content creation. It’s a great tool and something we use on a daily basis. The problem was, they’d lost sight of their own tone of voice. The content it was producing was decent, but didn’t sound like them and their audience could tell. The result was low engagement, even though the topics were on point.

So we went back to basics. We developed a clear Brand Strategy that captured how they actually spoke and the energy they brought to meetings. We then built a custom BrandGPT (as we call it!) with lots of writing examples and instructions to humanise the content. That one change made a massive difference. The content was still coming from AI, but it felt more real. Engagement levels rose, and so did confidence across the team.

AI and automation is brilliant, but without brand thinking behind it, you end up losing the consistency. The content that might be accurate, but still gets ignored.

3. Don’t hide your humans.

People buy from people. They relate to faces and stories, not corporate language and polished stock photos. So, one of the most powerful things a brand can do is show up honestly.

Let your founders, team, and customers tell your story. That kind of authenticity is a growth strategy in and of itself, because it’s so powerful in building genuine trust and strong brand connections.

This is something we’ve seen proven time and time again. On LinkedIn, there’s been a noticeable shift over the last few years as small and mid-sized businesses start to build founder-led or team-led visibility. These companies are challenging bigger players in their space because they’re showing up with personality and truth. Their teams post with regularity, share what’s really going on and invite people into their world. There’s no templated approach or marketing jargon. Just real people doing the work and talking about it in a way that feels human.

And it’s not just anecdotal. There are loads of A/B test case studies out there that back this up, particularly in email marketing and web design. Swapping out generic stock imagery for real team photos or customer testimonials almost always leads to an uplift in performance. Double-digit increases in trust and conversions aren’t uncommon.

In a world full of automation, the brands that lead with real humans stand out, because authenticity is still rare, and that makes it valuable.

4. Be brave.

The fastest way to be ignored is to look and sound like everyone else. When you think about it, we see it constantly with businesses trying so hard to appear “professional” that they strip away any hint of personality. We’ve all seen messaging before along the lines of “We’re passionate about delivering innovative solutions.” Great. So is everyone else.

Your visual identity and tone of voice are the most powerful tools you have. It shapes how people feel when they interact with your brand and that feeling is what they’ll remember. Injecting personality into your brand doesn’t mean trying to be more quirky though. The aim should be to have a customer experience that stands out and, at the same time, feels human. Like there are real people behind the words who care about what they’re saying.

We worked with a US food startup who were a delight to spend time with and full of energy. To stand out, they needed packaging to reflect that. We created a suite of colourful, textured patterns and bold typography that felt more Willy Wonka than Whole Foods. We gave their tone of voice a playful edge to match and let their product stories breathe with confidence and humour.

Shortly afterwards, the founder got asked to tell their story on stage at a conference they were flying halfway across the world to. The packaging, which hadn’t even fully launched yet, became a talking point. People were intrigued and some were even inspired to rethink their own approach.

That’s what a strong visual identity and tone of voice can do. It doesn’t just sell your product. It invites people to care.

5. Fix your follow-through.

One of the quickest ways to lose trust is to build a beautiful looking brand and then let the experience fall flat. Too often, there’s a disconnect between what a business says and what it actually does. You might have a standout visual identity and powerful messaging, but if your website is slow or your customer experience is doesn’t match your promises, the whole thing collapses. People don’t separate the visuals from the experience. It’s ALL the brand.

One example that stands out for us was a charity we worked with that had a lovely new look, full of warm colours and a really positive message for society. Their online donation journey was clunky however. There was a confused page hierarchy on their website, with lots of pages that simply weren’t needed and no clear way to navigate between them. Many users dropped off before getting the chance to consider the impact a donation could make.

We worked with them to align the user experience with the brand story. We simplified the user journey, making the whole process feel smoother and more intuitive. The results were almost immediate and not only with donations, but increased traffic from search engines as a result of the improved site structure.

It’s easy to think of branding as the “front end” of your business, but it should inform everything. The way you follow up or welcome people in or solve problems. Every interaction either builds trust or breaks it.

What’s an example of a company that has done a fantastic job building a believable and beloved brand? What specifically impresses you? What can one do to replicate that?

Tony’s Chocolonely is a great example. They’ve taken a heavy, systemic issue in slave-labour free chocolate and built a colourful, joyful brand around it without trivialising the mission. That’s hard to do.

What impresses me is their transparency. They demonstrate openness around their supply chain reports and they use design to tell the story on every bar. To me, they’re bold, consistent and deeply human.

To replicate it? Commit fully. Don’t just say you’re purpose-led, but design your business model and messaging around it. Never be afraid to speak in a voice that’s unmistakably yours.

In advertising, one generally measures success by the number of sales. How does one measure the success of a brand building campaign? Is it similar, is it different?

It’s different in a way, because you’re measuring momentum, not just transactions. As I said earlier, it can be measured. We look at things like recall, sentiment, referrals, employee advocacy, organic growth and how often customers repeat key language back to you. If your audience can describe what you stand for in a sentence, you’re winning.

There are some amazing tools out there now that provide in-depth reports on both brand sentiment. This isn’t just based on a temperature check from social posts either. We have an amazing partner in Brandr, based in Iceland, who actively survey both customers and employees to provide a 360 view of your brand.

The basics still count of course when it comes to engagement. Heatmapping on websites with apps like Hotjar and diving into traffic stats to look at dwell time and bounce rate. People sometimes think of this more as product marketing, but there are lots of analytics that give you an indication on the level of connection your brand is capable of forming online.

It’s not always immediate of course and sometimes the feeling comes first. You can see branding success is when your sales get easier, your hiring gets faster and your customer loyalty gets stickier. It’s still mostly a lagging indicator, but when it lands, it lasts.

What role does social media play in your branding efforts?

It’s often the place where any brand breathes or falls flat. We endeavour treat socials as a trust touchpoint. For Horrible, channels like LinkedIn allow us to test the bolder, sometimes cheekier, side of our tone of voice in real time.

It’s also where consistency really matters. If your brand feels one way on your website and completely different on your Insta or LinkedIn, people notice.

We often work with clients to create what we call “brand anchors”. These are recurring formats or messages that reinforce who they are. It’s not just about showing up often either. It’s about showing up on-brand every time and again, sometimes less is more.

If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. :-)

As a Belfast child, I’ve always been very passionate about servicing local clients as well as businesses in other countries. I’ve seen how much potential this city holds. The kind of talent we see in sports exists in other areas too and we already see it in the people we export across the world. Not everyone comes back of course, and I believe we can do even more to develop our homegrown talent pool and encourage more people to stay.

Walking and commuting through what has become a popular tourism destination in the last couple of decades, I still see us being held back by cycles of social deprivation, poor mental health and a lack of opportunity in the communities that need it most.

If I could inspire a movement, it would be one that restores hope at street level. Not another top-down initiative either, but something rooted in real lives. I would love to see us able to invest more in people on the ground with tools and training. The idea of restoring the belief they need to step up, speak up and shape their future is a big part of this too. Because talent isn’t scarce here. It’s everywhere. What’s missing is the support and confidence to build something with it.

I believe Belfast has everything it needs to take its rightful place as a European hub for tech, creativity and commerce. A gateway to the Atlantic, not just geographically but culturally. It won’t happen by accident though. It starts with our young people. With safe spaces, mentoring and strong role models, accessible education and pathways to entrepreneurship. That’s how we shift the narrative. That’s how we turn what was previously a city of survival into a city of serious impact.

It all starts with raising belief and, when that happens, Belfast won’t just participate in the future, we’ll help lead it.

Can you please give us your favourite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?

One quote that’s stuck with me in recent years is from Bob Proctor:
“Once you make the decision, you will find all the people, resources and ideas you need every time.”

It speaks to something I’ve seen play out in my own life. The real turning point isn’t when things start happening, but when you make a clear, committed decision. That’s when momentum starts to kick in, even if you don’t see the result you want straight away. It’s a reminder to stay committed and that the right people will appear, the right ideas and opportunities will come through in the end.

Similar to any career, I always see things as a work in progress. When Kris and I decided to launch, we still had a lot of details to be worked out. However, we had, and still have, that conviction that things needed to be done differently and that we could create better outcomes for clients. We knew what we wanted to build and why it mattered. From that point on, things began to move and not always in ways we could have predicted. The same applies to any brand or individual. You don’t wait for the resources and then decide. You decide first and trust that the resources will follow, as long as you stay committed that is!

Is there a person in the world with whom you would like to have a lunch or breakfast with? He or she might just see this, especially if we tag them. :-)

Lately, I’d love to sit down with Mehdi Hasan. I know he can be a polarising figure for some, but I really admire his bravery. It feels like he has a genuine commitment to truth, especially in a time when real journalism feels like it’s under threat.

What he’s built with Zeteo is incredible. I see it as an independent platform that values scrutiny over spin and refuses to play it safe when it comes to holding power to account. It’s a two-way street and to me, that takes guts. It also takes a belief that the voice of the individual can still make a difference and that’s something I relate to strongly, especially when it comes to brand storytelling and business leadership.

I’d be fascinated to hear how he stays grounded in the face of backlash, how he maintains his own moral compass and what advice he’d give to anyone trying to create impact through words.

How can our readers follow you on social media?

You can find me at:

linkedin.com/in/aidanharbinson

And you can see more of what we’re building at Horrible Brands here:

horriblebrands.com

Thank you so much for joining us. This was very inspirational.