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Illustrative Case Study

The founder was the proof. He just wasn’t on the page. Here’s what we found.

WorkingWeight had a real programme, a real founder, and results that held up. What it didn’t have was a page that earned the trust of a visitor who’d been let down before. The sessions revealed exactly why, and what the rebuild needed to do about it.

The brief

The programme worked. The page never got the chance to prove it.

WorkingWeight is a coaching programme for busy professionals, built by Marcus Cole after he lost 22kg while working full-time in corporate finance. The results were real and the audience was clear. But the website was never tested against cold traffic, it grew through word of mouth and Marcus’s own presence on social media. The brief was to find out what a stranger actually feels landing on that page, and what would need to change before they’d book a call.

01
Trust on entry scored 1 out of 10, and the page made it worse. Contradictory pricing, implausible statistics and no visible human left visitors more guarded than when they arrived.
02
Marcus is the product. His story is the proof. Neither appeared anywhere on the page, which currently shows stock photography instead of the one thing visitors were looking for.
03
The emotional journey has a fixed order, recognition, then credibility, then belief, then action, and the current page broke that chain before a visitor ever reached the price.
The process

Fifteen sessions. Over two hundred responses. One consistent story.

We put numbers on what the team sensed but couldn’t articulate. Trust at 1/10. Delight at 2/10. Anxiety at 6/10. Each session tackled a different dimension, emotional, tonal, visual, strategic, and the findings converged from every angle without being asked to. That convergence is what makes the evidence usable.

Core PrinciplesThe Heartbreak Scale™75 min
DiscoveryThe First 60 Seconds™30 min
DiscoveryThe Aspiration Gap™60 min
DiscoveryThe Identity Shift™45 min
Brand PersonalityThe Dinner Party™15 min
Brand PersonalityThe Rejection Letter™30 min
Brand PersonalityThe Funeral Speech™60 min
Tone & CopyThe Voice Sort™40 min
Tone & CopyWrite It Wrong™30 min
Tone & CopyRead It Aloud™30 min
Design PrinciplesDesign Principles Builder™60 min
Design PrinciplesThe Moment Test™45 min
Design PrinciplesThe Anti-Principles™40 min
Visual DirectionOpposite Ends™10 min
Visual DirectionMoodboard Speed Dating™15 min
The sessions produced a full research base, a defined voice, and a design brief the whole team could work from, grounded in evidence rather than opinion.
Output 01: Strategy & Research

From emotional baseline to a founder-shaped brief.

The Research & Insights Report set the emotional baseline: trust at the floor, no moments of delight, a founder story sitting unused in a notes document. The Aspiration Gap mapped the exact distance between a guarded visitor and a confident one, and the three moments where that distance closes or doesn’t. The User Personas gave the findings four faces, each with a different reason to walk away and a different reason to stay.

Research & Insights Report
Discovery & Strategy

Research & Insights Report

Four findings from fifteen sessions, each confirmed independently, showing why the current page loses visitors before it ever makes its case.

Trust on entry measured 1/10. The page actively compounds it, with contradictory pricing and statistics that don’t survive scrutiny.
Marcus’s story, a founder who lost 22kg in corporate finance, was named the single biggest missed opportunity on the page.
The right voice emerged consistently across four separate exercises: direct, specific, unhurried. One word for it: sharp. One word for what’s live now: stiff.
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The Aspiration Gap™
Discovery

The Aspiration Gap™

The emotional distance between a visitor who arrives guarded and one who books the call, mapped dimension by dimension and moment by moment.

Three thresholds govern the journey: the face behind the promise, the evidence that removes the last objection, and the clarity that makes the next step obvious.
Visitors arrive asking “Is there a real person behind this?” and “What’s the catch?”. None of it is answered before they’re asked to trust the price.
Biggest single risk identified: a visitor never sees themselves in the page, and leaves with the belief that this still isn’t for someone like them.
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User Personas
Research

User Personas

Four professionals, four job titles, one shared instinct: scan for the first inconsistency, then decide whether the rest of the page is worth reading.

Tom Hadley, a corporate lawyer, leaves any page with contradictory pricing without reading further.
Sarah Blenkin, a Head of People, won’t forward a page to her CFO unless she can verify who’s behind it and what it costs per head.
Every persona shares the same success condition: trust established, in specific and verifiable terms, before the scroll ends.
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Plus 9 more documents in the full engagement
04
Feel Factor
The Feel Factor®
05
Brand
Brand Personality
06
Brand
Tone & Copy
07
Brand
Copy Handbook
08
Visual
Visual Direction
09
Design
Design Principles
10
Design
Interaction Principles
11
Design
Animation and Interaction Guide
12
Technical
Technical Architecture
Output 02: The Design

Six screens. Every decision traceable to a session finding.

We didn’t stop at the landing page. Marcus’s presence, and the voice the sessions defined, carried all the way through the product, from the first screen to onboarding, the workouts themselves, and the weekly check-in that brings someone back. Drag to compare against what was live before.

Original
WAA
The result

A page built for the visitor who almost left, not the one who was always going to book.

One structural absence explained almost everything that wasn’t working. Once the sessions surfaced it, the brief for the rebuild wrote itself, sequenced, specific, and grounded in what visitors actually needed to feel before they’d act.

The brief rewrote itself
The page was built around the product. The sessions showed it needed to be built around the person arriving to evaluate it, guarded, sceptical, and doing far more work than they should have to.
Marcus went from asset to foundation
The story that made WorkingWeight credible already existed. It just wasn’t on the page. The rebuild didn’t need to invent trust, it needed to place what already worked somewhere a stranger could find it.
A voice the whole team could write to
Four separate exercises landed on the same register: honest, specific, unhurried. Any copy that performed credibility instead of earning it could now be identified and fixed on sight.
A sequence, not a wishlist
Recognition before credibility. Credibility before belief. Belief before action. Every design decision could be tested against that order, rather than argued over on taste.