TLDR:

No intake call. No backstory. (Sorry, no explaining allowed.) I go in cold.

This is how you answer one question: What story is your marketing telling?

You probably think you know… (you’re likely wrong).

The question is, what do your prospective clients see?

You know what you meant. Can they tell?

You know the experience behind your business. Why that sentence is on your homepage. Why you chose that phrase in your bio. What connects the five things you’ve been talking about all month.

A stranger doesn’t.

They see the pieces you’ve put in front of them and make a fast decision about who you are, what you do, who it’s for and why they should care.

Sometimes every individual piece is true and the whole still adds up to the wrong story.

That’s what I’m looking for.

I use the same seven story criteria every time so I’m not grading your brand on vibes. They give me a consistent way to show you what’s strong, what’s scattered and what never made it onto the page at all.

That’s a Cold Brand Read.

A Brand Read is useful when everything feels almost right.

The business has grown. The work is good. The clients are real.

But the website feels a little behind. The content keeps wandering. People understand pieces of what you do, but you’re not sure they’re putting those pieces together the way you intended.

And you’re not particularly interested in rebuilding your entire marketing system just to find out.

That’s a good time for outside eyes.

How would you like me to read your brand?

Free

Find out what a stranger sees when they find your brand.

Shared in my content:

I’ll read your brand to see what story your marketing is telling a stranger, then share the results in my content.

You can choose named or anonymous.

$147

Get the full story and the things I’d fix first, in order.

Delivered privately to you:

You’ll get the full report and breakdown within one week of your scheduled read date, delivered only to you.

Your read never goes public.

Jeannie Ruesch

I’m Jeannie. I read brands like novels.

I’ve spent more than 25 years in marketing, including at the VP level, and I’ve published three novels.

That’s an oddly useful combination for this.

The marketer in me knows where to look for positioning, clarity and the clues that tell the right person why your business matters.

The novelist in me notices what those clues add up to: what story I’m being told, where it contradicts itself, what’s missing and whether I understand why I should keep reading.

I’m not reading the brand you can explain over coffee. I’m reading the one a stranger has to figure out without you.

How it works

How a Cold Brand Read works

  1. I.

    You show me where your brand lives.

    Your website. LinkedIn. Instagram. Substack. Wherever people regularly encounter you.

    I don’t just read the prettiest page. I look at what the pieces add up to.

  2. II.

    I read it without the backstory.

    No intake call first. No explanation of what you meant.

    If I can’t find an important part of the story, that’s useful information.

  3. III.

    I look for the pattern.

    Using the same seven criteria every time, I look for what’s clear, what conflicts, what’s missing and where the story starts pointing in a different direction than the business.

  4. IV.

    I show you what a stranger walks away with.

    Not a score. Not a pile of copy edits.

    The story your marketing is currently telling and, with the private read, the three places I’d start fixing it.

A Cold Brand Read isn’t grading your business.

It can’t tell me how good you are at what you do.

It can tell me whether a stranger can see how good you are at it.

That’s a different problem.

And it’s why rewriting one sentence at a time can turn into a spiral.

The bio.
The headline.
The niche.
The offer.
The posts.
The homepage.

When you can’t see what the actual problem is, everything starts to look guilty.

So you fix all of it.

Very efficient.

A Cold Brand Read pulls back far enough to see what all those pieces are doing together.

Because the problem may not be that any one sentence is wrong. It may be that they aren’t all telling the same story yet.

The trade

Why is the public read free?

Because your read becomes part of my content.

I may turn it into a post, newsletter or teaching example that helps other business owners see something in their own brands.

That’s the trade. You get my read. I get a real brand to work with instead of inventing Generic Expert Business Owner Number Fourteen. Everyone wins.

You choose named or anonymous.

If it’s named, I’ll credit you and link to your work. If it’s anonymous, I’ll remove your name, links and identifying screenshots and share only enough context for the read to make sense.

If you’d rather keep the read completely private and get the three things I’d fix first, choose the $147 read.

Your brand is already telling a story.

Let’s find out what a stranger walks away with.