Simple Brand System Development

I need a cohesive personal brand system designed across three surfaces: a simple website, a PowerPoint deck template, and a Word document template. I'm a Ph.D. researcher and go-to-market advisor who works at the intersection of academic research and B2B revenue. The brand should feel intelligent and editorial, credible to senior executives, and clearly different from the typical blue-and-purple sales-tech look. I have positioning, bios, and voice already locked; I need the visual identity and templates built on top of them. Ideal candidate has strong brand identity experience and can deliver a small brand guide plus production-ready templates. 1. Who this is for Name (practitioner-facing): Curtis Schroeder Name (academic-facing): Curtis S. Schroeder (with "PhD" where credentials carry weight) The name flexes between two registers, and the brand should too. "Curtis Schroeder" for revenue leaders, stages, and LinkedIn; "Curtis S. Schroeder" for journals and academic contexts. Role: Researcher and advisor working where academic research meets B2B go-to-market. Postdoctoral fellow at Texas A&M, Ph.D. from Oklahoma State, formerly at Oracle and Gartner. Publishes in top sales and marketing journals, writes for Forbes, speaks to revenue leaders, and advises teams on go-to-market strategy. Positioning line (tagline): Designing go-to-market, grounded in research. Core belief the brand should carry: Most revenue problems are clarity problems, not data problems. 2. Audience, in priority order Revenue leaders and prospective clients. CROs, RevOps leaders, senior sales and marketing executives at Fortune 100 and mid-market companies. The people he influences, speaks to, and advises. Prospective advisory clients live inside this group and should be able to find their way to "work with me" without being sold to. The people who give him a stage. Conference and event organizers and podcast hosts and editors. The brand should make booking him an easy yes: clear, credible, professional. Academic peers. Researchers who take his scholarship seriously. This audience keeps the "credible in both worlds" positioning honest. Not the audience: investors and recruiters. Don't design this like a startup pitch or a job-seeker portfolio. 3. What the brand should say and feel Say: He designs go-to-market grounded in research, not guesswork. He is credible and relevant in both the academic and industry worlds and moves between them, which almost no one does. He helps leaders see clearly and act with conviction. Personality: Plainspoken and direct. Rigorous without being stuffy. Intellectually serious but accessible. Willing to name what others won't. Think "sensemaker," someone who cuts through complexity, anchored in truth. Feel: Intelligent, editorial, confident, uncluttered. Quiet authority rather than hype. Warm enough to be human, restrained enough to be taken seriously by a boardroom and a faculty committee alike. Avoid: Hype and hustle-culture energy. Neon gradients. Overused sales-tech blue/purple. Motivational-speaker warmth. Clip-art charts and stock "business handshake" imagery. Anything that reads as either a SaaS startup or an academic's dusty faculty page. No corporate-theater language in any placeholder copy. 4. Reference sites (study these, borrow deliberately) Four sites in his adjacent space. Notes on what to take and what to leave. Todd Caponi — toddcaponi.com. Closest to Curtis in substance: sells on science, behavioral research, and sales history. Take the intellectual-credibility angle and the idea that rigor can be a differentiator. Leave the "nerd/geek" framing and the busy WordPress-template density; Curtis is more restrained and editorial. Jen Allen-Knuth — demandjen.com. Strong, contrarian, data-forward point of view (leads with hard statistics and a "you don't need a motivational speaker" stance). Take the spine: lead with a claim, back it with evidence. Leave the edgy parenthetical styling and the high-energy purple; Curtis's confidence is quieter. Tim Sanders — timsanders.com. Polished, authoritative, book-and-keynote forward, uses big-brand logos for instant credibility. Take the clean authority and the "trusted by" credibility markers (his would be journals, Forbes, and past employers). Leave the AI-hype positioning and the heavy dark theme. Shari Levitin — sharilevitin.com. Warm, human, heart-forward, photo- and testimonial-rich. Take the human warmth and the strong use of real photography and social proof. Leave the emotional/motivational register and gradient logo; Curtis is cooler and more analytical. (Note: Curtis collaborates with Shari Levitin Group, so avoid visually echoing her brand too closely.) The gap Curtis should own: None of these four leads cleanly with "peer-reviewed research applied to go-to-market." That's the open lane. The design should look like it belongs to someone who publishes and advises, editorial and evidence-forward, not a trainer, not a hype merchant.