Category defining science no longer works alone to command funding from VCs and top pharma. This was the challenge Portal came to us with, as they struggled to break through in proteomics despite having been earmarked by industry leaders for their potential to “revolutionise biology”. Portal’s technology sequences proteins one molecule at a time, a capability with the potential to strip significant time and cost out of drug discovery by revealing biological detail current methods cannot see. Our response was strategy–first: create preference by defining a high-definition market proposition, then a brand as precise as the science it represents.