Key takeaways from Original Thinker, Peter Oram

Key takeaways from Original Thinker, Peter Oram

How do you make a complex tech business stand out in a market where everyone looks and sounds the same?

That’s what we explored in the latest episode of Original Thinking, where we sat down with [tag] Peter Oram, CEO at [tag] PervasID, to talk about global growth of the brand and why technical brilliance still needs a story people can understand.

PervasID is an RFID tech business working across sectors including retail, healthcare and aerospace. The technology is smart powerful and properly impressive, but as Pete explains, being brilliant under the bonnet is only half the job.

If you want to lead a market, people need to quickly understand what you do – and they need to remember you.

Here are three takeaways from Pete’s episode that every scaling business can learn from…

1. If you want to be a leader, you can’t look like everyone else

When Pete first joined PervasID, he saw a business with huge potential, but a brand that needed to work harder. The RFID sector, like a lot of technical markets, can feel pretty samey, usually with lots of blue and white branding, heaps of corporate language and businesses saying similar things in similar ways.

Pete’s view was that PervasID needed to stand out and it needed to shout, by setting the narrative rather than following it.

That matters commercially, but it also matters when you’re on a funding journey. Investors need to understand the size of the opportunity and the ambition of the business. A strong brand helps tell that story with confidence.

That’s where brand becomes a commercial tool, where the branding, messaging, tone and positioning needs to help people understand why you’re different and why they should care.

2. Complex tech needs a simple language

One of the biggest challenges with a business like PervasID is that the technology can sound complicated before you’ve even started. Pete talks about the journey of taking something highly technical and making it feel clear enough for the right people to lean in.

The goal was to make the message clear enough that people want to know more. When people stop asking “what do you do?” and start asking “how can this help us?”, the brand is doing its job.

3. Brand builds the road for sales

For scaling businesses, especially those moving into new countries or sectors, sales can’t do all the heavy lifting on its own. Pete makes a really strong point in the episode – you can’t put a salesperson in every country straight away, but a strong brand can travel before the team does.

It gives people a reason to come to you and gives future sales teams the tools to have better conversations. This helps everyone tell the same story, wherever they are in the world. For PervasID, investing in brand has helped create reach, recognition and inbound interest.

There’s plenty more in the full episode, from creative risk and why simple ideas can open the right conversations, to looking outside your industry for better thinking and how AI can help without replacing original thought.