Refract
Refract Group2026
Glossary
Brand, product and growth terms, defined.
For founders, marketing leads and product leads who meet these words in a brief or a meeting. Each entry gives the short answer, how we do it, a worked example and what people get wrong.
Trusted by teams from pre-seed to the S&P 100
Brand
7 termsWhat a company stands for, and how it looks and sounds.
- Brand guidelinesBrand guidelines are the document or site that records a brand identity and how to use it: the logo and where it may go, colour values and roles, type, layout, imagery and voice, shown with examples so people outside the design team can apply it.
- Brand identityA brand identity is everything a person can see, read or hear that tells them which company they are dealing with: the name, the mark, type, colour, layout, imagery and voice, designed as one system with rules for using it.
- Brand strategyBrand strategy is the set of decisions, agreed by the people who run a company, about who it is for, why they should choose it over the alternatives, what it stands for and how it sounds. Every later brand decision is checked against it.
- NamingNaming is the work of choosing a name for a company or product: agreeing what the name has to do, building a long list, and cutting it to one that people can say and spell and the company can register and own.
- PositioningPositioning is the decision about which buyers a company is for, what they will compare it with, and why it is the better choice for them, written as one line the whole team can repeat. It is the centre of brand strategy.
- RebrandA rebrand is a change to a company’s brand that starts from its position: who it sells to and what it wants to be known for. The identity is rebuilt on the new position, and sometimes the name changes as well.
- Tone of voiceTone of voice is the way a company sounds whenever it writes or speaks: how formal, serious, respectful and enthusiastic it is, and which words it uses and avoids. It stays the same company while adjusting to the reader and the moment.
Product
10 termsDesigning software people use, and deciding what to build.
- AI design systemAn AI design system makes a brand usable by an AI agent. It brings together the source assets, the decisions behind the design and the working method for each format, so the agent can turn a brief into work a person reviews.
- Design systemA design system is the shared set of parts a product is built from and the rules for using them: named values for colour, type and spacing, components with their states, the patterns they combine into, and when each one applies.
- Design tokensDesign tokens are named values that record a design decision, such as a brand colour, a spacing step or a type size, stored once in a format that design tools and code can both read, so every platform uses the same value.
- MVP (minimum viable product)An MVP, or minimum viable product, is the first usable version of a product: small enough to build quickly, complete enough that the people it is for can finish one real task with it, and measured so the team learns from their use.
- Product sprintA product sprint is a short, fixed piece of work on one product problem that ends with a working prototype tested by real users and a plan for what to build next.
- PrototypeA prototype is a model of a product, or part of one, built to answer a specific question before the real thing is built. It includes only what that question depends on, and the rest can be faked.
- User flowA user flow is the route one person takes through a product to finish one task: every screen, action and system response from where they start to where the task succeeds or fails, with each point where the path splits.
- User onboardingUser onboarding is the part of a product that takes a new user from sign-up to the first time the product does its job for them: the setup it needs, the help it offers and the empty screens they meet first.
- UX auditA UX audit is a structured review of how well a product helps people finish a task: one journey worked through as each kind of user would, checked against the evidence available, and written up as findings ranked for fixing.
- WireframeA wireframe is a plain drawing of a screen or page that shows what goes on it, in what order and how it connects to the next, before any colour, type or imagery is decided.
Website
6 termsHow a site is structured, built, moved and kept fast.
- CMS (content management system)A CMS, or content management system, is software that lets people create, edit and publish a website’s content through an editing screen instead of code. It stores content as structured items, such as posts or products, and fills page templates with them.
- Core Web VitalsCore Web Vitals are Google’s three measures of how a page feels to use, taken from real visits: Largest Contentful Paint for loading, Interaction to Next Paint for responsiveness and Cumulative Layout Shift for visual stability.
- Headless CMSA headless CMS stores and manages a website’s content and delivers it through an API, with no pages or templates of its own. Developers build the site separately, in a framework such as Next.js or Nuxt, and fetch the content from it.
- Information architectureInformation architecture is the structure of a website’s content: which pages and content types exist, how they are grouped and named, and how they link to each other. The navigation, the search and the sitemap are all built on it.
- Landing pageA landing page is a web page built for visitors arriving from one source, such as an ad, an email or a campaign, and it asks them to take one action. It repeats the promise that brought them, explains the offer and puts the evidence beside it.
- Website migrationA website migration is a move that changes a site’s platform, domain or URLs, planned so that people and search engines reach the right new page from every old address. Its core is a redirect map that pairs each old URL with its replacement.
Search and AI answers
8 termsBeing found in Google and named by AI assistants.
- 301 redirectA 301 redirect is the HTTP response that tells a browser or crawler a page has moved permanently to the address in its Location header. Browsers go straight to the new address, and Google indexes it in place of the old one.
- AEO (answer engine optimisation)AEO (answer engine optimisation) is work to make a page the source of the answer a search engine or AI assistant gives directly, such as a featured snippet, an AI Overview or a ChatGPT reply.
- Canonical URLA canonical URL is the one address a site asks search engines to index when the same page answers at several. It is declared with a canonical link in the page’s head, and Google treats it as a hint it can overrule.
- GEO (generative engine optimisation)GEO (generative engine optimisation) is work to get a company named, and its pages cited, in answers written by generative AI such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google’s AI Overviews. Nobody can guarantee a citation.
- llms.txtllms.txt is a Markdown file at the root of a website, proposed in 2024, that gives AI tools a short summary of the site and a chosen list of links to the pages most worth reading.
- Schema markupSchema markup is structured data added to a page, usually as a JSON-LD block, that uses the schema.org vocabulary to tell search engines what the page is and what it describes: an organisation, an article, a service, its breadcrumbs.
- SEO (search engine optimisation)SEO (search engine optimisation) is the work that helps a website’s pages get found, understood and chosen in unpaid search results: how the site is built, what its pages say, and what other sites say about it.
- Technical SEOTechnical SEO is the part of search engine optimisation that makes sure search engines can crawl, render and index a site’s pages, each at one address, and that the pages load fast enough for the people who arrive.
Growth
7 termsAds, tests and the work that turns attention into customers.
- A/B testingA/B testing is a controlled experiment that splits people at random between two versions of a page, screen, email or ad, then compares the share in each group who take one chosen action to see whether the difference is larger than chance.
- Conversion rate optimisation (CRO)Conversion rate optimisation (CRO) is the work of raising the share of visitors who take the action a page exists for, such as booking a call or starting a trial, by changing the offer, the page and the form, and measuring the result.
- Creative testingCreative testing is the structured practice of running versions of an ad against each other, each made to answer one question about what makes customers act, and keeping what each round taught for the next round of ads.
- Growth auditA growth audit is a review of how buyers find a company, what its website does with them and where they leave, ending in a ranked list of fixes with the evidence for each and a plan for what to do next.
- Lifecycle marketingLifecycle marketing is the emails and in-product messages a company sends each customer according to where they are with the product, from welcome and activation to retention and win-back, triggered by what they do or stop doing.
- Performance creativePerformance creative is advertising made to be measured: ads produced in sets of variations, so each one can be judged on a tracked action such as a sign-up or a purchase, and replaced when its results fall.
- Social proofSocial proof is evidence that other people have chosen, used or approved of something, such as reviews, testimonials, client logos and customer counts, which people lean on to decide what to do when they are unsure.
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