In this doctoral dissertation, I relate three studies performed to address the challenge of a visual inquiry tool for identity communication in the context of startups and SMEs. The challenge being: how to develop a visual inquiry tool (a tool on which a team of stakeholders with different backgrounds could try and solve their challenge in a designerly way) especially tailored to help them tackle the issue of communicating a coherent brand identity to all their different stakeholders. These three chapters (or studies) have been developed within a design science paradigm of research, which allows to develop knowledge through both theoretical and in the form of artefacts to tackle a practical problem. The main contributions of this dissertation are: 1) a brand identity ontology based on an extensive literature review, which addresses the semantic issues found in the brand identity literature and gives us the opportunity to explore and redefine the concept in terms of a conceptual model and 2) an identity communication map, this is derived from the ontology but is this time directly aimed at practitioners. It addresses the challenge of creating a coherent and structured identity communication especially in the context of startup and SMEs. And lastly, 3) by analyzing existing visual inquiry tools, we derived a design theory for managing any business challenge in a designerly way. This last contribution aims at supporting future designers and researchers when developing such artefacts. The view proposed in this thesis is highly interdisciplinary, but focuses mainly on design and proposes to adopt a new approach when solving management problems.