Branding & Brand Strategy

The creative side of marketing tends to be mistaken for branding. Marketers think of branding in terms of the design elements of a marketing campaign such as logos, colors, naming, etc. Although marketing comes with a creative element, what makes branding important is whether customers are likely to trust your business. It’s not about how creative you are or how good your design elements are, it’s about how you are able to sell the trust.

Rebrand or Refresh

When companies begin asking if they need a rebrand most of the time they actually just need to refresh. A brand begins to feel stale when its design and tone begin to feel outdated and stale to its customers. A rebrand involves shifting to a new name and a new positioning for your company. Fundamentally, a rebrand is needed when a shift in business direction calls for it. Most business shifts actually call for greater focus on brand design elements, positioning, and marketing message, etc. Shifts in this area tend to be less costly and faster to implement.

Why “authentic” isn’t a buzzword – it’s a differentiator

Repetition has made the phrase “authentic branding” appear in nearly every branding-centered article published over the last year, which has dulled its meaning. That said, there is a real shift happening right below the surface of that phrase. AI generated imagery is beginning to permeate stock photography, illustrations, and even video. People are beginning to not only recognize, but dismiss this imagery as well. Compared to this, real photos of employees and real photos of workspaces, showing the slight imperfections are truly standing out from the crowd.

That doesn’t warrant complete avoidance of AI tools. In fact, they can be great for quickly testing ideas and drafting in a rapid design sprint. That said, the public facing assets, the assets potential customers see when considering whether to use your business, are most definitely worth budgeting for real photography. It does so much for a company’s image and is incredibly cost effective. It’s a very small cost when looking at the return on investment.

Do values actually influence buying decisions?

It can be rather tough to take values-driven branding with a pinch of salt, and some of the texts out there on this subject tend to be the marketing consultants’ own ‘take” on a value-based branding framework. However, let us not confuse values-based marketing with a faceless business hiding behind a ‘service page’ with generic, banal, and stock copy. There is a good deal of truth in the statement that potential clients and patrons will trust a business that is willing to put its identity behind it.

This does not mean having a mission statement in the employee restroom. It rather means being willing to describe the reasoning behind certain decisions that have been made. In the case of a small business, such an approach is an advantage compared to a large business. A big business cannot “scale up” personal commitment the way a small business can.

A message that wraps a sentence. For businesses, if you need a paragraph to describe the uniqueness of your business, it is not there yet. Businesses that are remembered can answer the question “why you, not somebody else?” better in a single sentence without equivocating.

Small scale visuals. A design that only looks good in large formats, as lightweight as they may be, can quickly become a fragmented mess when scaled to smaller dimensions, like a thumbnail, phone screen, or printed card. Wildly bad post-final design testing.

Where branding fits for this business

Branding is the component of this strategy that everything else (e.g. SEO content, paid ads, small business advice content) fits within. Ranking pages, ad clicks, all still need to influence a potential customer to your product or service. That is the function of branding and not other domains, e.g. SEO or PPC.

UK trending branding data unsourced, originally published in 2026 industry research: Cuco Creative, Mattdarm, Prox Digital Agency; reported findings are considered directional obvservations of industry trends.