Worth far more than most people realize and needed much sooner than they think.
I was at a spiritual retreat when I nearly talked myself out of my own career.
It was dinner, and the conversation found its way to what everyone did for a living. When it got to me, I hesitated. I had recently invested in a brand strategy certification, which was expensive and time-consuming, and at that particular moment, not exactly paying off. I was spending so much time trying to explain what brand strategy actually was that I had stopped filling my pipeline with the clients who needed it.
So when a man named Brad turned to me and asked what I did, I said something I had never said before. “I used to say I’m a certified brand strategist. But maybe I’m just a designer.”
Brad didn’t hear the maybe; he heard brand strategy. He leaned in and said his team had been talking about their brand. Could I tell him more?
What followed was a refreshingly lively and memorable conversation from nearly two decades ago. It illustrated something I had been struggling to articulate. Brad’s skepticism about brand was common and completely reasonable. And it was pointed at the wrong problem.
He was the CEO of a global consulting firm working primarily in the oil sector. His company helped massive organizations find and fix inefficiencies, saving them extraordinary amounts of money. Their main competitor was McKinsey. Their challenge was simple: they were struggling to explain themselves to new prospects.
When Brad said his team wanted to look at their brand, what he understood them to mean was a new logo. They felt the existing mark looked dated. Brad had designed it himself, years earlier, and he was not exactly enthusiastic about replacing it. So when I shared that a real brand process had little to do with whether the logo stayed or went, he relaxed. When I told him it started with going deep inside the business to understand what was genuinely different and why anyone should care, he got very interested.
Then the real conversation began.
Brad wasn’t dismissing strategy. He simply thought “brand” meant logo. I understood this because by then, branding had become synonymous with visual identity for many business owners. If that had been my understanding of brand, I probably would have been skeptical too.
The leaders who dismiss brand are wrong about what brand can be, although that is not entirely their fault. Large enterprises like Apple never lost sight of brand as a strategic discipline. It stayed in the C-suite, shaped culture, guided decisions and drove enterprise value. But for privately held and small to mid-sized businesses, the strategic option was never made accessible. What was offered instead was branding—logos, websites, campaigns—without the supporting foundational work to build upon. So leaders delegated brand to marketing because they didn’t know where else to put it.
Brad had never been offered a strategic option. What he had been offered was branding. And branding, without the foundation beneath it, is as disappointing as he expected it to be.
I spent time learning the business from the inside out. What they actually did, where they created the most value, how they were different from every other firm promising to improve efficiency.
What emerged validated what Brad already knew but had never been able to say clearly enough. His firm’s engagement extended beyond the report. His team coached the recommended changes until they stuck. In the oil sector, where the same inefficiencies tend to reappear the moment outside consultants leave, that was worth a great deal. Brad told me a story that captured it perfectly. Two workers on the floor, months after a consultant had come and gone, look at each other and one says, “What were we supposed to do when this happens?” The other shrugs, “I don’t know. Just go back to doing it the way we’ve always done it.” His firm made sure that conversation never happened by actually installing the change. They stayed until the new way was the only way anyone knew. That distinction was significant. They just had no way to say it in a way that truly landed.
They also had so many names for their different service offerings that prospects could not follow them. There was no brand architecture holding any of it together, no clear way for someone on the outside to understand what they were buying or why it mattered. Brad’s team was working hard to explain a business that was not easily explainable.
Once they understood that distinction, other things became obvious. Their services had multiplied over the years, each with its own name. Prospects couldn’t follow how the pieces fit together. Sales conversations became longer than they needed to be because the business was trying to explain complexity instead of communicating clarity.
What we discovered was something that had always been true about the business but had become murky as it grew. The distinction Brad’s firm offered was already there, in how they worked, in what their clients actually experienced, in the promise they were keeping every time they stayed to install the change rather than just describe it. The brand work clarified it, validated it and gave it an easier way to communicate within the organization and out into the market.
Brad chose a new logo in the end. He held the old one and the new one side by side before making his decision. By then, though, the logo was no longer the point. The clarity and positioning were the point. The language his team now had to walk into any room and explain, in the same way, what they did differently and why that was actually better.
I have watched this pattern repeat across thirty years of work with owner-led businesses. The skepticism about brand is valid for what they have experienced. However, the skepticism is wrong about what brand can be when it is done earlier and in the right order.
Brand is not the finish; it is the foundation. And the leaders who understand that early on tend to pave the way to substantial growth and a great culture.
I walked into that retreat wondering if I should stop calling myself a brand strategist. I left reminded that the problem was never the work, it was the word.
Brand has become one of the most misunderstood words in business, which is unfortunate because when it is understood correctly, it holds tremendous value. Brad understood the difference before dinner was over. I’ve spent the years since trying to help more leaders understand it too.
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