As long as branding is a silo, it won’t fulfil its promise

GW+Co’s CEO, Gilmar Wendt, makes the case for including strategy and culture from the beginning of rebranding projects, and explains the risk of not adopting this approach.

When I moved to the UK in 1999, BT’s brand book had the title ‘A brand is not a logo’. Twenty-five years later, I don’t think the design industry has successfully established this view. In B2B, at least, most people think of branding as ‘logo and the colours’.

The promise of branding is that it can be the connective tissue of a business. It isn’t just marketing – it can be a unifying force that integrates strategy and culture and touching every function. But is that the case in reality?

Businesses naturally operate in silos, and in many cases, that makes sense – division of labour has its merits. But branding is not like other functions – it should represent the entire business, so treating it as just a marketing job weakens its impact. As a result, branding efforts tend to be too visual and externally focused and fail to integrate the culture and strategic direction of the business. In other words, the design looks great, but nothing has changed.

This is particularly relevant in B2B, because sales teams own the customer relationships, not marketing. Therefore, a new brand promise means nothing if sales don’t believe in it.

Nine years ago, I worked with a €1bn business that had just changed strategy. We were going to help them translate that new strategy into a branding programme. As usual, we started by interviewing stakeholders, and in this process, I met an experienced function manager. He told me, with a wry smile: “Gilmar, I’ve been here for a while. I’ve survived three strategies. I will survive this one.” Here was my real-life experience of Peter Drucker’s famous quip that “culture eats strategy for breakfast.”

The meeting resulted in a wholesale change to our approach and ultimately led to the business I run today, where we integrate strategy, culture and brand by setting up cross-functional project teams, working simultaneously top down and bottom up, and involving people from all areas of the business.

This approach is not just rewarding, it works.

Identec Solutions needed to shift from physical to digital sales during the pandemic, but misalignment between marketing and sales was slowing progress. Involving sales in defining the value propositions stopped the usual finger-pointing and turned them into active participants. Salespeople even started writing marketing blogs, giving them ownership of the message and setting Identec on its path from thought leadership to market leadership.

Yale had a global brand team spread across different regions, many of whom had never physically met and had competing priorities. A structured process brought them together, allowing them to build relationships and make commitments that lasted beyond the project itself. Teams that had previously invested in their individual market activities pulled together, leading to a unified brand identity and shifted internal marketing engagement from 47% to 96%.

Nidec Control Techniques had tried to raise its profile through campaigns with limited results. When the management team engaged in a process that integrated strategy, culture and brand into a single, actionable framework for employees, the company collectively rediscovered its mojo and achieved 20% year-on-year growth with significant market share gains – even through the pandemic.

They had fun, too: the above projects won a total of 17 Transform Awards.

Branding should be simple. But getting to that simplicity takes work. If you take the traditional approach – isolated, marketing-led, agency-driven – you risk spending months and a sizeable budget with little impact.

Instead, take brand out of its silo. Include strategy and culture from the start. Build it through a process that ensures buy-in before launch, not after. Because if you don’t, don’t be surprised when people say: We have a new logo and colours, but nothing else has changed.