Branding enemies, and how to fight back.

Brand-building faces many enemies. Over time challenges arise and bad habits creep up. Small compromises on consistency, clarity, distinctiveness and brand truth easily snowball to dull your brand’s impact and leave you struggling to connect with your audience in a meaningful way. Then, without even realising, you’ve built a brand that isn’t reaching its full potential.

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Strategy can help you fight back, and regain your edge.

Enemy #1: Fragmenation.

Brands evolve over time. And as they form, it’s natural for teams across different departments to develop their own interpretations of what the brand is and what it represents.

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This can lead to a fragmented brand identity, where each team is bringing the brand to life in slightly different ways. Across marketing, product, experience and more, the brand starts to have inconsistent visuals, varied messaging and even convey conflicting values. 

The result: a fragmented brand that is uninspiring for your audience and your team. 

“It’s really rubbish when even senior leadership can’t articulate what our brand is. That’s really upsetting a lot of people.”

‍– DixonBaxi client, articulating their brand challenge.

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How we fight back: strategy means we can unite.

A solid brand strategy sets the long-term vision, defines your creative perspective, aligns the teams’ efforts and creates a cohesive system. It gives you a central idea that can pull together all your activity and outputs, and presents your internal teams with a common goal to work towards.

Enemy #2: Short-termism.

Business moves quickly. 

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The foundational work of brand-building—such as clarifying values, purpose, and positioning—is often left behind in the pursuit of rapid expansion. Brand strategy becomes an afterthought, written quickly in a speedy meeting or left in a perpetual state of ‘work in progress’. 

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When teams lack clarity on a brand’s purpose and long-term goals, they struggle to make decisions for the long term. Instead they end up chasing trends that aren’t authentic, unique or relevant to the brand. 

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The result: a brand will lose its direction and its impact.

‍“We’ve been reactive. Now we need to ‘grow up’ and create a clear direction so we can focus on what comes next.”

– DixonBaxi client, articulating their brand challenge.

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How we fight back: strategy means we can be intentional.

It’s a thoughtful, deliberate place for everything to grow from, without the ground moving. It keeps a brand focused on core truths that can stand the test of time. This means you can avoid quick but ineffective fixes, and also you can be picky—defining ‘what you aren’t’ as much as ‘what you are and want to be’.

Enemy #3: Functional thinking.

Many brands come to market with something they want to shout about: a product feature that no one has done before, a level of service, a quantity or quality of content or product. 

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But over time the market evolves, competitors catch up, and the once-unique idea becomes commonplace.

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The result: a brand that loses its meaning quickly because it is easily replicable.

“We have these ingredients but do we really know what the overarching idea is? No, I can't say that we do.”

‍– DixonBaxi client, articulating their brand challenge.

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How we fight back: strategy offers up an expansive vision.

It is founded in a bigger emotional idea with lasting, truthful significance—that can scale and allow people to connect to it as a business grows and evolves. It is a defence against imitation and pigeon-holing. It gives you meaningful and timeless differentiation that wins people’s hearts and stays in their minds.

Enemy #4: Complexity.

Strategy can seem complicated—the very word suggests something analytical and academic. 

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This expectation makes people add more detail, more layers and more models in an attempt to make it all make sense, cover every base and satisfy every stakeholder. But all it leads to is a strategy that is too complex.

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The result: a brand driven by complicated frameworks without clear direction or actionable goals.

“We’re in a word soup. We need to say what we mean, and mean what we say.”

– DixonBaxi client, articulating their brand challenge.

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How we fight back: a strategy focused on clarity.

In order to swap confusion for coherence, we need a brand strategy that focuses on the essential elements using easy-to-understand and straightforward language. In place of endless frameworks there needs to be a single source of truth that eliminates ambiguity and sets a direction everyone can follow. 

Enemy #5: Lazy thinking.

Some brands struggle to differentiate themselves.

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It’s a human trait to look to the latest trends and proven winners for inspiration. But whether consciously or unconsciously, brand-building becomes an exercise in copying each other and following category conventions.

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Without a clear, distinct brand positioning or identity, brands blend into the background.

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The result: a market flooded with indistinguishable offerings.

“There are a lot more competitors in the marketplace now. We need to give a reason for people to reappraise us.”

– DixonBaxi client, articulating their brand challenge.

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How we fight back: strategy uncovers competitive edge.

A clear brand strategy allows you to think differently about your offer, amongst a sea of others. It gives you a perspective in the category that no one else owns. It takes into consideration what is happening in the world—and looks to the future to understand trends and shifts—to get to a unique sentiment that acts as a hook for an audience to choose you.

‍Claire Langer, Strategy Director.