Stop polishing your brand into invisibility

We spend a lot of time talking about getting branding right. The right underlying strategy. The right logo and colours. The right messaging. All signed off long before anyone outside the room sees it.

The instinct to get it right is often what makes a brand forgettable. Every review round can take out something that someone objected to and often, the objection is to the distinctive bit. By the time everyone has signed off, what’s left is whatever nobody minded.

As Vanessa Bowen, Head of UK Marketing at Orbis Investments, put it:

“The biggest risk is being invisible.”

Invisibility isn’t really a reach problem. It’s what happens when an organisation quietly stops defending the things that made it specific, usually without anyone deciding to.

Insight gives you something to defend

If a rebrand starts with how the brand looks, taste is the only thing anyone can argue about, and taste tends to converge. Everyone in the room has seen the same competitor decks and the same category conventions. The safe answer wins by default because nobody has a reason to reject it.

A stronger starting point is understanding why you’re doing a rebrand in the first place.

For FSCS, feedback from industry showed that its brand wasn’t as easy to use on digital platforms. That gave the rebrand a clear job to do, rather than simply a desire to look different.

As Conor Richards, Senior Digital and Marketing Manager at FSCS, explains: “That was the insight that drove that change.”

Decisions could be tested against whether they made the thing easier to use rather than against whether the people in the room liked them. That’s a much harder argument to win with a personal preference.

Bring people in when the baby is still ugly

An insight only survives if it reaches people while it can still be argued with. Most organisations do the opposite.

“You have to bring them in when the baby is still ugly,” says Alanna Nensel, Global Head of Brand and Central Marketing at Janus Henderson.

It’s an uncomfortable approach. Nobody wants to show work before it’s polished. But bringing stakeholders in early means giving them a chance to engage with the thinking while there’s still time to shape it.

If the first time colleagues see the work is when it’s finished, the only feedback available to them is on the finish. The underlying idea isn’t up for discussion any more, so they challenge the edges instead and the edges come off.

Agencies can be as guilty of this as brands. Walking into a room with something half-formed and no answer to the obvious questions feels like turning up unprepared, so the temptation is always to do one more round first. Every round makes the work easier to present and harder to disagree with.

The question worth asking

Look back at any branding process and ask what got taken out, who took it out and what reason they gave. Most of the time it made someone uncomfortable – and nobody wrote that down.

That discomfort was the useful signal. It got treated as a problem to be smoothed over.

Nobody sets out to build an invisible brand. It’s just what’s left once everyone has been kept comfortable.