Design can't decide for you.
But once you've decided, it's what brings that decision to life.
When a business owner tells me they need a new brand identity, what they often need first is to make decisions they’ve been putting off for months.
While The Big Decision™ is often being mulled over in solitude, at odd hours, with no structure to it — pricing, positioning, who the business is actually for — design just seems … easier, somehow.
Design can be briefed and bought, which is part of why it gets reached for first: it’s the part of a brand problem you can hand over cleanly. The decisions that need to happen before any design project can be successful can’t be handed off in the same way. They must be made by the person who has to live with them.
Which is not at all the same as saying you have to make them alone, and this is a distinction I care deeply about. These decisions feel enormous largely because of the conditions they’re made in: a fog of half-formed instincts and competing options with no obvious way to compare them. Bring them into a proven process, with someone whose job is to play devil’s advocate and spot the bigger picture, and more often than not — something shifts. The decision stops being scary, because it stops being vague. Very often when I work with clients on the fundamental questions, I find the answer was already there; it just needed dragging into daylight and stress-testing against the actual business.
This work is the part of my job I find perhaps most satisfying of all. And yet, it’s the part that often gets skipped.
A brand identity, by contrast, can be commissioned on a regular Tuesday. It arrives a month or two later, looking all fresh and new and feeling like progress. But if the underlying decisions haven’t been made, what you’ve bought is a more elegant rendering of your own indecision.
The reason this matters commercially comes down to what actually drives brand growth. Kantar’s Blueprint for Brand Growth1 is the most substantial recent work on the question, and the finding that ought to make any founder sit up is this: brands that are meaningfully different to more people command up to five times the market penetration of brands low in meaningful difference, and can hold up to twice the average category price point.
Sit on that for a moment: twice the price point. For being different to the alternatives in a way that matters to the people choosing.
So, let’s look at where difference comes from. Sure, it comes from what you sell, who you sell it to, how you deliver it, and what you charge. But also from what you have decided you will not do. Each of those is a business decision you have to make before even considering a design brief. Design can visualise a difference, sharpen it, and make it stick in people’s minds, but design cannot invent a difference that isn’t there. Ask it to, and you get decoration standing in for strategy.
Design cannot invent a difference that isn’t there.
Rebranding carries a cost even when the work is good. A.G. Lafley and Roger Martin — the former a P&G chief executive, the latter former dean of the Rotman School of Management — made this argument for Harvard Business Review2 with a bluntness I rather enjoy. Their point is that being the familiar default is itself the advantage: people pick the leading option largely because it's the easiest thing to do, and every time they do, that ease compounds into what the authors call cumulative advantage.
A rebrand asks people to abandon that familiarity. Change it, and the customer's response is essentially 'huh?' — they're confused about where the familiar thing went, and you're back competing to establish a new habit.
Which means that if the business hasn’t fundamentally changed, a full-on rebrand is a voluntary reset of a real asset. You’re essentially paying to become slightly harder to recognise in exchange for looking more current. Sometimes that trade is worth it, but that’s a decision you should be making with your eyes open.
[Side note: what many refer to as a rebrand is, in fact, a brand refresh. That’s a different thing altogether, and a process that balances brand recognition and the need to stay visually up-to-date.]
The only question really worth asking before considering a rebrand isn’t a question about design at all. It’s whether the business underneath has decided what it is. Not in a values-on-the-wall sense, but in a pricing, positioning and client-selection sense: the decisions that determine whether there’s a meaningful difference for design to express.
If those decisions are made, design will do extraordinary work for you.
If they aren’t, the answer isn’t to make them alone in the dark before you’re allowed to hire anyone. Instead, go find someone who’ll sit in the difficult decisions with you until they’re made — and who can then build the thing that expresses them, without anything getting lost in the handover.
If you think I might be that someone for your brand, I’m currently accepting new clients and would love to talk.
Warmly,
https://www.kantar.com/campaigns/blueprint-for-brand-growth
https://hbr.org/2017/01/customer-loyalty-is-overrated