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Brand naming best practices come down to a short list of principles that are easy to state and surprisingly hard to execute: the name must be distinctive, easy to say, legally available, and capable of carrying meaning at scale. Most names that fail do so not because the team lacked creativity, but because the process…

Archetypes in branding are a framework for giving a brand a consistent, recognisable character, drawn from Carl Jung’s theory that certain personality types are universally understood across cultures. Applied to marketing, they give brand teams a shared language for how a brand should feel, speak, and behave, from advertising to customer service to packaging. When…

A brand refresh is a deliberate update to how a brand presents itself, typically covering visual identity, messaging, tone, or positioning, without replacing the brand entirely. Done well, it closes the gap between what a brand says it is and what the market actually experiences. Done badly, it creates confusion, alienates existing customers, and solves…

Branding analysis is the process of evaluating how a brand is performing across the dimensions that drive commercial value: awareness, perception, differentiation, consistency, and competitive positioning. Done properly, it tells you not just where a brand stands today, but why it stands there and what needs to change. Most organisations run some version of this…

Distinctive brand assets are the sensory and visual cues that trigger immediate brand recognition without the brand name being present. A colour, a shape, a sound, a character, a typeface. When they work, they do something that most marketing cannot: they make recognition effortless and compound over time. Most brands have fewer genuine assets than…

A functional brand is one that earns its place in a customer’s life by doing something useful, consistently and reliably. It doesn’t rely on emotional storytelling as its primary asset. It competes on what it actually does, how well it does it, and whether customers can depend on it to do it again. That sounds…

Multibrand marketing is the practice of managing two or more distinct brands within a single organisation, each positioned to serve a different customer segment, price point, or market need. Done well, it lets a business compete across multiple fronts without diluting what any individual brand stands for. Done badly, it creates internal confusion, cannibalisation, and…

A subsidiary brand is a distinct brand that operates under the ownership of a parent company while maintaining its own identity, positioning, and sometimes its own market presence. The parent may be visible or invisible depending on the strategy, and that choice carries real commercial consequences. Getting this decision wrong is expensive. Build too much…

Customer experience branding is the practice of making your brand real through every interaction a customer has with your business, not just through advertising and visual identity. It treats each touchpoint, from the first search result to the post-purchase email, as a brand expression that either builds or erodes positioning. Done well, it closes the…

Own label brands, also called private label or store brands, are products manufactured by one company and sold under a retailer’s brand name. For decades, branded manufacturers treated them as a low-quality fallback for price-sensitive shoppers. That framing is now dangerously outdated, and the brands still operating on that assumption are losing ground they will…