Branding

Merger and acquisition branding is the process of deciding what happens to the brands involved when two companies combine. That sounds straightforward. In practice, it is one of the most commercially consequential decisions a business can make, and one of the most frequently mishandled. The wrong brand decision after an M&A can destroy customer trust,…

Brand drivers are the specific factors that cause customers to choose one brand over another. They are not values statements or mission copy. They are the measurable, testable reasons why someone picks you, stays with you, or recommends you, and they sit at the foundation of any positioning work that is meant to do more…

Negative branding is the practice of defining a brand by what it explicitly rejects, whether that is a competitor’s approach, an industry convention, or a set of customer assumptions. Done well, it creates sharper positioning than most affirmative brand statements ever achieve, because exclusion forces clarity in a way that inclusion rarely does. Most brands…

Branding culture is the alignment between what a company says it stands for and how it actually behaves, internally and externally. When that alignment exists, the brand feels coherent and trustworthy. When it doesn’t, no amount of visual identity work or messaging refinement will fix it. Most brand problems aren’t positioning problems. They’re culture problems…

A parity brand is one that matches its competitors on the dimensions that matter most to buyers but offers no meaningful point of differentiation. It meets the category standard. It passes the basic test. And it struggles to grow because there is no compelling reason to choose it over anything else on the shelf, in…

Higher ed branding has a serious sameness problem. Visit the admissions pages of ten universities and you will find the same words: “world-class,” “significant,” “community,” “excellence,” “opportunity.” Strip out the logos and you could swap the copy between institutions without anyone noticing. That is not a brand. That is a category description. The institutions that…

Archetypal branding is a strategic framework that assigns a brand a recognisable character type drawn from universal human psychology, giving it a consistent emotional identity that audiences can relate to across every touchpoint. The twelve archetypes, rooted in Carl Jung’s theory of the collective unconscious and popularised in brand strategy through Margaret Mark and Carol…

A brand portfolio is the full set of brands a company owns and manages, each serving a distinct role in the business. Done well, a portfolio lets you reach different customer segments, protect your core brand, and compete across price points without undermining what any single brand stands for. Done badly, it becomes an expensive…