The question businesses often ask is:
"What will we get back if we invest in branding?"
It is, no doubt, a very good question.
But it can create a difficult standard to meet, because your brand touches every part and every person in your organisation, and it's shaped by hundreds of decisions they make every day.
It contributes to whether people recognise you, whether they understand your offer, whether they trust you, whether they remember you and whether they choose you.
Those things matter to revenue.
Sadly though, they don't always show up in a CRM dashboard labelled "brand stats".
We expect brand to behave like a performance marketing channel when it is actually part of the infrastructure of the business.
A connected brand gives people a clearer basis for action. It protects the work you have already done, improves the decisions being made now and supports where your organisation is going next.
Sometimes brand loses the budget fight because the team or agency has not made the right case for it.
Too often the work is presented as a set of outputs and fixed deliverables, like a logo, a strategy document, a set of guidelines or a new website.
While valuable, these are not the reason the work matters.
Brand work only delivers a return when it changes how the organisation works.
A connected brand gives people a clearer basis for action. It protects the work you have already done, improves the decisions being made now and supports where your organisation is going next.
Suddenly, it becomes clear why brand work actually has the strongest argument for remaining in the budget.
Brand should be accountable. It has a clear strategic purpose, and the people responsible for it should be able to explain how their work contributes to the business.
But we shouldn't pretend that every valuable thing can be reduced to a dollar value.
The better question is whether the brand is helping the business make better decisions and compete more effectively.
Does it give the business a clear starting position to work from?
Does it make the value of the offer easier to understand?
Does it create a reason for people to choose you?
Does it help the organisation make confident choices?
Does it build something that becomes more valuable over time?
If the answer is yes, I'd have thought the return, both financially and in the other kinds of value that matter to your organisation, was pretty clear.
Brand is losing the budget fight because it's losing the argument.
When brand is presented as a vanity project, it is easy to see it as discretionary.
When it is presented as something that helps the business compete, grow and make better decisions, it's irrefutable.
That doesn't mean there aren't other important expenditures.
Sometimes the right decision is to spend the money somewhere else.
But brand shouldn't lose because it is seen as a nice-to-have.
Because as I've written before, you're not avoiding branding by not investing in it. You're just surrendering control of it.
And not investing in it could be costing your organisation more.
