Your Rebrand Won't Save You
Most companies rebrand when they should reposition. They change their logo when they should change their strategy. They refresh their visual identity when they should reconsider who they're for and what they're for.
Most companies rebrand when they should reposition. They change their logo when they should change their strategy. They refresh their visual identity when they should reconsider who they're for and what they're for.
This is not a coincidence. Changing aesthetics is easier than changing strategy. It's visible, it feels like progress, and it doesn't require making anyone uncomfortable. The problem is that it doesn't work.
A new typeface cannot fix a broken positioning. A color palette cannot create differentiation. A design system cannot compensate for strategic confusion.
If your brand problem is strategic, a visual solution will fail. Every time.
The Seduction of the Visible
Brand identity is tangible. You can see it. You can present it. You can get approval on it. You can launch it. This makes it attractive to organizations that need to demonstrate momentum.
Strategy is abstract. It's a set of decisions and constraints. It's what you won't do, which is harder to visualize than what you will. It's a point of view about the market, which is harder to get consensus on than a color choice.
When a brand struggles, the instinct is to fix what's visible. The logo looks dated. The website feels stale. The packaging doesn't match what competitors are doing. These observations are often accurate. What they're not is strategic.
You can have a beautiful brand identity attached to a commodity positioning. You can have exceptional design in service of an undifferentiated strategy. This is very common. It's also very expensive and very ineffective.
What Actually Drives Brand Performance
Brand performance is determined by strategic clarity:
What you stand for that's defensible
Who you're for that's specific
What you won't do that's meaningful
Why someone should choose you over an alternative
These are strategic questions. They're not answered by designers. They're answered by people willing to make hard calls about market positioning, competitive dynamics, and customer needs.
Once you have strategic clarity, design can express it. Good design makes strategy visible and actionable. It creates coherence. It builds recognition. It signals position.
But design cannot create strategy where none exists. It can only reveal the absence of it.
The Tell
Here's how you know if a brand problem is strategic or executional:
If you changed the logo and kept everything else the same—the positioning, the pricing, the product, the target customer, the distribution—would the problem be solved?
If the answer is no, you have a strategy problem. Spending money on identity won't fix it. It will just make the strategy problem more visible and more expensive.
Why Organizations Default to Identity Work
Identity work is legible to non-strategists. Everyone has an opinion on fonts and colors. Everyone can see a logo. This makes it easier to socialize and get buy-in.
Strategic work is not legible in the same way. It requires market understanding and competitive analysis. It involves trade-offs that make people uncomfortable. It produces documents that are less satisfying to review than mood boards.
The result: organizations skip the hard strategic work and go straight to the visible identity work. They tell themselves they'll figure out positioning later. They don't. What they get is a pretty brand with nothing to say.
What Good Strategy Looks Like Before Design
Before you touch the visual identity, you should be able to answer these without hedging:
What's the single most important thing your brand stands for?
Who is this for, specifically, and who is it not for?
What customer need are you meeting that's not well served currently?
What would you have to believe about the market for this positioning to work?
What are you willing to sacrifice to maintain this position?
If you can't answer these clearly, you're not ready for design. You're ready for strategy.
The Actual Sequence
Strategy first. Always.
Strategic clarity determines:
What you say
Who you say it to
How you price
What products you build
What channels you use
What partnerships make sense
Identity comes after. It expresses the strategy visually and verbally. It creates a system for consistent execution. It makes the abstract tangible.
This sequence matters. Do it backward and you get a gorgeous brand with no strategic foundation. You get design that doesn't know what it's expressing. You get creative work that makes everyone feel good in the presentation and confused in the market.
The Uncomfortable Reality
Most rebrands fail not because the design is bad but because the strategy is absent. The organization wanted the perception of change without the substance of it. They wanted a new look without new thinking.
This is a choice. It's often a rational one. Real strategic repositioning is risky. It requires leadership to take a position. It means some people in the organization will disagree. It might mean walking away from current revenue while you build new revenue.
Refreshing the visual identity is safer. It's also useless if the underlying strategy is weak.
What This Means for Your Brand
If you're considering a rebrand, start by auditing your strategy:
Do you have a clear, defensible position?
Can everyone in leadership articulate it the same way?
Does it drive decisions about what you do and don't do?
Would a new logo change any of that?
If the answer to the first three is no, don't rebrand. Reposition first.
If the answer to the first three is yes, then design can help express that positioning more effectively. It can create coherence and recognition. It can signal quality and position. But it's in service of strategy, not instead of it.
The Filter
Most brands will keep doing surface-level refresh work because it's easier to sell internally and faster to execute. They'll keep wondering why the new identity didn't move the business metrics. They'll blame the design, or the market, or the timing.
The opportunity is to do the actual work. To get the strategy right first. To make the hard calls about positioning. To refuse the comfort of aesthetic change without strategic substance.
This requires a different kind of discipline. It requires patience. It requires leadership that values clarity over consensus.
If you're not willing to do that work, don't hire a designer. You're not ready for one yet.
Differentiation Is Not Optional
Most brands don't fail because they're bad. They fail because they're the same.
You know this already. You've sat in the meeting where someone suggested "best-in-class customer service" as a differentiator. You've watched a positioning document describe the brand as "innovative, customer-focused, and results-driven." You've approved marketing that could have your competitor's logo swapped in without anyone noticing.
The question isn't whether differentiation matters. The question is whether you're willing to accept the consequences of actually differentiating.
The Problem Isn't Awareness
When a brand struggles, the first instinct is to blame visibility. Not enough ad spend. Not enough content. Not enough reach. This is comforting because it suggests the solution is additive. More of something.
But visibility only works if people can tell you apart. Most brands are perfectly visible. They're just indistinguishable. Being seen while being generic is not a positioning problem. It's a brand execution problem masking a strategy failure.
The uncomfortable truth: your competitors have the same media budget anxieties you do. They're running the same playbook. The winner isn't the one who runs it harder. It's the one who stops running it.
Differentiation Requires Subtraction
Here's what actually differentiates a brand: what it refuses to do. What customers it turns away. What needs it won't meet. What language it won't use.
Most brands can't do this because the people who fund them and the people who lead them believe growth comes from inclusion. Serve everyone. Appeal to all. Offend no one. This is not strategy. It's cowardice dressed as pragmatism.
Real differentiation forces a choice. It creates tension. It makes some people uncomfortable. It means saying no to revenue you could have taken. It means accepting that some segment of the market will never be yours—and wouldn't be profitable if it were.
Strategy is choice, and choice is loss. If you're not losing something, you haven't chosen.
The Center Is Crowded
When you try to appeal to everyone, you end up in the middle of the market. The middle is not a bad place because it's morally wrong. It's bad because it's tactically stupid. Every other risk-averse brand has made the same calculation. The center is the most competitive, most commoditized, lowest-margin space in any category.
Your brand has three options:
Compete in the middle on operational efficiency and price. Possible if you have the cost structure. Most don't.
Differentiate and compete on something other than price. Requires strategic clarity and discipline. Most won't.
Pretend you're differentiated while actually occupying the middle. This is what most brands do. It doesn't work, but it feels safe.
The middle is where brands go to die slowly.
What Differentiation Actually Looks Like
Differentiation is not a tagline. It's not a visual identity. It's not tone of voice. These are expressions of differentiation. They are not differentiation itself.
Differentiation is a structural choice about what the brand is for and who it's for. It shows up in:
What products you don't make
What distribution channels you avoid
What customer problems you ignore
What partnerships you refuse
What price points you won't compete at
If your differentiation can be copied by changing a few words in a deck, it's not differentiation. It's decoration.
The Real Cost
The reason most brands avoid real differentiation isn't because they don't understand it. It's because it requires conviction in the face of short-term pain. It means watching potential customers walk away. It means explaining to a board why you're turning down business. It means accepting that your growth curve might be slower while you build something defensible.
Most leadership teams will choose the appearance of safe, broad appeal over the risk of real positioning. This is a rational response to the incentive structures they operate in. It's also why most brands are forgettable.
Differentiation is not a creative exercise. It's a business decision with consequences. The consequence of differentiating is that you become something specific. The consequence of not differentiating is that you become nothing in particular.
Both have costs. Only one has a future.
"And" Is the Enemy
Every weak positioning statement contains the word "and."
We're premium and accessible. We're innovative and reliable. We're for enterprises and small businesses. We're experts and generalists.
This isn't strategic thinking. It's conflict avoidance. When a brand tries to be two opposing things, it's usually because someone in the room had enough political capital to avoid being told no. The result is a positioning that looks like a compromise because it is one.
Strategy is not consensus. It's a series of hard choices that force trade-offs. If your positioning doesn't exclude something meaningful, you haven't positioned anything.
The Fantasy of "Both"
The desire to have it both ways is understandable. Markets reward scale. Leadership wants growth. Investors want expansion. If you can be premium and affordable, you capture more of the market. If you can serve enterprises and startups, you have more opportunities.
The problem is that being two things requires two business models. Two sales approaches. Two product roadmaps. Two marketing strategies. Two operational realities. Most brands don't have the resources to do one of these well, let alone two simultaneously.
What actually happens: the brand does neither well. It's not premium enough to command premium pricing. It's not accessible enough to win on price. It confuses both audiences and satisfies neither. The brand becomes stuck in a liminal space between two positions, unable to execute either with the commitment required to win.
You cannot be both. You can only be one, or you can be mediocre at both. The market does not reward mediocrity at scale.
Why "And" Feels Safe
Including "and" in your positioning feels like smart business. It looks like strategic flexibility. It sounds like you're not leaving money on the table. It suggests you understand market complexity.
What it actually signals: you're afraid to choose. You're unwilling to defend a point of view. You'd rather be vague and inoffensive than clear and polarizing. You want to win without competing.
The comfort of "and" is that it delays the hard decision. It pushes conflict into the future, where it will express itself as poor execution, confused customers, and mediocre results. By then, the people who made the decision will have moved on or the blame will be diffuse enough to avoid.
This is not strategy. It's institutional cowardice.
What Strategic Clarity Actually Requires
A real positioning decision means choosing one thing and accepting everything that comes with that choice. This includes the parts you don't like.
If you position as premium:
Your volume will be lower
Some customers won't be able to afford you
You'll need to justify the price constantly
Your brand needs to perform at the premium standard every time
If you position as accessible:
Your margins will be thinner
You'll need operational efficiency
Some customers will question your quality
You'll compete with others doing the same thing
Neither of these is comfortable. Both come with real constraints. The point is not to avoid the constraints. The point is to choose which constraints you're willing to accept and build a business model that works within them.
The Discipline of "Or"
Successful positioning is built on "or." You're this or that. Not both. The entire strategy flows from this choice.
This requires discipline at every level:
Product development: what features do we build, what do we ignore
Pricing: what does our price signal about our position
Marketing: what language and channels match our choice
Sales: what customers do we pursue, what do we decline
Partnerships: what associations reinforce our position, what dilute it
If your positioning contains "and," you haven't done the hard work yet. You've documented the political stalemate and called it strategy.
The Test
Here's how you know if your positioning is real:
Can you name three types of customers or opportunities you've explicitly decided not to pursue? If not, you haven't positioned. You've just described yourself in generous terms and hoped the market will figure it out.
Real positioning creates constraints. It makes some decisions easy because they're clearly out of bounds. It makes some opportunities irrelevant because they don't fit. It makes the organization uncomfortable because it forces prioritization.
If your positioning doesn't make someone in the organization uncomfortable, it's not positioning. It's a permission structure to keep doing what you're already doing.
What This Means for You
Most brands will continue to use "and" because the alternative requires leadership to take a position and defend it. It requires accepting that growth might come from depth rather than breadth. It requires believing that being something specific is more valuable than being broadly acceptable.
This is a harder sell internally than "we can have both." It requires explaining why limiting the opportunity set actually increases the odds of winning. It requires patience while the market understands what you stand for.
Most won't do it. They'll keep hedging. They'll keep trying to serve everyone. They'll keep wondering why their marketing doesn't work and their competitors are eating their lunch.
The opportunity is not to convince them. The opportunity is to choose differently and capture the ground they're too afraid to claim.
Strategy is not additive. It's subtractive. Every "and" you remove makes your positioning stronger. Every "or" you commit to makes your execution clearer.
The question is whether you have the conviction to choose.
AI: Turbocharge Your Next Campaign
Ever feel like Don Draper but with 10 times the deadlines? Well, that was me—tasked with crafting a cinematic masterpiece for a company turning yesterday's trash into tomorrow's architectural wonders. But thanks to Midjourney, I achieved the advertising equivalent of light speed. Here’s the lowdown.
Why Midjourney is the Creative Espresso Shot You Didn’t Know You Needed
In the mad rush of the advertising world, we're all chasing that elusive blend of inspiration and efficiency. Well, folks, I've found it—and its name is Midjourney. Imagine needing to whip up a cinematic gem for a company that turns trash heaps into chic construction materials. Sound daunting? Not with Midjourney at your side. This AI-powered wonder lets you churn out storyboards faster than you can say "Cannes Lions."
Let's talk practicality. You've got a brilliant idea. You've got a tight deadline. What you don't have is a month to scout locations and hire a film crew. Enter Midjourney. Feed it a script, and you've got instant mockups that'll make your clients think you've sold your soul to the creative gods.
The Eureka Run: Trash to Treasure, Reimagined
Ah, the birth of a creative concept—it's almost like magic, isn't it? But for me, it's a bit sweatier than pulling a rabbit out of a hat. I'm a long-distance runner, you see. As I hit the cobblestone streets of Copenhagen, my mind starts running too, only faster and freer. It was during one such invigorating run that the idea crystallized: "One man's trash is another man's treasure." But here's the twist—the word 'treasure' morphs into the name of my client's upcycled building materials right on the screen! A clever play on an old saying that packs a punch and turns waste into wonder. Imagine the camera panning from depressing mountains of landfill waste to captivating scenes of beautiful, sustainable buildings. All thanks to the ingenuity of upcycling. So if you're stuck in a creative rut, perhaps what you need isn't another brainstorming session, but a good, long run. It’s my secret sauce for generating brilliant ideas, and it could be yours too.
Not Quite a Mind Reader, but Close Enough!”
But let's get real: AI isn't perfect. If you're looking for an exact replica of your client's custom, upcycled flooring, Midjourney might leave you hanging. But for getting your big idea across? It's pitch-perfect. Besides, a few limitations are a small price to pay for dodging the logistical nightmares of a full-scale shoot.
So, future clients, here's my unsolicited advice: use Midjourney as your creative wingman. It’s like the friend who helps you with your homework—only instead of algebra, it’s your million-dollar campaign. You get to test-drive your wildest ideas, without risking your budget or your reputation.
Davinci Resolve! This is where the raw generated content took on its final form. Editing allowed me to tinker with the film's flow, ensuring a natural progression of ideas and fine-tuning the messaging. What emerged was a refined draft that captured the spirit of the brand.
And... Cut!
So, if you're looking to hyper-speed your way from 'just an idea' to 'let's roll the credits,' Midjourney's your co-pilot. It's the espresso shot your creative process didn’t know it needed, and your ticket to cruising through deadlines with flair.
In a world rapidly transforming, where consumption often outpaces reflection, we are reminded of an age-old saying: 'One man's trash...' Yet, what if we could reimagine this narrative? What if the discarded and the forgotten could be given a new purpose, a second life?
Crafting 'HMW' Questions:
Ready to redefine your strategic thinking? Dive into the transformative power of 'How Might We' questions. This is where intellectual ability meets creative jazz.
Unlock the door to your organization's biggest challenges, one 'How Might We' question at a time. Because sometimes, the quietest questions yield the loudest impact.
“How might we”: The Secret Sauce of Stellar Strategy
Ready to redefine your strategic thinking? Dive into the transformative power of 'How Might We' questions. This is where intellectual ability meets creative jazz.
Introduction: Elevate Your Game, Strategists!
Greetings, creative minds and brand strategists! Are you yearning to break free from the humdrum of conventional brainstorming? Do you desire a strategy session that’s not just another meeting but a carnival of ideas? Well, you're in for a treat. Behold the power of 'How Might We' (HMW) questions, the unsung heroes in the strategic design realm. Stick around; we're about to have some fun.
Why 'How Might We' Questions? A Brief Encore
Let's get the basics down first. Why are HMW questions causing ripples in the ocean of strategic planning? Because they are like that spritz of lime in your mojito—absolutely essential. They:
Fuel creativity like caffeine on a Monday morning
Shift the spotlight to solutions, not just sob stories
Encourage every Tom, Dick, and Harriet in the room to speak up
Produce insights that you can actually run with, not just jog beside
If you’re in search of a creative revelation, these questions are your guiding star.
The Art of Crafting 'How Might We' Questions That Resonate
Clearly Identify the Problem: The Root of the Matter
Understanding the problem at hand is step numero uno. This isn't the time for vague platitudes; get specific. The clearer the problem, the better your HMW questions will be.
The Open-Ended Question: A Creative Playground
We're brainstorming here, not administering a true-or-false quiz. Your questions should be open-ended to invite a bouquet of solutions. It’s like opening Pandora’s box, but in a good way.
User Focus: Your North Star
Your user is your polestar. They're the main character in this strategic drama, and we're all just supporting actors. Make your questions as user-centric as a bespoke suit.
Simplicity Is Key: Elegance over Extravagance
While we're all for sounding intelligent, a simple question is often the most potent. Let’s not make our strategy sessions feel like deciphering a cryptic crossword, shall we?
Positive Vibes Only: Optimism’s the Word
No one ever solved a problem by complaining about it. Frame your HMW questions in an uplifting manner, and watch how the room's energy changes. Good vibes only, folks.
Specific, Yet Open to Interpretation
HMW questions should be specific enough to guide the discussion but not so narrow that they stifle creativity. Think of it as a jazz improvisation—structured yet free.
Actionable Insights Await: Time to Get Things Done!
Once you've wrapped up the question-asking shindig, you should be armed with actionable insights. And yes, they should be actionable, not just ‘ponderable.’ Let's get moving!
Real-World Examples to Fan Your Creative Flames
Forget "Why are our customers as engaged as a piece of wet cardboard" Think "How might we turn our customer journey into an epic adventure?"
Instead of "Why aren’t we hitting sales targets?", try "How might we redefine our sales strategy to be the talk of the industry?"
Ditch "Why is team morale in the basement?" for "How might we cultivate a workplace atmosphere where enthusiasm skyrockets?"
Conclusion: Your Turn to Shine
There you have it — your playbook for creating 'How Might We' questions that elevate the game. These are not just questions; they’re the seeds of your next big innovation. So why not let your strategic imagination run a little wild?