I help leadership teams improve their organisation’s performance, culture and reputation. When they become aligned, they reinforce one another. That’s when businesses become clearer, more coherent and better able to grow.
Organisations rarely fail overnight. They often just become harder to run, and decline is almost always progressive. The frog in boiling water might not be a true anecdote, but it’s a great analogy.
What I’ve observed over the last 30 years is that decline is generally self-inflicted, not through bad intent or bad actors, but because people lose sight of what matters most.
As organisations lose sight of what matters most, complexity accumulates, priorities compete, decisions slow down and standards begin to slip. Customers notice the inconsistency, performance suffers and the financial consequences can be significant.
My experience of working with leadership teams trying to overcome these problems has been that we’ve tended to view and treat them separately.
As issues of performance, culture and reputation.
But I’ve come to believe that they all stem from the same cause.
The strongest organisations align their performance, culture and reputation around a shared purpose. They create clarity instead of confusion, momentum instead of friction, and consistency instead of contradiction.
In short, they make it easier for good things to happen. And that’s where, for me, brand strategy has always come in.
Not as an exercise in logos or communications, but as a practical way of creating alignment across an organisation. When that happens, businesses become easier to run, people make better decisions, and lasting commercial value follows.
If you’re leading an organisation through growth, change, simplification or turnaround, I hope the ideas and stories on this site give you something useful to think about.
It’s one in which performance, culture and reputation reinforce each other. People know what matters, customers experience inconsistency and the organisation becomes easier to run.
Coherence is the outcome, brand strategy is the method. Over 30 years, my clients have all wanted their organisations to perform better, feel better and be more highly regarded. Brand strategy has been the most effective way I’ve found to help them achieve that.
The simple answer is “B2B”, often where the people are the brand. The more substantial answer is “Organisations that have reached a significant point in their development.” Sometimes, that’s been negative, other times it’s been positive. What they’ve usually had in common is that they’ve become more complex than they either wanted or needed to be.
Either after recognising a problem: “We’ve lost our way or focus”; customers are experiencing inconsistency; innovation has slowed. Or around major change: new leadership, M&A, restructuring, need for culture shift. Or (ideally) in anticipation of change: new growth target, international expansion, new leadership, diversification.
By understanding what the organisation wants to become. From that statement of intent, we can determine where the organisation stands in key stakeholders’ minds and therefore set out the strategic imperatives.
Absolutely. And you should expect it to. In all of my client engagements, I can show results including revenue growth, IPO, successful M&A integration, improved innovation, and substantial cost reduction.
Only someone who thinks “brand” is a logo. No organisation has ever improved its performance, culture or reputation just because it has a new visual identity.
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