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RETHINK
BRAND NOTES
ISSUE 01 /
Growth doesn’t always mean getting bigger. Sometimes it means becoming clearer, more focused and better able to compete. As businesses adapt to a tougher market, the story around them needs to adapt too.
Put Growth Into Perspective
Matt Nowell /
29 September 2026 at 12:00:00
/ 5 mins
What happens when the business changes faster than the brand around it?
Growth feels like a strange thing to write about at the moment.
For plenty of businesses, the immediate question isn’t how quickly they can expand. It’s how they protect margin, keep customers, win new work and make sensible decisions in an uncertain economy.
And perhaps that’s exactly why this conversation matters.
Businesses don’t stop changing when growth gets harder.
Services get reshaped. Teams change. Markets move. Customers become more cautious. AI changes how work gets done. Companies focus on the things they do well and quietly let go of the things that no longer make sense.
The business that emerges can look quite different from the one its brand was built to describe.
That’s the gap I’m interested in.
Growth looks different right now
Businesses use words such as responsive, specialist, personal, straightforward, trusted and expert all the time.
They sound like brand language. They also create very practical expectations.
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If you say responsive, customers expect somebody to respond.
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If you say specialist, they expect access to people who really know the subject.
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If you say personal, they expect to feel recognised rather than processed.
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If you say straightforward, the experience should require less effort.
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If you talk about partnership, the relationship needs to feel different from a transaction.
Those expectations move quickly from language into delivery.
That’s why I think a useful brand promise should also work as a service standard.
People inside the business should be able to look at it and understand what it asks of them.
Businesses still change when markets slow down
A customer might only interact with two or three people. They still experience much more of the organisation.
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They experience how well information moves between teams.
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They feel the quality of a handover.
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They notice when one person knows what another has already promised.
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They experience the decisions made by operations, finance, project management, technology and leadership without ever meeting those people.
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A delayed approval can become a slow response.
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Poor information can become a repeated question.
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A rigid process can make a supposedly personal service feel generic.
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A lack of authority can leave good people unable to solve something simple.
The customer sees the outcome.
The cause often sits much further inside the business. That makes service excellence an organisational discipline.
Your brand promise becomes credible at the moment somebody inside the business has to act on it.
The cost of an outdated story
The timing matters.
UK businesses continue to operate cautiously.
In September, 29% of trading businesses said economic uncertainty was affecting turnover, while 28% had reported falling turnover in August. Office for National Statistics
Customers are becoming more deliberate too.
The July 2026 UK Customer Satisfaction Index found that value, competitive pricing, product or service quality and being easy to deal with had all become more important to customers over the previous six months. Institute of Customer Service
That combination changes the standard.
When customers are scrutinising expenditure, the experience has to reinforce the decision they made.
Qualtrics’ 2026 global consumer research, based on 20,000 consumers across 14 countries, found that good customer service was associated with 92% satisfaction - higher than good value for money.
That doesn’t make service a substitute for value.
It shows how strongly customers respond when the experience works.
Clarity has commercial value
Most businesses can deliver impressive moments when everybody is paying attention. The harder test is the everyday experience.
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The first response.
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The project handover.
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The update when nothing dramatic has happened.
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The moment something goes wrong.
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A change in scope.
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An invoice query.
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The follow-up after the work is complete.
These moments rarely appear in a brand strategy presentation. They are where customers decide what the company is actually like. And that means service excellence cannot depend entirely on exceptional individuals repeatedly saving the day.
It needs enough shared clarity that people can make good decisions consistently.
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What does good look like here?
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How quickly should we respond?
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Who owns the next step?
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What should happen when something goes wrong?
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Where can somebody use judgement?
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When do we escalate?
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What would make this experience feel like us?
Those are brand questions too.
Focus can be a form of growth
This becomes particularly important as businesses grow. A founder who once knew every customer personally hires a team.
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Specialists become departments.
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Projects become processes.
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Informal conversations become systems and handovers.
The things that once created a great experience almost instinctively now need to become repeatable.
That can be difficult.
Because growth often removes some of the conditions that created the original excellence.
The founder has less contact.
Senior specialists become further removed from day-to-day delivery.
New people learn the process before they fully understand the intent behind it.
Efficiency becomes important.
Standardisation appears.
Those things can support growth.
The challenge is keeping the qualities customers valued in the first place visible inside the experience.
That is one reason I think brand has a useful role internally.
A good promise gives people a reference point for decisions.
This is probably the point I feel strongest about.
Businesses often assume becoming more distinctive means inventing something new. Sometimes it does. Quite often, the more useful work is already inside the organisation.
The challenge is finding it.
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A particular capability that customers value.
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An approach people use without having given it a name.
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Years of specialist expertise buried behind generic service descriptions.
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An unusual combination of skills.
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A strong philosophy that has never made its way onto the website.
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Stories everyone inside the company knows and nobody outside ever hears.
I think good brand work should surface those things before it starts creating new ones.
There are three simple questions I find useful when looking at this problem.
01
SAY
Are you expressing something specific enough to belong to your business?
02
SHOW
Does the way the business presents itself support that story?
03
PROVE
Can people see enough evidence to believe you?
The brand has to earn the attention
B2B buying increasingly happens before a sales conversation takes place.
People research.
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They ask colleagues.
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They read.
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They search.
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They use AI.
They form impressions long before you know they exist.
The 2025 Edelman–LinkedIn research found that 91% of hidden buyers regard thought leadership that identifies previously unrecognised challenges or needs as a hallmark of quality. More than three quarters said they were more likely to champion proposals from businesses that consistently produced strong thought leadership.
That gives expertise a job to do before anyone fills out a form.
It has to be visible enough to create confidence.
Make the difference easier to see
This doesn’t automatically lead to a new identity.
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Sometimes the problem is messaging.
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Sometimes the evidence is weak.
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Sometimes there is plenty of good material, but it lacks structure.
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Sometimes the digital experience makes a sophisticated business look surprisingly ordinary.
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And sometimes the identity genuinely no longer represents the quality or character of the organisation behind it.
The useful work starts by finding the gap.
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What is genuinely strong about this business?
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How much of that can somebody recognise from the outside?
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What is getting lost between the two?
Once those questions become clearer, the creative decisions become much easier. Because sometimes the business doesn’t need to become more interesting.
The difference is already there. People simply need to be able to see it.
In this note
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Why strong businesses look generic
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Difference needs expression
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Make expertise easier to read
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Say. Show. Prove.
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Make the difference visible
