RETHINK
BRAND NOTES
ISSUE 02 /
Difference is not always obvious.
Matt Nowell /
13 October 2026 at 12:00:00
/ 5 mins
Some businesses have far more expertise, capability and value than their public brand makes easy to see. The issue isn’t always what the business can do. It’s what customers can recognise from the outside.
When your expertise has evolved, but the brand still tells an older story.
I keep coming across businesses where there is clearly something good underneath the surface.
Deep expertise. Years of experience. Specialist knowledge. Strong client relationships. People who really know their subject.
Yet you would struggle to work all of that out from the outside.
Visit the website and the language sounds much like everyone else.
Look at the services and they are described accurately, but without giving you much sense of why this particular business is good at them.
Scroll through LinkedIn and there is plenty of activity, but very little that builds a recognisable point of view.
The expertise is there. The difference simply isn’t visible enough.
Buyers can only judge what they can see
This sounds obvious, but I think businesses forget it.
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You know the history behind your company.
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You know which clients call when the problem gets difficult.
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You know the experience sitting around the table.
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You know the methods, relationships, judgement and lessons that have taken years to build.
A potential customer knows none of that. They see what you make available to them.
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Your website.
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Your people.
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Your content.
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Your case studies.
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Your identity.
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Your sales material.
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The way you describe an offer.
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The evidence you choose to show.
From those signals, they begin building a picture of the business.
And they can only value the expertise they can recognise.
If your expertise is difficult to recognise, your market cannot value it properly.
Strong businesses can still look generic
This is where things become interesting.
Generic brands don’t necessarily belong to generic businesses.
Often the opposite is true. The business has grown through relationships, reputation and doing good work. The people inside it understand what makes it good because they experience it every day.
That knowledge rarely gets translated clearly enough for someone encountering the company for the first time. The result is familiar.
“We put customers first.”
“We deliver tailored solutions.”
“We are passionate about what we do.”
“We work in partnership.”
All perfectly reasonable things to say. They could also belong to hundreds of competitors.
The expertise has been flattened into category language.
If your expertise is difficult to recognise, your market cannot value it properly.
Difference needs expression
Kantar talks about brands being Meaningful, Different and Salient, relevant to people, distinct from alternatives and easy to bring to mind. Its research argues that difference has a significant relationship with long-term brand performance.
For me, there is a useful business question hiding inside that thinking:
What can your customers recognise about you that they could not easily say about someone else?
It doesn’t need to be revolutionary.
Your difference might come from the problem you understand particularly well.
The way you approach it.
The combination of expertise you bring together.
A method you have developed.
A particular philosophy.
An unusually strong body of evidence.
The experience customers have when working with you.
The role of brand is to make those things easier to see and easier to connect.
Visibility doesn’t mean saying more
This is becoming harder because businesses can now produce an extraordinary amount of content.
AI has made writing, designing and publishing much faster.
That creates a temptation to solve a visibility problem by increasing volume.
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More posts.
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More articles.
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More campaigns.
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More pages.
I’m not convinced volume is the answer when the underlying story remains unclear. A business can become highly visible and still be difficult to understand.
In B2B, there is good evidence that the quality of what a company communicates can affect how its expertise is perceived.
The 2025 Edelman–LinkedIn B2B Thought Leadership study surveyed nearly 2,000 professionals and found that 53% of decision-makers said strong thought leadership made brand recognition less important when assessing a company. It also found that hidden buyers actively use expert content to evaluate potential suppliers.
That is particularly interesting for smaller specialist businesses.
You may never have the awareness budget of the largest company in your market.
You can still become the company that explains the problem better.
Make expertise easier to read
I think this is where design and strategy have to work together.
Take a specialist engineering business.
The expertise might exist in its people, technical processes and decades of project experience. Putting a new typeface around the same generic message will reveal very little of it.
The brand needs to translate that expertise.
That might mean showing real projects rather than relying on generic imagery.
Turning a complex methodology into something customers can grasp quickly.
Giving senior specialists a visible point of view.
Building case studies around the problem solved and thinking applied.
Creating a visual language that feels specific to the organisation.
Connecting claims to proof at the point where somebody is making a decision.
Each change makes the business easier to read.
Sometimes the difference is already there
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.
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SAY
Are you expressing something specific enough to belong to your business?
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SHOW
Does the way the business presents itself support that story?
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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
