What does getting your branding wrong cost?

Branding isn’t the logo

A logo is how you’re recognised. Everything else is what decides whether you’re chosen.

When people talk about getting branding wrong, they usually mean a bad logo. That’s the smallest part of it. Your brand is what buyers believe about you: who you’re for, what you’re good at, and whether you’re worth the price. The logo, the website and the deck are just where they check.

So getting branding wrong usually isn’t one bad decision. It’s a business that has moved on while its brand stayed where it was.

Signs your brand has fallen behind the business

The business is better than its own presence, and you’re the only one who knows.

• You apologise for the website before you send the link.
• Sales has quietly rewritten the deck because the official one doesn’t fit any more.
• The website, the deck and the proposals describe three slightly different companies.
• The enquiries coming in are smaller than the work you want.
• New starters can’t explain what you do without checking with someone.

Where it costs you

None of these costs arrive as an invoice. That’s why they get ignored.

• Shortlists you never see. Buyers price you on what they see. If you look smaller than you are, you’re left off lists you should be on, and nobody tells you why.
• Price. A dated or muddled brand invites the price conversation early. Looking like a cheaper business makes it harder to charge what the work is worth.
• The wrong enquiries. The brand attracts the buyers it describes. If it describes the business you were five years ago, that’s who gets in touch, and your team spends the week filtering them out.
• Hiring. Good candidates look you up too, and they compare you with whoever else has offered them a job.
• Time and money spent twice. Nothing matches, so files go missing, suppliers guess, and every new deck and campaign gets rebuilt from scratch.

AI tools repeat what your site says

If your brand is out of date, AI tools will repeat the old version to every buyer who asks.

Buyers now ask ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google’s AI answers about businesses before they visit a website. Those tools build their answer from what your site and others say about you. If your site still describes the old business, or tells three different stories, that’s the version they pass on, and you’re not there to correct it.

It works the other way too. When we changed our own positioning and put it on the website, the AI tools started describing us differently within a few weeks. A clear, consistent brand gives them something solid to repeat.

Getting the rebrand wrong costs too

The fix can be as expensive as the problem if it’s done in the wrong order.

The best-known example in the UK is still Royal Mail renaming itself Consignia, then going back to Royal Mail within about a year. The new name described a corporate structure, not anything customers cared about, and it threw away one of the most recognised names in the country.

B2B rebrands go wrong in quieter ways, but for the same reasons:

• Designing before the strategy is agreed, so the work gets judged on taste and the amends never end.
• Treating the logo as the brand, and expecting a new one to change how people see the business.
• Throwing away recognition that took years to build, because nobody checked what it was worth.
• Treating launch day as the end. Launch day is when you find out if you were right, and only if you set a baseline first.

Working out what to fix first

Audit before you spend anything. Keep, change or drop, in that order.

Lay out everything your brand appears on and sort it into three lists: what to keep, because it works and people recognise it; what to change, because it’s right in spirit but dated or inconsistent; and what to drop, because it no longer fits who you serve.

The free 9 step rebrand audit walks you through it. It often shows the problem is the message rather than the look, which is quicker and cheaper to fix. If you’re not sure which it is, here’s how to tell a rebrand from a refresh.

And if you’d rather have an outside view, our rebrand audit gives you a straight answer: rebrand, refresh or neither.