Strategic branding for ambitious professional service firms.

I was reading a post recently from a business owner who had made the difficult decision to put their company into liquidation. What struck me wasn’t really the business itself, but the honesty behind what they were describing. The pressure, the responsibility, the constant feeling of trying to make the right decisions while the ground underneath you keeps shifting.

There are more TV channels today than ever before.

Hundreds of them. Streaming platforms everywhere. Infinite choice, on-demand content, personalised recommendations and entire libraries available at the touch of a button.

Yet somehow, most nights, people still end up scrolling endlessly, thinking: “There’s nothing worth watching.”

Modern branding and marketing feel very similar.

I sometimes wonder whether the design industry has become too accessible for its own good.

That probably sounds elitist on the surface, and I don’t mean it in the sense that creativity should only belong to a select few. Some of the best designers, writers, photographers and thinkers came from unconventional backgrounds, not polished agency pathways or expensive universities.

Somewhere along the way, ‘branding’ stopped being about making your company recognisable and started being about producing documents nobody reads.

These days, every business seems to believe they must have 60-page brand guidelines, a sweeping mission statement, a purpose, pillars, archetypes, personas, tone of voice; the whole shebang.