Love isn’t efficient

Think about the relationships that matter to you – your partner, your friends, your family. None of those relationships are built through efficiencies and cost-saving. Nobody has ever felt loved because someone found a quicker way to spend time with them.

Love grows through time invested and effort you can see. That effort says you’re worth it.

Brands work the same way. We talk a lot at KISS about love being the most commercial thing a brand can own, and effort is how that love gets built.

When a brand puts visible effort in, it shows the brand believes in what it’s doing as much as it wants its audience to. That’s a commitment to them, and commitment is where trust starts.

Put two pieces of work side by side – a piece of OOH, for example. Same brief, same idea, same results in market. One was made by a team of people over a few weeks. The other was generated in an afternoon. Tell people which is which, and most will value the human one more, simply because someone cared enough to spend the time.

That isn’t just a hunch. Psychologists call it the effort heuristic. Back in 2004, researchers found people rated the same poem and the same painting higher when they were told it had taken longer to make. We’ve always judged quality partly by how much effort we think went in.

Why effort is getting turned up on the attention dial

For most of history, effort has been a given – it was simply the cost of making anything. AI has changed that. Output is now close to free, so the difference between something made and something generated is often the first thing people pick up on.

Gold works in a similar way. It isn’t valuable because it’s useful; it’s valuable because it’s rare and hard to get out of the ground. When everything can be produced instantly, work that clearly took time becomes a declaration in and of itself. It costs something to make, and that cost is exactly what people value.

AI is amplifying the effort heuristic.

Building up an intolerance

We’re flooded with instant slop, and people are getting quicker to reject it. Younger audiences especially – anything that looks remotely AI gets dismissed as “AI slop,” often regardless of whether it’s any good. That can be harsh, and sometimes unfair. It’s still the market that marketing directors and CEOs are now working in. The first judgement a piece of work gets is “did anyone actually make this?”

A declaration of care

Games Workshop is a brand I reference a lot. Back in January, CEO Kevin Rountree used the half-year report to outline an internal policy that keeps generative AI out of its design and creative processes – designing miniatures, writing lore, creating artwork. They aren’t cutting creative jobs either. Rountree says the company is hiring more creatives across concepting, art, writing and sculpting. And this came alongside record half-year results for a business that has been in the FTSE 100 since the end of 2024.

Games Workshop is making a declaration to a fanbase that spends hundreds of hours painting armies by hand: the effort you put in will be matched by the effort we put in.

Now that’s a love-building stance.

Compare that with Coca-Cola leaning on AI for its Christmas ad again last year, or Google’s “Dear Sydney” Olympics spot, which suggested a child let AI write her fan letter and was pulled within days. Both brands reached for the machine in exactly the place where their emotional relationship with people lives. Christmas is Coke’s heartland. A child’s letter to her hero is about as personal as it gets.

Trust is at a premium right now. Saying you care has always been cheap and now the words are literally free to generate. Effort is the proof.

Where it’s worth doubling down

So for marketing leads and CEOs, the question isn’t whether to use AI, it’s when the world is rushing to get more done with AI, where is it worth doubling down on effort?

My answer is wherever the relationship with your customer is being built. That includes the ideas and identity at the heart of the brand, because that’s where your soul lives and it shouldn’t be averaged out by a tool trained on everyone else’s.

It includes the moments customers actually touch, like a reply from a real person, packaging someone obviously sweated over, or a service experience that goes a step further than it needed to. And it includes the stuff your own team sees.

We hold ourselves to the same line at KISS. AI is integrated into our processes but it’s never the final output.

Let the machines handle the admin. Spend the effort where it can be seen.

Welcome to the high-effort era. I suspect it will separate the brands that say they care from the ones that can prove it.

‘Marketing should be about mindsets not demographics’ – a line I picked up early in my career and held closely ever since. I was taught early on to shun demographics entirely as they merely operate on the surface level and, given modern life, don’t reflect anything true about the people they’re supposed to. Demographics speak nothing to how their mind works and what they want. That requires getting to know them more.

As a business evolves over time, introducing new departments, offerings or off-shoots, the coherence of the brand, its meaning and what it stands for, gets diluted, pushed and pulled across many uses and needs. Every now and then this needs to be pulled back together and unified – made sense of.

But what about the audiences? As a business grows, often the number of audiences grows too, and so does the need to service and connect with all of them. When you sit in a room with a business that has five audiences with nothing in common on the surface, the segments stop helping entirely. You wonder what to do.

Having many audiences creates paralysis and confusion internally – decision making gets stuck, who are we writing this to? What matters to them? And even when the customer base is clear, there’s usually a host of other audiences that need addressing, like shareholders, membership, employees perhaps the general public. Each one has skin in the game, for a variety of different reasons.

Not all of them buy, but some of them enable and some of them block. A shareholder never becomes a customer, a regulator never converts and an employee doesn’t purchase, but they carry the whole thing. Which is why the unifying thing you’re looking for has to sit at the level of what the business is for, not what it sells.

Finding the thread

The good news is that when a business has multiple audiences, there is almost always a shared truth that unifies them, waiting to be discovered. A bridge between what’s unique and true to the business, and what’s uniquely needed and true to the audience.

It might be a need for resilience or protection. It might be experience elevation. There are often truths that overlap, and when you target that, you can speak to them all. It starts with getting super clear on their core drivers, and seeing what unifies them. That creates a base idea to focus on. Then for each audience the language is tailored to the situation – the communications adapt for those contexts while still being held by an overarching truth that stays relevant to them all.

One warning though. Unify badly and you go drifting off into the sea of blandness, which happens all too often. You end up with the overlap of everything. True of everyone, distinctive to nobody. That’s because you’re not looking for what’s common across your audiences. You’re looking for what’s deep enough to hold across them, and deep takes digging.

The fear driving that is usually the same one: talk to a single audience and you’ll push the others away. But it’s worth inverting. Nobody feels spoken to by a message aimed at everybody. The businesses that genuinely pull multiple audiences do it by being vividly specific about one truth, not by being carefully neutral about several.

First Milk

A dairy cooperative dealing with big blue chips on one side, independent family farmers on the other, and a large number of stakeholders and employees as an employer brand. All with widely different needs and priorities. How does a brand connect with all of these at once?

It was a case of looking at each audience by sector – interviewing, researching, and getting a strong base understanding of what matters to them and how First Milk directly serves it.

For the farmer membership, the primary and short-term desire is getting paid for the milk they make, everyday for a fair price. Followed closely by the long-term need of stability: riding out economic and climatic turmoil, and ultimately being able to pass their legacy on to their children.

For the buyers and customers, the primary concern is different. Is our milk supply guaranteed to arrive? Is the supply chain robust enough to keep going?

And for the First Milk staff and teams themselves — will they still have a job next year, or six months from now?

All of these things are what First Milk, through its organisation, structure and fundamentally regenerative initiative, can serve. All of these audiences want future-proofing. How does regenerative agriculture fit into all that? Well it future-proofs the soil, the farm, the supply and ultimately their livelihoods. That’s the thread that ties them together. To live and work with stability and certainty in their lives. A farmer in Cumbria, a procurement lead at a blue chip and someone in the First Milk office share nothing a segmentation model would ever put in the same box. They share a mindset.

Going regenerative, First Milk is more able to make that happen – securing the future for all of these people.

The positioning of the business, its communications, language and identity all lean into that single idea, and therefore create a meaningful connection with each of them. Adjusting language to suit their needs, but still leveraging that main hook.

Bleiker’s Smokehouse

The same mechanism, in a completely different place. For Bleiker’s it meant reframing the audience away from premium smoked salmon, which frankly everyone including supermarket own label is already saying, and toward experience elevation.

It turns out people eat smoked salmon for a myriad of reasons. Paleo diets. Smoke-a-holics. Those who use it as a showpiece when hosting; status seekers. Health fanatics and protein maxxers. And those who just love to treat themselves to a fancy breakfast at the weekend.

What are they all looking for that Bleiker’s can uniquely deliver?

In this case, they were all at different levels looking to elevate their everyday experiences, through that salty, smoky, delicate melt-in-the-mouth taste. Making breakfasts even tastier, making healthy eating even tastier, the show-piece that one step better.

With that established there’s one focus, and plenty of flex to apply language to. For Bleiker’s, this laid the groundwork for the creative hook ‘The Home of Smokecraft’ which deliberately speaks to that need. A vital piece of strategy work helped generate a 30% increase in like-for-like sales. Simply by deeply understanding what the many audiences want from the brand.

When there isn’t a thread

Sometimes there isn’t one, it’s worth being honest about that.

If a business has bought or built something that genuinely isn’t the same business, no amount of digging will produce a truth that holds across both. Forcing one just gets you back to the average. That’s the point where the judgement to create a sub-brand, or another brand entirely, comes into play.

The work is knowing which situation you’re actually in. Sometimes there is a thread and it just hasn’t been found yet, sometimes there isn’t, and the right answer is architecture.

Where it lands

Most brands we work on have this exact challenge. Every time it comes back to the unique source of truth. True-need matched with true-value, or as we call it; Soul to Society.

It’s often about finding the unique factor that only that brand is best at solving or offering, and matching it to an audience need. That’s when a brand kisses.

Applied to B2B or B2C, whether it’s a food brand with multiple eaters, families, fitness enthusiasts, or a big corporate enterprise with various reasons to buy, they’ll share a core agenda. It just takes a bit of uncovering to find it.

When a business doesn’t dig deep into this, its messaging and identity fragments. When it does, there’s one idea holding everything together, and enough room underneath it to speak to everyone properly.

Mindsets, not demographics. It’s an instruction to stop describing them at all, and go looking for what they’re all actually after.

Nobody hated Woolworths.

When the last shops closed in early 2009 the country was sad about it. Sincerely sad. Sad enough to produce newspaper columns about pick ‘n’ mix and the smell of the record racks. But almost none of the people writing them had been shopping there.

Brands don’t die of being hated. Being hated at least means somebody is paying attention. They die of being fine. Ok. Middle ground. Of being a business people are quite fond of and never quite choose.

And they rarely get there by getting worse. They get there because the distance between what the business is and what people understand it to be widened, slowly, until nobody could see what separated it from anything else in the category. That distance is the gap. Closing it is how a business gets chosen rather than tolerated, which makes being loved a commercial position rather than a sentimental one.

Signs you’re being tolerated

The gap shows up commercially long before anyone in the business realises its a brand problem.

You’re discounting to win work you’d have won on merit previously. Sales cycles are longer, there are more competitors at your heels, and there’s more explaining to do before anyone will talk about money. Good candidates don’t self-select in any more, which means you’re selling the job rather than watching people want it.

None of those show up as a brand issue, they show up as a sales problem, a marketing problem, a recruitment problem. That’s why the gap gets to run for years.

Ask five people

The cheapest diagnostic available costs an afternoon. Ask five people in the business, separately, three questions. What does this company do. Who is it for. Why does anyone pay more for it. Separately matters.

Then count the different answers – that variance is the gap. Ask the sales team what they get asked twice, because the second question is always the one your brand failed to answer the first time. Ask anyone who joined in the last six months what surprised them. New starters can still see the business clearly.

If the CEO and the finance director describe the business differently to the same investor, you already have your answer.

The best time is before it hurts

Most gaps get looked at when they start causing big problems. The better trigger is structural: new leadership or an MBO, a funding round, a merger, a move into a new market, a listing win that suddenly puts you on a shelf beside better-dressed competitors. The last one, the business hasn’t changed at all, but the audience has.

The moment to act is six to twelve months before the consequences of that trigger land, while there is still money, attention and a time runway.

Wait until it becomes a pinch and you end up briefing and buying under duress, not from a position of control. The decision gets driven by urgency, which can lead to surface level problems being solved, not the root cause.

The ones who never let it open

July this year Coca-Cola launched a new global visual identity across more than two hundred markets, built with JKR. The brief, in the company’s own framing, was to make Coca-Cola more Coca-Cola: so the team took the script, the red, the ribbon, the Arden Square and push them harder everywhere the brand appears. It follows a 2021 update aimed at the same thing.

There is no significant gap at Coca-Cola. They spent anyway.

That’s the pattern across the businesses that stay ahead of this, in B2B as much as consumer. Coca-Cola has a global vice president of design. Stripe runs an in-house brand studio that commissions research into its own visual motifs. IBM has had a design policy since 1956, which is why a mark drawn in 1972 still holds up a company that has reinvented itself three times since.

The mechanism is that there are people’s who job to keep that gap tight or fully connected. It never becomes unbearable because it gets reviewed on a regular basis, not in a crisis.

Many business even above £10m have brand sitting nowhere in particular in their leadership responsibilities, often sitting with marketing, which is a channel in it’s own right, not sitting at board level where it should.

And before the obvious objection: the smaller you are, the cheaper the maintenance. A £20m business doesn’t need an internal studio. It needs one honest annual review and a senior given the accountability to put against it. The cost is minimal against the cost of not.

However, reinvestment is not the same as reinvention. Reinvestment takes what a business already owns and makes it work harder – sharper, more consistent, more present. Nothing changes hands. Reinvention swaps the asset out – equity that took years to build gets written off and the business starts again from a lower point.

Burberry did it once, than had to redo it, four years apart. In 2018 the brand retired its equestrian knight – in continuous use since 1901 – for a stripped-back wordmark and a new monogram. In 2023, under a new creative director, it brought the knight back. Peter Saville, the designer behind the 2018 identity, later said as much himself: replacing it again within five years was reckless, and not wise for a company of Burberry’s size to abandon continuity like that.

The cost was the switching. Every relaunch spends the recognition built by the one before it, and asks the market to relearn the brand from a standing start. Do that twice in five years and you’re not investing in the brand, you’re refinancing it, at a worse rate each time.

Reinvestment compounds what you already own. Reinvention spends it.

Two directions, and most only consider one

So what does closing the gap actually look like?

There are two answers. You can change the story so it describes the business. Or you can change the business so it deserves the story.

Almost everyone assumes the first, which is how you end up with a rebrand that flatters something not yet true. The gap reopens within eighteen months, because you can’t be loved for something you aren’t. M&S is the other route: the retail business got materially better first, and the brand work caught up to describe a company that had already earned the description.

Both are legitimate.

The gap is closed when your team can say the same thing without the deck in front of them, when the reason to pay more survives being said out loud to a sceptical buyer, and when somebody chooses you and can tell you why.

What it looks like in numbers

The gap is a brand problem, but it shows up as a commercial one. Which means when it closes, the effect shows up in the same place.

Bleiker’s Smokehouse had 25 years of reputation in Yorkshire for smoking fish and a brand that said none of it. Sat in the seafood aisle, it read as an 80s dinner party starter. It was repositioned as The Home of Smokecraft and rebuilt the portfolio around the smokehouse itself.

Like-for-like sales on existing lines grew 30%. Same fish, same recipes, same smokehouse. Listings with existing retailers went from 60 regional stores to 260-plus nationwide in Morrisons, with new multi-SKU listings won elsewhere. ROI landed inside four months.

Dense Hair Experts were selling a world-first preventative range that looked like a barber shop supplement. Monthly sales moved from £22k to £52.3k. Average order value went from £29.99 to £68.57 – the same customers, choosing to spend more than twice as much, because the brand finally justified the price. Online conversion rose from 0.4% to 2.3%. Post-rebrand, Dense secured up to £1m of investment to scale globally.

Neither business invented a new product to get those numbers. They closed the distance between what they already were and what the market understood them to be, and the money followed.

The cost of getting it wrong

Everywhere else in this issue the gap opens slowly, which is why it’s so easy to blame something else. Tropicana opened one (sort of) deliberately, and it hit them badly.

Tropicana, 2009. PepsiCo replaced the orange-and-straw carton design with a plain glass of juice, backed by a $35m campaign, which led to shoppers unable to find it. Per Information Resources data reported by Ad Age, unit sales fell 20% and dollar sales 19% between 1 January and 22 February. Roughly $33m of juice, not bought. On 23 February the packaging was scrapped, less than two months after launch. Their competitors all picked up the slack.

Tropicana removed the two things that made it recognisable at a glance. Seventeen years later Coca-Cola spent a considerable sum making its equivalent assets more prominent. Same argument, opposite ends.

Love or die.

Nobody sets out to be tolerated, it happens by default. A business keeps getting better at what it does, never updates the account it gives of itself, and the two drift apart until people stop choosing it.

The businesses the market is indifferent about are almost always the ones that were indifferent about their brand first. It sat with marketing as a channel rather than at board level as an asset, and the drift went unnoticed because noticing was nobody’s job. Indifference inside produces indifference outside. It just takes a few years to show up in the numbers.

That’s what love or die means. So go ask five people, three questions, separately. That’s where it starts.

I use AI to stop me wasting energy on the wrong things.

You can make anything with it now. Doesn’t mean you should. So forget image generation, forget the design and layout tools. The most valuable thing AI can do for a brand is act as a filter. In other words, disagree with you.

LLMs allow us to tap into the consensus of the entire planet and decades of thinking at the click of a button – and be able to apply that brain power to your business. That’s nuts.

But it’s only as good as the thing you’ve set it up to do. Most businesses have a strategy deck. Very few have it written in a form you could hold a decision up against, which is why most people end up with an AI that butters up everything they say and calls it genius.

The practical version is building a skill in Claude, or a gem in Gemini, or whatever your tool calls it, and creating a permanent set of instructions or standards it loads before it answers. Ours hold the fit filter for new business, the standards work has to clear, the rules for how we write and the principles any strategic decision gets measured against. It sits where anyone in the business can use it.

“This is going against everything you’ve deliberately been moving away from” is the most useful push back and holds me to account on even the smallest decisions.

Written once, properly, as a team. Applied every time since. That’s the point it stops being a clever writing tool and starts being a mentor that’s awake at all hours.

Up at night with a thought, run it past your digital counsel and it’ll lay it out plainly – forget it, delegate it, or build it in. Back to sleep.

AI is not making decisions for us, rather it’s a voice that raises questions and challenges our thinking against the strategy we’ve given it. It has to be set up to argue, though. An AI that agrees with you is a yes-man that steadily fills you with hot air and is worse than having nothing. “Tell me where this breaks the plan” needs to be in there explicitly.

The hard part of leading isn’t having ideas. It’s knowing what to cut, what to leave alone, what not to follow, especially when a plan takes years to come into shape and the pressure to change course arrives weekly. Almost every bad call I’ve made came from somewhere other than the plan. Fear of a quiet quarter, or a competitor’s campaign landing in the inbox at 7am and everything getting reshuffled by lunchtime. Fear and novelty both make a very convincing case at the time.

Every one of those pulled real energy off the plan and put it somewhere that couldn’t compound. That’s the actual cost, a fortnight of energy spent in the wrong place.

A prospect landed on my list a few weeks back that I really wanted to work with. Great brand, right sector, name I’d have enjoyed telling people about. Ran it against the fit filter I’d written down months earlier – no fresh trigger, spend nowhere near the threshold – failed on both. Two years ago I’d have spent days drafting a proposal that wouldn’t have gone anywhere.

The same thing happens at every scale. I nearly adopted a blanket rule about never competing, because someone I rate holds it. Tested against what we’d actually written down, it fell apart – turning down a pitch and entering an effectiveness award aren’t the same act at all. And copying a rule because you admire the person holding it doesn’t hold up against the strategy. AI reminded me of that fact.

The rules were already written, I just needed something to hold me to them.

It won’t tell you whether your strategy is right. Only whether you’re still on it and where you haven’t looked.

Half the team is off. The rest are carrying work that isn’t theirs. Then in a fortnight you swap and repeat.

That’s August in most businesses. School holidays land, the rota gets thin and everyone tries to carry on like it’s a normal month. For some it’s peak – hospitality, leisure, travel, food and drink, anything that lives off the school holidays. Most seen, by the most people, plenty of them meeting you for the first time. And it’s the exact month head office is at its emptiest.

Which brings me to the most-read piece of copy your company will produce all month.

The out-of-office autoreply. Customers, suppliers, the person deciding whether to send you a brief – all of them get one, all of them read it, and it lands in seconds when nothing else about you does.

They get typed at 4.55pm on the last Friday by whoever remembers, and they read like a parking notice.

Which is odd, because you’d never let any other piece of work out of the door like that – packaging or a pitch deck. The autoreply gets a pass because it feels like admin. That’s exactly why it’s worth doing. Not a gag – nobody needs a whimsical autoreply. Just useful, and unmistakably you. Who to contact, when you’re back, said the way you’d actually say it.

Because a brand that kisses is obsessed at that level. On the stuff nobody’s grading. Every touch is a chance to build something with the people on the other end of it, and the ones that get skipped are always the ones that don’t feel important enough to bother with.

August is made of those. The enquiry answered in four days instead of four hours. The social post signed off by someone three rungs down who’s never been told what good looks like, because the person who knows is in Cornwall. The complaint handled by someone covering a job they don’t really understand, doing their best, with no guardrails to work from.

The ones carrying the extra load are usually grafting harder than they would normally. It’s structural. The standard was being held in somebody’s head, and that somebody is on a beach.

Brands that kiss make it integrated and embedded instead. Templates, guides, onboarding. Standards talked about, visible, consistent, so a stand-in can’t get the tone wrong. Rules for what can go out without a second pair of eyes and what genuinely can’t. One person, named, holding sign-off each week, and not always the same person.

Dull, unglamorous stuff. It’s also the difference that makes a brand that holds all year round persistently.

So who’s holding the standard when you’re two cocktails down on Mykonos? Or better, have you built the thing that means nobody has to?

Everyone outside of brand wants to stick their nose in. When actually brand should be sticking its nose everywhere.

You don’t get many people poking around the pricing model. Or the supplier contracts, the warehouse layout, the payroll system. But everyone has a view on the logo, the name, the packaging, the principles. Brand is the one function that invites universal commentary, because it’s the only part of the business you can have an opinion on without being an expert in.

That’s usually the complaint. It should be the argument. If brand is everyone else’s business, everyone’s business is brand’s.

Because brand is experienced at every touchpoint, so brand has a claim on every touchpoint. The job ad. The pricing page. The onboarding email. The customer service script. The invoice. The out-of-office. The retail staff training. The CRM cadence. Customers never see the identity system – they see the delivery date, the price rise, the refund email, the person on the phone, the job ad they scrolled past. All of that is the brand.

So brand has the right to butt in.

I saw this with a property developer. The vast mixed use development as a whole is the product. Everything – the buildings, the routes between them, the planting, the coating on the fencing, every little detail combines to make the product. That’s what someone feels when they stand there. Every one of those decisions is a brand decision, and most dont come near a brand person.

Nobody would let the finance team pick the red on a Coke can.

I think the reason brand people don’t butt in isn’t a lack of bravery. It’s often not being asked to be involved to begin with: in a lot of businesses a brand is still read as the aesthetics function, so a view on pricing architecture gets heard as the logo person having opinions about money. A general misunderstanding that these are brand issues. The risk is also asymmetric. Stay quiet and the brand erodes slowly – incoherence has no author, there’s nobody to blame. Speak up and slow a launch by a fortnight and you’re to blame. You’re the reason Q4 slipped. Obstruction is attributable in a way that erosion never is. And by the time you’re looped in it’s past. Objecting then turns you into the blocker. So brand learns that intervention equals friction, and stops.

The fix is being in the room earlier, not arguing harder later. Turn up with a commercial argument rather than an aesthetic one. Ask a question rather than issue a verdict. Bring the customer, not your taste – not being the arbiter of what’s nice, but the person who spends the most time with what customers actually believe. That’s a legitimate seat and it isn’t a taste claim.

Which really means the brand controller should be in every meeting where a decision gets made. That is the job.

And September is the moment. Q4 planning, budgets getting signed, everything moving fast. In September you can still shape it. By November you’re just objecting to it.

When entering a new market, it has already decided what your category means before you turn up.

You get read against whatever is already there, by people who worked out what this kind of business is for long before they heard of you – you don’t get to explain yourself from scratch. Which means you only own your words if you were early enough to define them. Arrive later and, unless you’re willing to spend a fortune breaking it, you inherit the meaning the category already carries, whether or not it’s the one you’ve spent a decade building at home.

Zambrero is a quick example. Feel Good means generosity and a good time in Australia, but something closer to low-in-calories in Britain. More on that soon.

Getting this wrong is the difference between a market entry that flies and one that flops. It’s eighteen months and real money spent building a perception somebody else already owns, competing with businesses you didn’t think you were competing with, at a price ceiling you didn’t set. Moving into a new country and a new culture unsettles the whole operation more often than anyone plans for, and sometimes not in the most obvious places.

What’s true about a business doesn’t change when it crosses a border. How it’s understood does. Most brand problems are drift problems: the company changed, or grew, or got sloppy, and what it looks like came apart from what it is. This one is different. It happens to companies that are brilliant at home. Same truth, same expression, same everything, and the gap still opens, because this time it opens from a cultural difference.

It goes unchecked because of how people work rather than how businesses do. We have an uncanny ability to treat our own culture and viewpoint as the obvious one, which leaves us blind to the alternatives, and both readings feel entirely self-evident to whoever happens to be holding them.

Sometimes that does actually work in our favour.

KitKat arrived in Japan in 1973 as an ordinary British chocolate bar. Decades later Nestlé noticed sales spiking every January, went looking for why, and found that Japanese customers heard kitto katto as kitto katsu, meaning surely win, or never fail. The bars had become a gift for students sitting university entrance exams, and a way for parents to signal support without saying good luck outright and adding to the pressure.

This was in no way planned, nor possible from the home country. What Nestlé got right was noticing, and then amplifying rather than correcting.

The practical reality is you can’t ask people in a new market what you mean to them. They’ll read your positioning back at you. Instead, ask what else they considered instead. The competitive set they put you in is the answer.

Once you know, there’s a decision to make. Fit the frame you’ve been handed, or build the strategy on breaking it. In Zambrero’s case that’s the difference between becoming a health brand in Britain and going after what feel good means here on purpose. Both are real options and both can work.

Drifting in with no decision is the expensive one. You end up with a meaning either way, you just didn’t pick it.

Imagine if you had special glasses that automatically blanked out the news from your life. How different would your mood be? How often would you actually notice anything that’s bombarded at us 24/7?

Now imagine that in business. If an organisation was completely ignorant of the news, how differently would it behave?

Probably less hedging, less uncertainty. It would act with conviction and plough on with its strategy.

So much of what we take in is conjecture and mood-driven, not based in reality. Markets move on feeling as much as fact. As much as I value and understand the importance of a free press, I often question how free we are from it. It constantly knocks us sideways and creates self-fulfilling prophecies. It tells us we’re all uncertain and have lots to worry about, then marvels at the consequences of such unnecessary information.

The headlines say recession, so businesses cut back, and marketing usually goes first. The brand goes quiet, sales dip, and the headline proves itself right.

I always get frustrated that here in the UK in particular, we feed our own negativity into a downward cycle of uncertainty and fear. We need some of that brazen optimism, and the media is hindering it.

Kellogg’s had it nearly a century ago. When the Depression hit, Post pulled back its advertising. Kellogg’s, so the story goes, doubled theirs and took a lead in the category it held for decades. It wasn’t blind to what was happening. It just refused to let the mood write its strategy.

Hyundai had it in 2009. With the car market in freefall and people terrified of losing their jobs, it ran a Super Bowl ad promising to take your car back if you did. While the rest of the industry braced, Hyundai went on the front foot, and within a year its US market share jumped from 3.1% to 4.3%. It heard the news, it just didn’t let the mood derail it too.

Weirdly, ignorance can be bliss. It can’t be total ignorance, though. Blockbuster ignored what streaming was telling it and we know how that ended. The trick is telling the difference. Some news changes how your customers behave. Most of it only changes how you feel.

That’s where brand comes in. A clear brand strategy is the glasses. It tells you what’s worth paying attention to and what you can let wash past. Without one, every headline knocks you sideways.

How much more confident can a business be by doggedly ignoring the noise and committing wholeheartedly to its strategy, with discipline?

The best ones already wear the glasses. They just call it strategy.

I picked my car up from its service this week at my local Skoda dealership. A few hundred quid lighter, standing at the desk while the advisor sorted the paperwork, I clocked a little framed sign propped up next to her Service Advisor of the Year certificate.

“We no longer carry out a vehicle wash or vacuum after service visits.”

Underneath, the reasons… less water, less energy, fewer chemicals and a partnership with a tree-planting scheme. Every visit, they plant a tree.

As much as I’m a big believer in ecologi initiative, I walked out to a car that looked exactly as it did when I dropped it off. And I felt, genuinely, a bit mugged off.

A service is a strange thing to buy. You hand over your keys and a few hundred pounds for work you can’t see – fluids, filters, in this case new tyres and windscreen wipers – a load of boxes ticked on a checklist. Which you take almost all of it on trust.

The wash was the only part of the visit you could actually see. It was the dealership saying “we’ve looked after this”. You drove off in something shinier than you arrived in, and for five minutes on the forecourt the money felt well spent.

There’s a reason that small moment carries so much weight. We judge experiences mostly by their best bit and how they end. The wash was both. Take it out, and the whole visit ends on an invoice and the same dirty car you arrived in. Spending £360 – how much does it cost to clear a car?

I get it. It’s a tough market and they’re trying to save costs. The cut is defensible, but the reasoning isn’t.

If the sign had said “we’ve stopped washing cars to keep your service price down”, I’d have rolled my eyes and respected it. Honest trade. Instead, a cost saving has been dressed up as a value.

And this is a car dealership – a business whose entire product sits near the top of most people’s carbon footprint – telling me the planet is the reason my car is still dirty.

That does damage twice. First to the experience itself: I’ve gone from a customer being looked after to a customer being managed. Second, to every sustainability claim that comes after it that when “eco” becomes the cover story for doing less, customers learn to read every green badge as a cost-cutting notice, which I’m not okay with.

The businesses doing genuinely good work pay for that cynicism.

Nobody storms out of a dealership over one unwashed car, but that’s the really point. Brands rarely die from a single nuisance or disaster – they die from a thousand small subtractions over time, each telling the customer a little more clearly that they’re a transaction rather than a relationship.

I’m feeling a little less loyal. I’m already wondering whether I’ll take the car somewhere else next year. That’s what it looks like up close when a business stops building love.

So ask yourself which of your small details are actually doing the heavy lifting. The moments customers can see, feel and remember are rarely the expensive ones, but they’re often the first to go when someone’s hunting for savings. Even when everything has gone right, they’re actually the bit that makes the money feel well-spent.

If you need to cut them, cut them honestly. Better still, find a better way to do it. Just don’t hand the customer a framed sign telling them it’s for their own good.

Love or Die? Brands that Kiss.

kissbranding.co.uk

I was at the Sovereign Minds summit in Westminster on Tuesday for a panel on team performance. Naturally, it wandered into working from home, and the room split fast – some fairly fierce views on both sides.

One panellist made the case for remote work with her own business: a team of nine, fully remote, and doing brilliantly. Fair point. Then the interviewer gently took it apart. Of course they’d make it work, she said – your team would dial in from the top of a mountain for you. Her business campaigns for working mothers. People join it because they believe in it.

Most businesses don’t have that and I think it reframes the whole return-to-office debate.

What the office is standing in for

If people will work from a mountaintop for something they believe in, then dragging them back to their desks is partly an admission that nothing else is holding them together. Proximity becomes the glue. You manage behaviour by being near it.

Businesses without that belief tend to do the same thing with customers – they spend on advertising to buy attention they haven’t earned. In both cases they’re compensating for something they haven’t built.

I’d go further. Internal belief matters more than external belief, because external belief is downstream of it. Every piece of brand activity a customer sees was made by someone inside the business, out of whatever they understood the business to be for. When the team isn’t clear, that doesn’t stay an internal problem. It ships.

Yes, plenty of brands sell well with a disengaged workforce behind them. For a while. The gap between what’s promised and what’s delivered always shows eventually.

We felt this one ourselves

KISS is a brand studio. Belief is what we sell. And for a while, we didn’t have enough clarity of our own.

Belief was never the issue – the team cared, and still do. It was quieter than that. There was confusion about what to say and what the standard was, and all of it ran back through a bottlenecked founder. That was me. Questions came up the chain because people wanted to get it right and weren’t certain what right looked like. Capable, committed people, checking.

That’s the bit I’d underestimated. Belief on its own isn’t enough. It needs something specific to attach to, or it stays a feeling rather than a way of making decisions. A standard that only lives in the founder’s head isn’t a standard. It’s a dependency. And a dependency needs proximity, which is the office argument again in miniature.

What fixed it was unifying our standards, beliefs and identity into something the team could hold without me in the room. That gave us clear guide rails for how the business operates, and a clearly communicated direction and destination that decisions could be measured against.

“But we don’t have a mission”

This is where most businesses sit, and it’s a fair objection. Most businesses aren’t fixing childcare inequality, and a manufactured cause will smell like purpose-washing – to the team first.

But a mission doesn’t have to be a cause. It’s a destination clear enough that someone can test a decision against it without asking the founder. By that measure, a food manufacturer or a property developer can have a mission every bit as real as a campaigning charity’s. It might be a standard of craft, an obsession with a particular customer, or an enemy you’re fighting – mediocrity in your category, say, or the way everyone else treats buyers.

It helps to see it in two parts. Standards, beliefs and identity are the guiderails that tell people how to operate. The mission is where they’re heading. Guiderails without a destination give you a well-behaved business going nowhere in particular. A destination without guide rails gives you a team that agrees on the goal but gets there in ten different ways, and the founder ends up as the only reliable guardrail.

And if external belief is built internally, a business without a mission is asking customers to believe in something its own people don’t.

The angel and devil on every shoulder

Done properly, brand becomes every department’s angel and devil on the shoulder, challenging people and pushing them to keep to the mission. What does it whisper to finance when they’re cutting costs? To the hiring manager weighing a brilliant but misaligned candidate? To product when a shortcut is tempting?

The real test is whether the most junior person in the business can use it to say no to something.

It’s also worth being honest about the dark side. Mission-led organisations are also where people get underpaid and burnt out “for the cause.” Brand gives people something to believe in beyond the payslip. It’s not a substitute for the payslip.

Worth asking yourself

Is your mission communicated continuously, or was it announced once at an away day? Could your team repeat it from memory? Does it actually matter to them, and if not, what would make it matter? Does it shape who you hire? Could someone use it to make a call without you?

If most of those answers are uncomfortable, bringing everyone back to the office might keep things moving. It won’t give them anywhere to go.