If your brand work never got uncomfortable, you bought expensive wallpaper

By Kurt Schröder

There is a version of brand work that treats the whole exercise as decoration. A cuter logo. Nicer colours. Photography with better lighting. Bringing the business "into 2026", making it look like it belongs in the modern era. The deliverables arrive, everyone feels a lift for a quarter, and nothing about how the business wins has changed.

That is wallpaper. And if you used a big-shot agency, probably expensive wallpaper.

The frustrating part is that the visual work is usually competent. The logo is fine. The colours are fine. The problem is what the project never touched. If the messaging is not clear about who you are targeting, if the positioning is not obvious, if the value proposition would not make your ideal customer sit forward, and if none of it creates any sense of shared identity with the people you want to win, then the design is sitting on top of nothing. It decorates a gap.

Here is the test, and you can run it on your last brand project right now. Somewhere in that process, were you forced to sit with these four questions until they got uncomfortable?

1. 1. Are we actually providing value? Not the version in the pitch deck. The honest version, where you ask whether the thing you sell changes anything material for the person buying it.
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2. 2. Who are we providing that value for? A specific someone, with a name for their role and a reason they care. If the answer is a market segment large enough to impress an investor, it is not an answer.
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3. 3. Why would they choose us over an alternative? They always have an alternative, even if the alternative is doing nothing. If your differentiation only makes sense inside your own boardroom, it does not exist.
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4. 4. What is the connective tissue between our story and the audience we want? Meaning: when the right customer hears you, what do they recognise? What belief do you share with them that a competitor does not?

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Those questions are hard on purpose. Answering them properly tends to cost something. A market you stop pretending to serve. A service line you stop selling because it muddies the story. A type of customer you stop pursuing even though they pay. When brand work is done properly, somewhere in the process it stops feeling like a design project and starts feeling like a strategy argument, because that is what it is.

If your last brand project produced new colours and no hard decisions, you did not do brand work. You did a bit of graphic design, and you paid brand prices for it.

None of this makes the craft unimportant. Design excellence matters enormously, and we hold ourselves to a high bar on it. But craft is the last mile. It expresses decisions. It cannot substitute for them.

So take the four questions into your next leadership meeting and see how far you get before someone changes the subject. That moment, wherever it lands, is where your real brand work starts.

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