Branding in industrial sectors.
State of the Brand: Dawn of Europe
Brandingmag Interview
Over the past few years, we have encountered the same situation repeatedly: projects where design, marketing, or technical development begin before the strategy is clear.
The project moves forward, materials are produced, campaigns go live, digital platforms are built. There is activity, teams are engaged, and things appear to be progressing.
The problem surfaces later, and usually not all at once. It shows up in decisions that contradict each other, in shifts of direction that catch some team members off guard, in costs that grow without anyone being able to explain exactly why. The project does not fail spectacularly. It erodes, gradually, from the inside.
Many organisations operate under the pressure of launching quickly.
In this context, execution feels more urgent than strategy.
AND SO, PROJECTS BEGIN.
Investment goes into design, marketing materials are produced, technical features are developed, while the fundamental questions remain, officially or unofficially, unanswered.
WITHOUT CLEAR ANSWERS, EVERY DECISION THAT FOLLOWS IS BUILT ON ASSUMPTIONS.
Some assumptions prove correct. Others do not. And there is no mechanism to distinguish between them before the cost becomes visible.
Projects begin from an initial impulse and continue to advance through momentum, adjusted along the way based on point-in-time feedback, individual preferences, or the pressure of the moment. They do not collapse suddenly.
Tone shifts between different registers depending on who wrote the last piece of copy or who approved the last campaign. Decisions about product or digital platforms are constantly revisited as new ideas emerge or new perspectives enter the conversation. Each adjustment seems justified at the moment it is made. There is always a good reason, a valid observation, a context that explains the change.
The problem is not that the adjustments are wrong in themselves. The problem is that, in the absence of a clear direction, there is no objective criterion for deciding what to keep and what to change. Everything becomes negotiable. And when everything is negotiable, the loudest voice wins, not the most strategically sound argument.
One of the reasons why the absence of strategy is underestimated is that its effects are neither immediate nor easy to attribute to a clear cause. Projects continue to move forward. Money is spent on real things: design, campaigns, development, testing. The investments appear justified because they produce visible deliverables.
But in parallel, another type of cost accumulates, less visible and harder to quantify. Features developed with real effort and then abandoned because they no longer fit a direction that changed in the meantime. Communication materials rebuilt two or three times, not because they were poorly executed, but because the brief had shifted. Delays caused by decisions that need to be revisited from scratch after the context has evolved. Energy spent realigning teams around questions that could have been clarified from the beginning. And the list goes on.
They are distributed over time, hidden in revisions, in overtime hours, in file versions numbered up to v7 or v12. No one adds them up. And that is precisely why they rarely enter the calculation that should have justified the investment in strategy from the outset.
There is a common perception that strategy is a phase that slows projects down. This perception is, for the most part, wrong. And it is usually held by those who have never seen a well-built strategy in action.
Clarity about who the client is and what genuinely motivates them. Clarity about what makes the brand or product relevant in the market, not in general terms, but against the specific alternatives the client already has available. Clarity about what the communication needs to say and why, and about which features actually matter.
When this clarity exists, design becomes more efficient, marketing becomes more coherent, technical development becomes more precise, and decisions are made faster.
Strategy does not eliminate uncertainty. No process can do that. But it transforms uncertainty from a source of paralysis into navigable territory.
Brands that succeed in building consistent experiences almost always begin with a process of strategic clarification.
Sometimes, a few well-structured conversations are enough to align teams around the same fundamental questions. Other times, a deeper analysis is needed: of the market, of the competition, of how consumers currently understand and use the product compared to how the brand believes they do. The scope of the process depends on the complexity of the project, not on a fixed formula.
What does not change is the order. Before design, before campaigns, sometimes even before the first product decisions. Strategic clarity becomes the starting point from which every other decision gains meaning.
The invisible cost of missing strategy is never paid all at once. It is paid in small instalments, continuously, over the entire duration of a project. And by the time it becomes visible enough to be recognised as a problem, the price already paid is almost always considerably higher than clarity would have cost from the very beginning.
Branding in industrial sectors.
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