Well-known brands. Baffling businesses

Vincent Roffers, partner and head of strategy at Agenda, explores how, as businesses grow, their brands must do more than simply explain what they sell.

Somewhere between the brand film and the buying decision, somebody has to make sense of the business.

Too often, that somebody is the customer.

They’re the ones working out whether the platform includes the product, whether two offerings do the same thing or whether a new name means anything has actually changed. The company knows how everything fits together. Or at least, somebody inside it probably does.

That is a lot of homework to give people you want to choose you.

Of course, these are complex businesses. Nobody is going to turn NVIDIA, IBM or Microsoft into a simple company. Another acquisition, another technology shift, another route to market will keep adding moving parts. The ambition has to go beyond simplifying the story. It has to be making the business coherent as it changes.

That’s the thinking behind Agenda’s Complexity Quotient, or CQ. The framework looks at three dimensions: Clarity, how well people understand the positioning and offer; Alignment, whether expression and actions reinforce the promise; and Momentum, how experiences and ideas build engagement, advocacy and influence.

The question is not simply whether a brand has strengths in each area. It is whether those strengths actually work together.

Familiar isn’t the same as clear

A distinctive identity can make a company instantly familiar. That doesn’t necessarily make its business easier to understand.

People may recognise the name and admire the communications while still struggling to figure out which offering they need or how the company is different from its competitors. Being known gets you noticed. It doesn’t do the rest of the work.

Naming makes that distinction particularly visible. Successful individual names do not necessarily explain what belongs together, what sits inside what or where a customer should begin. A website can neatly organise products into categories while leaving the relationships between them unresolved.

A portfolio can accumulate years of launches and acquisitions. The customer shouldn’t inherit the job of figuring out how they all fit together.

Positioning must earn its keep

Red Hat’s enterprise open-source positioning offers a useful example of an idea doing practical work.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux, OpenShift and Ansible give the portfolio clear core families. But the more interesting connection is how Red Hat combines open participation with the support businesses need to put that technology to work. People can contribute to the ecosystem, while certification, subscription support and partner relationships help businesses adopt it, build on it and get help when they need it.

Openness is not just something Red Hat communicates. It shapes how people participate in – and build on – the business.

HubSpot’s “grow better” positioning connects marketing, sales and service as parts of the same growth challenge. Its hubs are organised around jobs customers need to get done: attracting interest, turning it into business and keeping people coming back.

But the hubs do more than tidy up the navigation. The product capabilities help customers do the work, while resources such as HubSpot Academy help them develop the skills behind it. The structure gives those tools and learning resources a shared purpose: helping customers get better at the work growth requires.

That’s positioning earning its keep – not just explaining what the company sells, but shaping how it helps.

Brand as an operating system

Growth raises the stakes. As a business expands, more products, audiences, teams and partnerships need to work together. Decisions made in one part of the organisation can change what customers need to understand or experience somewhere else.

Making those connections isn’t simply a communications challenge. It’s an organisational one.

Brand can provide a shared logic for those decisions: what belongs in the portfolio, how an acquisition fits, which experiences deserve investment and what should change when the company’s actions pull against its promise.

Start with one place where customers have to work too hard. Choosing the right offering. Understanding a change. Finding a useful way to learn or participate.

Then trace the difficulty back to the decisions that created it.

A new page or a sharper headline might help. It might also be a Band-Aid. The underlying problem can be systemic: different teams making individually reasonable choices that leave the customer with an unreasonable amount to reconcile.

That is where brand becomes consequential. Not as a layer applied to the business, but as an operating system that helps its parts work together.

If brand only enters the room when decisions need a rationale, it has arrived too late.

The opportunity is to use it while those decisions are being made. Your customers shouldn’t have to finish the job of making your business make sense.