Building brands wrong: how branding works in practice

Cathal Smyth, Executive Director, Strategy at Bladonmore, reflects on the gap between how branding is supposed to work and how it works in reality.

When I started in brand strategy, there was a clear idea of how this work should happen.

You did analysis.
You agreed a positioning.
You wrote a strategy.
You developed a big creative idea.
You designed an identity.
You wrote guidelines.
The client applied them.

Proposals described a controlled, orderly process, moving step by step through different types of thinking and doing.

Projects and clients that didn’t conform were anomalies, but over time they became more common: websites being built before strategies had been approved; identities being developed while positionings were still open; guidelines being written for unknown use cases.

Our model didn’t match the environment. Instead, projects were being shaped by shifting deadlines, organizational change, regulatory pressure, evolving platforms, personnel turnover, and budgets that were rarely as generous as the proposal had anticipated.

Looking back, most of my work happened in that gap – between how branding is supposed to happen and how organizations actually operate. The job was to find coherence within it.

When models meet organizations

Most organizations don’t start brand projects with a blank sheet of paper. They already have a range of brand furniture: strategy, purpose, values, tone of voice, EVP, ESG narrative, websites, investment case, annual report themes, internal messages, and marketing campaigns of various shapes, sizes, and levels of importance.

All created at different times, by different people, for different reasons. All accumulated over time rather than designed as a system.

When a new brand project begins, there is often an assumption that this complexity will be replaced by something new that is simpler and more connected. In practice, that’s rarely possible. Adding another layer on top doesn’t work either – it usually makes things more confusing. So most real brand projects sit in an uncomfortable middle ground: trying to make sense of what is already there, while also moving things forward. That’s where the work happens.

Guidelines and good intentions

Many brand problems arise not because people misunderstand the strategy, but because strategy is treated as separate from the systems and pressures that shape how organizations behave.

Brand guidelines are a good example. In theory, they provide clarity. They help teams work consistently. They protect the integrity of the brand.

In practice, many are outdated within months. Some are ignored. Others are followed rigidly in ways that create new problems.

Often this isn’t because people don’t care. It’s because the guidance doesn’t reflect how the organization works. Digital teams are trying to meet usability requirements. Investor Relations (IR) is responding to regulatory demands. HR is working with recruitment platforms. Sustainability has to report against external frameworks.

A static document written in isolation struggles to accommodate all of that. So, people improvise and adapt. They bend the rules. And slowly, the official brand and the lived brand drift apart. Not through negligence, but through necessity.

The quiet power of delivery

One of the things we have seen over the years at Bladonmore is how much brand meaning is created during delivery.

Not in workshops or decks or positioning statements. But in website builds. In report production. In campaign rollouts. In internal comms programs. In system migrations.

These are the moments when abstract ideas meet constraints. Content has to be written. Navigation has to make sense. Data has to be presented. Legal teams have to sign things off. Systems have to talk to each other.

Decisions get made quickly. And those decisions often shape the brand far more than the original strategy – even though no one ever intended that.

So, delivery isn’t just how the brand is implemented and expressed. It can often redirect it and redefine it.

Multiple audiences, multiple realities

Corporate brands rarely speak to just one audience. They speak to investors, employees, customers, partners, regulators, communities, prospective recruits, and the wider world.

Each encounters the organization in different contexts, with different priorities and levels of trust. Trying to force all of that into a single, uniform message usually fails.

So, organizations adapt their language and emphasis. They highlight different aspects of their story depending on the audience. The challenge is to make sure those differences still add up to something coherent.

Learning to work “wrong”

Much of the work that we do involves doing things “wrong”.

We develop strategy while delivery is already under way. We refine narratives through content. We test ideas through implementation. We adjust frameworks in response to what happens on the ground.

From a textbook perspective, that’s messy. From a practical perspective, it’s often the only way to make progress. It’s not about abandoning rigor but recognizing where it matters: in understanding the organization, making connections and judgments, and knowing when to hold a line and when to adapt, rather than in following a predefined sequence of steps.

Why this series?

Over the years, we’ve spoken about this issue in different contexts: digital, reporting, employer branding, corporate websites, sustainability communication and stakeholder engagement.

What strikes us is how persistent the patterns are. Different tools, platforms, and pressures. But the same underlying challenges.

This series is an attempt to look more closely at how branding works in practice – and what that means for how organizations approach the work today.

In future pieces, we’ll explore some of these themes in more detail: guidelines, websites, governance, content, AI, internal alignment, and the way brand systems evolve over time.

We’ll do that from the perspective of people who spend most of their time inside complex projects, trying to make things clearer, more coherent and more useful. We’re not proposing a perfect new model. But we are trying to better understand the gap between how branding is supposed to work – and how it works in practice.

If you’d like to discuss how branding works in practice inside your organization, get in touch.