What a year creating strategic branding taught me (and how you can apply these insights in 2026)

There’s a tendency with a new year to only look forwards, embracing the new, never-before-seen and revolutionary. I am all for fresh thinking, in fact I’d go so far as to say my business is built on it. Yet, it’s also constructed on a fabric of experience and knowledge. After all, anything new needs its foundations.

So to begin 2026, I’m reflecting on a few things we’ve learned from creating strategic branding for our clients and how they can inform your next steps, strategies and ultimately key decisions, as you plan out how to tell the world about your business in the year ahead.

Know who you really need to talk to (and what to say)

What we learned:

• Our best client briefs include detailed understanding of the key industry decision-makers their branding needs to reach. When we’re not given this ‘persona’ information, we now request it.
• Going further, our clients have key moments they need us at different stages of their stages of business growth. Foreseeing these opportunities and the differing ways we can help means we’re ready with detailed strategies, messaging and a product to match.
• Considering at what our clients do ‘from the outside, looking in’ enables us to be more radical with the business change and the language we propose to promote their services and products. The smart approach is a mix of ‘on brand’ and ‘customer first’ design. This is true of all our work but particularly service and expertise-led web design for financial services or branding for law firms.
• Business consultant Stephen Cribbett told us that speaking to a client effectively needs to stimulate a reaction: “a brand really needs to promote or trigger an emotion, giving that sense of confidence they can deliver the service and provide the support at the right price.”

How you can apply this:

• To challenge your ‘persona assumptions’, one approach could be to get your sales team to brainstorm the different people they talk to who both inform and really make decisions at every level of a client organisation. The answers may surprise you.
• Put yourself in the shoes of your personas, perhaps even talk to trusted clients, to gain a better understanding of their specific fears and frustrations, meaning whatever pain points you target with your marketing, they are the right ones.
• A great learning is that there’s a pretty good chance you need to speak to both ‘the person who signs’ as well as ‘the person who searches’ – and those personas will be at completely different levels of that business, both with equal importance for your marketing approach and tone of voice.
• After working with IP lawyer Veronika Brazdova, she called our design work “a brand that’s both distinctive and appropriate for my business”. Many companies lose sight of who they are in a rush to sell. So this sense of ‘the appropriate’ is a great reminder that, whatever new endeavours you embark on, it’s important to sense-check at brief and project conclusion that what goes to market cleaves to your values and strengths.

Good systems work cross-brand (and you can manage them yourself)

What we learned:

• Creating strategic branding requires thinking about scale. For Dubai and Saudi VC firm Outliers, we created a fantastic and original brand graphic concept for their stand-out new website. So much creativity had been invested and the client fully invested in the look and feel, so when it came to design for their Riyadh-based summit, the brand system extended seamlessly from digital platform to physical event.
• Having defined an identity and brand design for ICON Corporate Finance which then rolled out across every part of the business from marketing to sales, we embraced a ‘build, train, empower’ model for client design independence. Our proof of concept is that in the first quarter after launch, the most significant conversation we had with the CEO was his grateful end-of-year email.
• For consumer investment platform Your VC, we created something atypical from our usual end-to-end website service, embracing working in a completely new way creating the design concept for their Hubspot CRM site, then collaborating with their technical team on implementation, refinements and snagging. We swiftly understood that our classic design process can be applied to completely different tech.

How you can apply this:

• Start an audit exercise: Begin by listing every place your brand appears (chances are you’ll find more than you think).
• Identify places where design or technical inconsistencies create friction, confusion or just don’t work, offering opportunities for better design systems.
• Check if there’s new tech you could be using that would remain on brand but reach your client base in a better, fresher way.
• Collaborate with your agency to put in place your own decision-making frameworks to create independence, but equally know when things are getting stale and to seek creative agency input.

Long-term partnerships reveal what transactional projects can’t

What we learned:

• Seven years working across different businesses working with incoming Your VC CEO Freddie Hamilton: built trust, enabling “narrative and visual identity as two sides of the same coin” as we designed their new brand identity based on deep understanding of what Freddie would be looking for and their target client base.
• The best strategic work happens when both parties are invested in evolution, as Matteo Casarini explained, “Above all, it is important to have fun with it and to enjoy the process. I am excited that the work is far from done.” The deals he’s been doing since the relaunch tell their own story both in terms of his attitude and the success of the brand expansion project we did him.
• AI is not a strategic graphic designer. The finance director of a longtime client tried to come up with their new logo using ChatGPT and swiftly realised that it wasn’t in tune with their business. As they told us: “It just wasn’t right; we need a refreshed, modern identity in tune with who we are.”
• It’s usually a good idea to ask permission to challenge assumptions and help craft the project rather than just executing the given brief. We do this even when we don’t know the client, but when a great partnership has been established, there’s much more capacity to ‘go further’ with the aim of delivering a memorable and stand-out project.

How you can apply this:

• Evaluate potential agency partners by the questions they ask rather than the quote they email. Did they just apply a pricelist to your deliverables, or go further, asking for a call to ask strategic questions and understanding what you really need.
• Build relationships before you need major work. Start the collaboration with a small project. If that is delivered with care and creativity, it’s a great sign that more significant work in the future will succeed.
• Create feedback loops within your firm, within your agency and to trusted clients. This will establish if the brand work you’re doing is actually working and how to evolve it.
• Avoid short-termism and think in ‘bundles’ of time. What landmarks are coming up in 12 weeks, six months or even the next two years and how can you build towards those with a combination of great partners and strategic planning.

What’s the common theme here?

If there’s one through-line to all of these experiences and ideas about creating strategic branding, it’s to take the space to look up, beyond the complex noise of a busy day. Find a space where you can take a break with your key team and think about everything you experienced both in good years and the tougher ones and figure out the good decisions and how to build on them.

Experience combined with a willingness to embrace new ideas, counts for a lot. Get that design brief together and test out a new partner agency to see if they can lean into what you know and provide their own perspectives for the future.