A VP of marketing at a company doing about sixty million a year told me last month that they had outgrown their brand. Then she apologized for putting it that way, because she said it sounded like something from a conference stage.
It did not. It was the most accurate thing anyone said all afternoon.
Her company started with a founder who answered the phone, and a voice that came from him answering it. Now there are two hundred and forty people, four of whom write customer-facing copy, none of whom have ever met him. The voice did not break. It diffused, which is worse, because nobody can point at the moment it happened.
Every midsize company I talk to describes the same symptom in different words. The sales deck sounds like one company, the careers page sounds like another, and the product emails sound like a fourth that nobody in the building will claim.
The midsize brand problem is not a lack of strategy. It is that the thing which used to be the strategy was a person, and people do not scale.
Small brands do not need a brand book, because the founder is the brand book. Enterprise brands have governance, a team, a director of brand, someone whose entire job is saying no to a bad headline in a regional email. Midsize has neither. It has the volume of an enterprise and the infrastructure of a startup. The gap between those two is where brands go beige.
It has the volume of an enterprise and the infrastructure of a startup. The gap between those two is where brands go beige.
The default fix is a rebrand, because a rebrand is a thing you can buy and put on a calendar. I have watched this from inside brand strategy rooms and I have sold a few of them. Some helped. Most produced a beautiful document that answered a question nobody at the company was actually asking, which was never what should we look like. It was who decides.
So the real work is unglamorous. Write down the five things the founder would never say, in his words, and hand it to everyone who types. Give one person authority to reject copy and enough standing to survive rejecting it. Kill half the channels, because a midsize company running eleven channels is running nine of them badly. Patagonia is not consistent because it owns a great manual. It is consistent because somebody there will actually stop you.
She asked what the deliverable was. I said a one-page document and a named human, and I watched her decide whether she had been overcharged. Truffles does something similar when I set down a new bowl. He looks at the bowl, he looks at me, and he waits to see whether I am serious.