The Platform (Netflix, 2019)
If you’ve seen it, you’ll know the story: Prisoners in a vertical tower receive food on a platform that loses quality the further down it goes, exposing inequality and brutal competition. If that feels familiar, it’s because something similar is happening inside most marketing functions today. Just with slightly less cannibalism.
The Funnel (Your business, 2025)
Marketers inside an organisation receive brand assets that lose quality the further down the funnel they travel, revealing misalignment, avoidable anxiety and weak ROI.
You’ve seen it happen.
At the top of the funnel, there’s strong investment in brand, richer messaging, polished visual assets and high leadership engagement. Everyone wants to work on the big new brand campaign with [insert celebrity here].
But as those assets pass through teams, channels, systems, requests, shortcuts, templates and handovers, what reaches the bottom barely resembles what it started as. It leaves you thinking: “Who even are we anymore?”
The journey from brand to demand may be broken, but your brand isn’t. It’s just that the world has shifted faster than your brand system can keep up with. It’s normal. Inevitable. And it’s usually a sign you’re ready to make a significant leap forward.
Technology puts pressure on brands every few years. A decade ago, big data pushed businesses to sharpen CX and make better, data-driven decisions. Then Covid accelerated digital transformation almost overnight.
Today, AI is redefining how businesses operate, communicate and deliver. The pressure to produce more content, in more formats, for more channels, and with more tools, has skyrocketed – and at a pace that would have been unthinkable a few years ago.
Is it any wonder that, as a business, you’re feeling less like you than ever before?
You Deserve Better
Here’s the thing: a full rebrand can cost anywhere from £100,000 to £1m depending on scale, complexity and rollout, and that’s before you consider the time, disruption and operational lift required to rebuild every asset across the business.
And in many cases, a rebrand doesn’t fix the real issue.
Because what’s broken isn’t the identity, it’s the infrastructure underneath it. Your identity crisis isn’t a sign you need to start again, it’s a sign you need to rewire what you already have.
Here are three things to consider:
1. Rediscover your purpose
When we talk about purpose, we don’t mean a higher calling, we mean why your business started in the first place.
If you can’t answer that clearly, the first rule of brand is already broken.
Aligning everyone around a shared purpose gives both your people and your customers a reason to believe. If you don’t know why your company exists, how can you know where you fit into it?
Remember: you’re not just selling products or services, you’re creating real emotional impact.
2. Rewire your brand for use
Most brand identity crises aren’t visual, they’re operational. It’s a familiar pattern.
A company spends hundreds of thousands on a rebrand, launches with a celebrity endorsement and invests heavily in awareness.
Months later, the marketing teams are left figuring out what the rebrand actually means at the bottom of the funnel, where money changes hands.
Too many brands are still built like instruction manuals. But brand now needs to behave like infrastructure.
A brand system should support your teams, adapt to different contexts, scale across channels and operate at AI-level speed. It should help people create better work, not slow them down or make them second-guess every decision.
A rebrand might change how you look, but rewiring changes how you work.
3. Break your own rules
It’s easy to say “break the rules”, but much harder to do. It feels risky, especially in B2B, where the stakes are high and mistakes are expensive. But there’s so much sameness in B2B that you rarely need a huge leap to stand out – just some small steps in a different direction.
And while it sounds like a cliché, playing it safe is usually the bigger risk. When you avoid change, you blend in. You waste time and budget. And ultimately, you drain revenue instead of driving it.
So, the advice is simple:
Try Something New
Pick a project that feels safe enough to experiment with. Start small. Try something different. Then try something else. Over time, you build evidence, confidence and a real case for change.
If your brand is getting in the way of a good idea, it’s time to start breaking the rules. And remember: you don’t need to tear everything down and start again.
You need to reconnect with why you exist, rebuild the infrastructure that supports how your brand actually works, and give yourself permission to break the rules that no longer serve you.
Do this, and your brand will start working harder, and you’ll start to feel like you again.
CCO Unbound IA