Branding Strategy Insider

Why Checkout Abandonment Is A Brand Problem

2026-05-15T04:47:40Z

The standard diagnosis of checkout abandonment treats it as an engineering challenge. Forms are too long. Payment methods are missing. The mobile experience is too slow. Fix the mechanics, recover the revenue.

This logic has driven an entire industry of checkout optimization tools and A/B testing programs. And yet average cart abandonment rates across eCommerce have remained above 70% for years, even as checkout UX has genuinely improved. The mechanical problems are being addressed. The abandonment is not going away.

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The reason is that the diagnosis is incomplete. For most brands, checkout abandonment is not primarily a mechanics problem. It is a brand problem.

What The Payment Step Actually Tests

A customer who reaches the payment step has already made a purchase decision. They know what they want. They know the price. They have found a reason to prefer this brand over the alternatives available to them. The cognitive work of buying is done before they enter their card number.

What the payment step asks them to do is confirm that decision under conditions of heightened uncertainty. They are being asked to transfer financial information to a company they may have first encountered hours or days ago. The emotional state at that moment is not confidence. It is vulnerability. And people in a vulnerable state look for reasons to pause.

The signals customers scan for at that moment are not signals about the product. They trust the product enough to have gotten this far. They are scanning for signals about the brand: whether the company behind the purchase is consistent, reliable, and worth the risk of being wrong about. That is a brand function. No reduction in form fields addresses it.

The Coherence Gap

The most common version of this problem shows up when a customer moves from a carefully constructed product page into a checkout that feels like a completely different website. Different typography, different visual weight, copy that reads like a payment processor template rather than the brand voice they encountered before.

Most eCommerce companies invest heavily in the presentation of their product pages: photography, copy, social proof, design. The checkout then defaults to whatever the payment platform provides, with minimal customization. The customer moves from a high-craft brand environment into a generic transactional form. That shift introduces uncertainty at the worst possible moment.

Research across 350+ DTC optimization projects by Glued Agency found that narrative coherence across the purchase funnel had a larger impact on transaction rates than checkout UX changes in most tested scenarios. In one case, a mattress brand in a saturated DTC category tested three distinct brand narratives across their full funnel rather than optimizing their checkout mechanics. The narrative that held together coherently from the first ad impression through to the order confirmation page produced a 100% increase in transactions and a 61% increase in average revenue per user. The checkout flow itself was unchanged.

Where Brand Strategy Is Currently Missing

The organizational structure of most companies separates brand work from performance work. Brand teams build equity through campaigns, positioning, and visual identity. Performance teams optimize the purchase funnel. The assumption is that strong brand equity flows naturally into purchase conversion, and that anything interfering with conversion is a technical problem for performance teams to solve.

What this structure misses is that brand equity is not a fixed asset that transfers automatically from awareness to purchase. It is reconstructed at every touchpoint a customer encounters. And it is most vulnerable at the payment step, precisely because that is where customer skepticism is highest and the cost of a wrong decision feels most real.

Conversion rate is not a performance metric that reflects the downstream effect of brand work. It is a real-time measure of whether the brand promise is credible enough to justify a financial commitment at a specific moment. Brand teams should have visibility into checkout data for the same reason they have visibility into awareness and sentiment data. The checkout is a brand touchpoint.

Brand should strengthen competitive position, pricing power, and enterprise value. The Blake Project helps make that happen.

The Strategic Reframe

Treating checkout abandonment as a UX problem produces UX solutions that address friction without addressing doubt. These solutions can produce meaningful short-term improvements in specific scenarios, particularly where genuine mechanical barriers exist. But they plateau because friction is not the primary driver of abandonment for brands that have already implemented the foundational improvements.

The brands that sustain conversion advantages in competitive categories are those that carry brand coherence all the way through the purchase experience. Every element a customer encounters at the checkout, from the copy on the submit button to the confirmation email, is a brand communication. Treating these as administrative details rather than brand moments is where the gap between brand investment and business performance opens up.

The question for brand leaders is not only how to build awareness and preference, but where that equity is being lost. For most organizations, a significant portion of that loss happens not in market but at the payment step, in the distance between what the brand promises and what the checkout delivers.

Closing that gap is a brand responsibility. The conversion rate is just where the result shows up.

Contributed to Branding Strategy Insider by Andrés Esquivel, founder of Glued Agency, a CRO and eCommerce optimization firm with 350+ DTC projects across brands including Vital Proteins, AeroPress, and Maisonette.

At The Blake Project, we help leaders turn brand into a disciplined driver of financial performance — strengthening pricing power, competitive position, and enterprise value. Email us to start a conversation about enduring profitable growth. For The EBITDA.

Branding Strategy Insider is a service of The Blake Project, a strategic brand consultancy focused on turning brand into pricing power, growth, and enterprise value.

Solving Business Problems Through The Lens Of Brand

2026-05-13T15:06:32Z

Most companies lose momentum because their best thinking cannot get through the organization.

The strategy is understood in the room, but not in the field. The portfolio makes sense to leadership, but not to the channel. The value proposition is clear in the deck, but not in the sales conversation. The customer experience is discussed as a priority, but not built into the moments where choice, confidence, and conversion happen.

This is where brand problems become business problems.

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They show up as margin pressure, slow growth, weak conversion, channel confusion, inconsistent execution, stalled innovation, and a company that is harder to buy from, harder to sell for, and harder to value.

For mid-market companies, this matters. They rarely have the luxury of waste. They compete against larger enterprises with more resources and smaller challengers with fewer constraints. They need every strategic choice to create leverage.

That is the context for The Blake Project’s Value Acceleration Studio.

The Studio is a human-led, AI-enabled offering designed to help leadership teams solve organizational problems through the lens of brand. It helps identify, prototype, launch, and scale brand-driven experiences with the potential to create measurable business value.

The purpose is not to make brand strategy faster for the sake of speed. It is to make brand strategy more useful to the business.

The Cost Of Brand Drag

Brand drag is the gap between what a company has decided strategically and what the business can actually execute.

It is visible when sales teams explain the company differently.
It is visible when customers cannot determine which product, service, or brand is right for them.
It is visible when channel partners do not understand the full value of the portfolio.
It is visible when marketing, sales, product, finance, and operations make decisions from different assumptions.
It is visible when leadership knows what needs to change, but the organization lacks the tools, experiences, and systems to effect behavior change.

Brand drag is expensive because it slows the business at the very points where value is created.

The Value Acceleration Studio is designed to reduce that drag.

Scenario 1: A Manufacturer With A Portfolio The Market Cannot Navigate

A mid-market manufacturer may have strong products, respected brands, and meaningful channel relationships. But when the portfolio becomes difficult to understand, the business loses leverage.

A retailer may not know which brand to lead with. A distributor may not understand where margin opportunity lives. A sales representative may default to the most familiar product rather than the best-fit solution. A customer may struggle to connect product choice with lifestyle, performance, price, design, or durability.

The Studio could create a portfolio navigation experience that helps sales teams, channel partners, and customers understand which brand is right for which customer, channel, price point, design need, and project type.

It could also create a “right product, right customer” selling experience that matches needs to solutions while reinforcing the distinct role of each brand.

The outcome is more than improved messaging. It is clearer selling, better product fit, stronger channel confidence, reduced portfolio confusion, and greater enterprise value.

Scenario 2: A University With A Strong Yet Disconnected Story

Many universities have a brand platform. Fewer have a system that helps admissions, advancement, alumni relations, faculty, athletics, and communications use it consistently.

The result is fragmentation. Different teams tell different versions of the institution’s story. Donor conversations become disconnected from enrollment priorities. Alumni engagement becomes episodic. The brand promise stays at the institutional level rather than becoming useful in daily decisions.

The Studio could create a brand storytelling system that translates the strategy into practical use cases.

Admissions teams could tailor messages for prospective students and parents. Advancement teams could connect donor interests to institutional impact. Alumni teams could personalize engagement by school, life stage, affinity, and career path. Communications teams could evaluate whether new initiatives strengthen or dilute the brand.

The outcome is a more disciplined institutional voice, stronger enrollment narratives, better donor conversations, and greater consistency across the university.

Scenario 3: A Healthcare Organization Trying To Turn Trust Into Action

Healthcare organizations often compete on similar promises: care, compassion, expertise, access, and community commitment.

The challenge is not to claim trust. The challenge is to operationalize it.

Patients need help choosing the right pathway. Referring physicians need confidence in the organization’s capabilities. Employees need to understand what the brand promise means in moments of stress. Service lines need clearer differentiation.

The Studio could create a patient decision experience that guides people to the right care pathway while reinforcing the organization’s distinctive promise.

It could also create a referral-confidence platform for physicians or an internal brand-behavior system that helps frontline teams understand how the brand should be experienced.

The outcome is stronger trust, clearer service-line differentiation, better referral confidence, and a more direct connection between brand promise and patient experience.

Scenario 4: A B2B Technology Company With A Product Buyers Do Not Fully Value

Many technology companies have strong capabilities but weak executive relevance.

The product may work. The business case may not.

A CFO wants to understand economic impact. A CIO wants to understand risk, integration, and security. An operating leader wants to understand productivity. A commercial leader wants to understand conversion, speed, or customer experience.

When the value proposition does not translate across decision-makers, sales cycles slow, and pricing pressure increases.

The Studio could create a buyer-value experience that converts technical capabilities into role-specific business outcomes.

Instead of explaining features, the company can help each decision-maker see the value in the language of their function.

The outcome is sharper sales enablement, faster buyer understanding, improved executive relevance, and stronger confidence in the purchase decision.

Scenario 5: A Government Organization Trying To Turn Public Purpose Into Public Understanding

Government organizations often carry significant public value, but that value can be difficult for citizens, partners, funders, and internal teams to understand.

Programs may be fragmented. Services may be hard to navigate. Public communications may emphasize process over outcomes. Internal departments may define success differently. Citizens may not know where to go, what to do, or why the organization matters.

The Studio could help create a public value experience that makes services, priorities, and outcomes easier to understand and act on.

A city, county, agency, or public authority could use this kind of experience to help residents navigate services, understand major initiatives, access resources, or see how public investment connects to community outcomes. Internally, the same system could help departments evaluate communications, programs, and partnerships against a clearer brand promise and public mission.

The outcome is greater public trust, clearer service navigation, more consistent communications, stronger stakeholder alignment, and a more useful connection between public purpose and daily experience.

For government organizations, brand value is created when people understand what is available, why it matters, and how to engage.

Scenario 6: A Consumer Brand That Needs To Convert Meaning Into Behavior

A consumer brand may have awareness, affinity, or emotional relevance, yet still struggle to convert.

The issue may be choice complexity, weak retail storytelling, unclear product architecture, poor education, or a gap between brand meaning and customer action.

The Studio could create a guided customer experience that connects shopper need states, lifestyle priorities, product benefits, usage occasions, and brand meaning.

A food brand could guide customers by health goals, family routines, taste preferences, or meal occasions. A home-goods brand could help customers envision product fit. A personal care brand could help shoppers navigate regimen, preference, price, and desired outcome.

The outcome is improved conversion, stronger basket building, clearer differentiation, and a more direct line between brand equity and revenue.

Scenario 7: A Private Equity-Backed Company Preparing For The Next Stage Of Value Creation

Private equity-backed companies often face a familiar challenge: the operating model has improved, but the growth story is still unclear.

The company may have acquired brands, expanded channels, added capabilities, or entered new markets. But the market may not understand the platform. Employees may still operate from legacy assumptions. Customers may see a collection of offerings rather than a coherent enterprise.

The Studio could create an enterprise value narrative, portfolio decision system, sales enablement experience, or brand-to-EBITDA decision tool that helps leadership connect brand strategy to value creation.

The outcome is sharper strategic clarity, better integration, stronger commercial discipline, and a more compelling story for customers, employees, investors, and future buyers.

In this context, brand should make the business easier to understand, easier to believe in, and more valuable.

From Strategy To Working Assets

The Value Acceleration Studio follows a practical sequence.

First, identify the business problem that brand can help solve.

Second, determine where value is most likely to be created.

Third, prototype the experience, tool, or system quickly.

Fourth, launch it in a focused environment where learning can happen fast.

Fifth, measure what works and scale the ideas with the strongest business case.

The format depends on the problem. It may be a sales experience, a customer decision guide, a portfolio navigation system, an executive diagnostic, a brand governance tool, a channel confidence platform, a public value experience, or an enterprise value narrative.

The point is not to build more things.

The point is to build the right things.

Brand should strengthen competitive position, pricing power, and enterprise value. The Blake Project helps make that happen.

Brand Needs Mechanisms, Not More Language

Many companies do not need another articulation of who they are.

They need mechanisms that help people choose, sell, explain, evaluate, prioritize, and act.

That is where brand strategy becomes commercially useful.

A strong brand creates meaning. A valuable brand converts meaning into behavior. A more valuable company converts behavior into measurable business outcomes.

For mid-market leaders, this is the opportunity.

Brand can improve sales productivity. It can support pricing power. It can reduce internal ambiguity. It can increase customer confidence. It can sharpen portfolio decisions. It can improve conversion. It can help a company compete on a new level.

But only when it moves from presentation to application.

The companies that win will be the ones that make brand easier to use, easier to buy, easier to sell, and easier to value.

The Blake Project’s Value Acceleration Studio helps leadership teams turn brand strategy into working assets that solve business problems and create measurable value.

Learn More

If your leadership team is facing a growth, conversion, retention, pricing, portfolio, or alignment problem that brand may be able to solve, The Blake Project’s Value Acceleration Studio can help identify what is limiting growth and determine what is worth building.

Schedule a conversation with The Blake Project to explore whether the Value Acceleration Studio is right for your organization.

Branding Strategy Insider is a service of The Blake Project, a strategic brand consultancy focused on turning brand into pricing power, growth, and enterprise value.

Harley-Davidson’s Brand Problem Is Bigger Than Its Bikes

2026-05-12T15:45:31Z

Financial geniuses on Wall Street appear to be happy that there is new leadership at Harley-Davidson, Artie Starrs as CEO. As with the appointment of the previous CEO, Jochen Zeitz, analysts and those with significant monetary Harley-Davidson stakes are thrilled with the recent CEO Starrs change in HOG leadership. In 2020, when Jochen Zeitz, a longtime member of Harley-Davidson’s Board, became CEO, the business press wrote that “Wall Street was elated by the news of Harley-Davidson’s ‘course correction’ under a new leader. Harley-Davidson stock rose 17%. There is new elation now that Mr. Zeitz has relinquished his cycle.

Wall Street appears to have a memory problem. The incoming strategies for this iconic brand are quite similar to the failed strategies of Mr. Zeitz’s predecessor.

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Regardless of the actual strategies Mr. Starrs is implementing, here are two major brand issues at Harley-Davidson of which no one seems to take notice or remark upon. Both of these brand issues are brand-detrimental.

First, Harley-Davidson has turned over its CEO position about every 5-6 years. It seems that every 5-6 years, both those inside and outside the brand lose faith in the C-suite’s strategic direction. The roster has been Jochen Zeits, 2020 to 2026; Matthew Levatich, 2015 to 2020; Keith Wandell, 2009 to 2015. Prior to Mr. Wandell, there was Jim Ziemer, from 2005 to 2009, and Jeffrey Bleustein, from 1997 to 2005, one of the 13 executives who purchased the company from AMF in 1981.

Brands suffer when there is constant organizational change. This is because brands need both short-term and long-term strategies. When the CEO changes, the long-term strategies go off the beaten path, as it were, leading to the second seriously troubling tendency at Harley-Davidson.

Second, each CEO brings a new set of “winning” strategies. Except that Harley-Davidson seems to be repeating the past in a weird Groundhog Day sort of way. There is a sort of doom-loop mindset at Harley-Davidson that overlooks basic brand principles. The strategy that Mr. Starrs brings to Harley-Davidson bears a remarkable resemblance to the strategy of Matthew Levatich, who preceded Jochen Zietz. Yes, there are some differences. But, in general, Mr. Starrs’ plans are “back to the future.”

1. Constant Organizational Change

Constant organizational change affects employees, leading to reduced engagement, burnout, turnover, erosion of trust, and cynicism. This is often cited in textbooks as ‘change fatigue.’ Every leadership change brings new strategies, tactics, internal presentations, and three-ring binders with laminated pages. The internal sense is “here we go again.”

With organizational change, employees are asked to be enthusiastic about the new direction, even when it is the third new direction employees remember. Internal change fatigue affects the brand across all functions. Short-term, in-the-year-for-the-year activities become the priorities. After all, the first priority is always financial. Brand building or brand rebuilding takes more time.

Constant CEO change affects productivity. At KFC, when we worked with both corporate and franchisees, KFC’s leadership changed every 3 years. This was unfortunate not just for the employees but also for the franchisees. With a franchisee or dealership organization, most owner-operators have been around a long time. There is a sense of anxiety about just what changes this CEO will ask of us. Haven’t we been through this before? At KFC, many franchisees had worked with the Colonel. These franchisees had experienced multiple leadership changes and were rather jaded.

With YUM!, we learned that constant C-suite change created a dysfunctional organization. There was no organizational alignment. An aligned organization reflects a results culture, which is essential for building a brand mindset. A results culture is both functional and psychological.

There is a huge difference between constantly changing the C-suite and institutionalizing change within the organization. A brand must be innovative and flexible. A brand must be flexible to deal with unforeseen events and customer trends. At the same time, a brand must steadfastly stay on course. Brands must have strategic dexterity: to create and implement prearranged, deliberate strategies while being open to and able to evolve when disruptions happen, or business, environmental, political, and geographic circumstances alter the landscape. Change at the top disrupts strategic dexterity. Stakeholders must start over with new approaches to support with gusto.

2. As For Reliving A Past Failure, It Is Worth Noting Harley-Davidson’s Recent History.

The previous strategy from the former Harley-Davidson CEO, Jochen Zeitz, focused on expensive touring bikes, with the average buyer age in the “late 50s,” meaning many Harley-Davidson owners are well into their 60s and above.

Mr. Zeitz focused on Harley-Davidson’s Boomer biker constituency and on the big, expensive touring bikes that Boomers know and love. Two of these models, the CVO Street Glide and the CVO Road Glide, start at US $44,499 and range up to $51,999.

Mr. Zeitz’s approach contrasted with that of his predecessor, CEO Matthew Levatich, who focused on international markets and on selling smaller, less expensive bikes, turning away from the Boomer customer base, which prefers big, heavy, more costly machines. The Levatich strategy was to support the less expensive, lighter models. Mr. Zeitz told analysts that the lighter, more affordable bike strategy of model expansion while chasing new customers and markets added manufacturing complexity and “diverted attention from Harley’s profitable models.”

With Artie Starrs, Harley-Davidson is back to focusing on affordable bikes such as the Sportster, “an entry-level bike the company stopped making in 2022 after concluding its air-cooled engine wouldn’t meet European environmental regulations.” This issue has since been fixed. The bike has now passed the international rules.

The Wall Street Journal points out,

“Starrs said the company will also proceed with a previously announced bike called the Sprint, which will cost around $6,000 and have a 440 cubic-centimeter engine. It will be in dealerships later this year.

“The focus on entry-level motorcycles is a reversal of the strategy plotted by Starrs’ predecessor. Jochen Zeitz, a longtime company director who became CEO in 2020 and departed in October, gave priority to Harley’s large, expensive touring bikes and cruisers, which can cost more than $50,000.”

In other words, Harley-Davidson is returning to a strategy that failed during the period 2015 to 2020.

Of course, affordability is critical. Of course, having entry-level bikes is important. Of course, the environment has altered. But, focusing strategies on age, price, and bike weight are elements of death-wish marketing. One of the things that made Harley-Davidson such a powerful brand was its ability to understand the needs and occasions of motorcycle customers.

A big brand such as Harley-Davidson is not a unidimensional brand. Harley-Davidson is a multi-dimensional, multi-faceted, multi-segmented, many-sided brand. Harley-Davidson should change from a positionista approach – a uni-dimensional, own a single position, approach – to a multi-faceted, multi-segmented, many-sided innovation, marketing, and development strategy. Harley-Davidson is a brand that means different things to different people. Harley-Davidson does not have one brand position. It is perceived differently by young adults, Millennials, and Boomers.

They used to know that simplifying a brand to a single position is not simplification, it is simplistic. Simplistic marketing is marketing suicide. Brands are complex. Brands are multi-dimensional.

Harley-Davidson has been bouncing between single positions for so long now that the brand is repeating what did not work. Furthermore, it appears that they have always been aware that it is a multi-dimensional brand, something its three past CEOs have not leveraged.

In a June 25, 2012, edition of Hog Happenings’ part 2, a segmentation of Harley-Davidson riders and owners appeared, taken verbatim from an “official” Harley-Davidson handout at an internal marketing and management course. The segmentation was described as “The Diversity of HARLEY-DAVIDSON Buyers.”

Brand should strengthen competitive position, pricing power, and enterprise value. The Blake Project helps make that happen.

This segmentation was generated about 40 years ago, when the majority of Harley riders were male. Since then, Harley-Davidson has created communications and outreach to female bikers. But just because the segmentation was generated decades ago does not mean there is no value in the insights. Reading the segment descriptions still sounds fresh and real. Even though the segmentations might need updating, this does not mean the segmentation should be overturned when generating a winning strategy.

1) Sensitive Pragmatists (29%)

The largest segment of Harley owners tends to be blue-collar workers. They consider themselves easy-going and practical. These owners take motorcycle riding seriously. They say, “You’d better know something about what you’re doing before riding a motorcycle.” They like the “high” of riding. They tend to be FL-series owners.

2) Laid Back Campers (24%)

Quiet and soft-spoken. That describes these Harley owners. This group likes to cruise, not speed or race. They also view their bikes as a way to get out of the city and in touch with nature. These bikers are patriotic: the “Made in America” label is their number one reason for buying a Harley. They tend to be Sportster owners.

3) Cool-Headed Loners (17%)

The loners consider a Harley motorcycle the perfect getaway vehicle to express their independence. They tend to be higher-income “white-collar” individuals. In their opinion, the “Harley experience” is the ride itself. They describe Harley as a “fingerprint: you buy the basic cycle, then personalize it so no one else has one exactly like yours.” Loners also believe in “live and let live;” to them, riding a Harley reflects that attitude. They tend to be Softail owners.

4) Adventure-Loving Traditionalists (10%)

This market segment rides a Harley for its independence, freedom, and adventure. These individuals love risk and seek thrills. Traditionalists consider new Harley-Davidson riders trendy and unappealing. Like the Laid-Back Campers, this group believes the reason for Harley’s great performance and quality is the “Made in America” label.

5) Classy Capitalists (8%)

Sometimes described as “Rich Urban Bikers” or “RUBS,” this segment represents the traditional American success story – a class of winners. Famous stars are represented in this group; members are often 45 to 50 years old. Most promised themselves years ago that they would reward themselves with a Harley-Davidson after making a certain amount of money. This group loves the attention they get when riding a Harley-Davidson. They tend to purchase Softails.

6) Cocky Misfits (7%)

This buyer enjoys its reputation as the ‘bad guy’ and the ‘wild man.’ These owners claim to have “tattoos with attitude.” The last thing they want is to be seen as stylish! They live for a chance to cut loose on their machine. The sound and speed of a Harley are important to this group. They’re always looking for an opportunity to “open it up.”

7) Stylish Status Seekers (5%)

The smallest Harley-Davidson market segment is young, stylish and elitist. This group tries to emulate the “famous stars” of the Classy Capitalists group. These riders say, “ Riding a Harley separates you and makes you stand out.” Like the Classy Capitalists, this group wants to be noticed. Harley aesthetics have the biggest appeal to this group. Owners liken a Harley bike to a vintage car –both are made for a ride on a sunny day.

Reading the above descriptions, it is easy to see how actionable and viable this decades-old account of Harley-Davidson customers is for renovation, innovation, resource allocation, and communications.

Instead of continuing to focus on a single customer and resuscitate losing strategies, Harley-Davidson should modernize its multi-dimensional heritage.

Contributed to Branding Strategy Insider by Joan Kiddon, Partner, The Blake Project, Author of The Paradox Planet: Creating Brand Experiences For The Age Of I

Branding Strategy Insider is a service of The Blake Project, a strategic brand consultancy focused on turning brand into pricing power, growth, and enterprise value.

Brand Strategy Must Solve The Problems That Limit Growth

2026-05-12T16:13:13Z

Brand strategy is entering a more demanding era.

For CEOs, CMOs, and CFOs, the question is no longer whether brand matters. The question is whether brand can help solve the organizational problems that determine growth, profitability, customer trust, internal alignment, and enterprise value.

That is the right question.

Brand should not sit outside the economics of the business. It should help improve them.

For many organizations, brand strategy has long been treated as a clarifying exercise. Define the position. Sharpen the promise. Align the story. Refresh the identity. Improve consistency.

Those remain important outcomes, but they are no longer sufficient.

A clear brand that does not change decisions, behavior, customer experience, or financial performance is underleveraged. A clear brand that helps leadership solve the right problems can become a true business asset.

This article is part of Branding Strategy Insider’s FREE newsletter. Join the world’s smartest marketers and subscribe here for actionable insights delivered directly to your inbox.

The Problem Is Not A Lack Of Ideas

Most companies have no shortage of ideas.

They have growth ideas, product ideas, campaign ideas, service ideas, partnership ideas, innovation ideas, customer experience ideas, and technology ideas. What they often lack is a disciplined way to determine which ideas deserve capital, attention, and organizational commitment.

This is where brand can play a more consequential role.

Brand is not only how a business expresses itself. Properly understood, it is a lens for deciding what the business should do. It helps leaders determine where to focus, what to simplify, what to stop, what to scale, and where value can be created faster.

For the financially minded CEO, CMO, and, of course, CFO, this is where brand strategy becomes more than marketing. It becomes a management discipline.

Brand strategy should help answer the questions that sit behind performance:

Where is customer trust being lost?
Where is the offer harder to understand or buy than it should be?
Where is pricing power being weakened?
Where is portfolio complexity suppressing growth?
Where are sales and marketing working from different assumptions?
Where is the customer experience failing to deliver the promise?
Where is culture slowing execution?
Where is capital being spent on activity that does not create measurable value?
Where could the brand create new demand, new revenue, or stronger retention?

These are not communication problems alone. They are organizational problems. Brand is one of the few disciplines capable of connecting customer choice, market position, internal behavior, and business economics in a single operating frame.

Brand As A Business Lens

Strong brands are not built by messaging alone. They are built through management decisions.

What the company prioritizes.
What it refuses to pursue.
How it enters the market.
How it prices.
How it sells.
How it serves.
How it organizes the portfolio.
How it aligns employees.
How it earns trust.
How it makes choice easier.

This is why brand belongs closer to the operating agenda.

When brand is viewed only as marketing, it is often asked to express decisions that have already been made. When brand is used as a business lens, it improves the quality of those decisions before capital, talent, and time are committed.

That distinction has financial consequences.

A brand lens can reveal why growth has slowed. It can expose the gap between what leadership believes the business stands for and what customers actually experience. It can show where complexity is creating hidden cost. It can identify where the market may be willing to pay more because the value is clearer, more trusted, or more differentiated. It can help CFOs distinguish between brand investment and brand activity.

That is not soft work.

That is value creation.

From Brand Clarity To Brand Performance

We repositioned The Blake Project around a simple mandate: Brand strategy should perform like a financial asset.

For us, that means brand work must be judged the way the rest of the business is judged: by its ability to strengthen pricing power, improve conversion, increase retention, support growth, and contribute to enterprise value.

We call this point of view For The EBITDA because brand should not be managed outside the economics of the business. It should help improve them.

This is a shift in expectation.

Brand strategy still needs to create meaning. It still needs to build differentiation. It still needs to give people a reason to choose, believe, advocate, and stay. But it also needs to help leadership make better decisions about where value can be created and how quickly that value can be tested.

The more complex the organization, the more important this becomes.

In many companies, the barrier to growth is not lack of ambition. It is fragmentation. The strategy is understood differently by different functions. Sales needs sharper tools. Marketing needs clearer proof. Finance needs a stronger business case. Operations needs a practical path. Culture needs a reason to change behavior. Customers need less friction and more confidence.

Brand strategy can help integrate these demands when it is built to solve business problems rather than merely express business intent.

Introducing The Blake Project’s Value Acceleration Studio

As part of this shift, we developed the Value Acceleration Studio, a human-led, AI-enabled offering designed to help leadership teams solve organizational problems through the lens of brand.

The Studio helps identify, prototype, launch, and scale brand-driven experiences with the potential to create measurable business value.

The technology accelerates the work. Human judgment determines what is worth building.

That distinction matters.

AI has made it easier to generate concepts, create prototypes, simulate experiences, and move faster from idea to execution. But speed alone does not create value. In some cases, it simply allows weak ideas to move through the organization faster.

The harder task is deciding which problems matter, which opportunities are worth pursuing, which solutions are strategically consistent, and which initiatives have a credible path to financial impact.

The Blake Project’s Value Acceleration Studio is built for that task.

It begins with a business issue, not a technology brief.

The issue may be slow growth, weak conversion, low retention, customer confusion, portfolio complexity, poor differentiation, sales friction, internal misalignment, capital inefficiency, or an experience that fails to deliver on its promise.

From there, brand becomes the organizing lens:

What must the customer believe?
What must the organization make easier?
What behavior needs to change?
What experience would increase trust?
What proof would move a prospect closer to purchase?
What would improve confidence, commitment, or renewal?
What would make the brand more valuable to the business?
What would give leadership a stronger case for investment?

The output may be a digital experience, sales tool, customer decision aid, value calculator, loyalty platform, branded service concept, education platform, licensing model, internal alignment system, or prototype for a new growth opportunity.

The form follows the problem.

The standard is measurable value.

What The Value Acceleration Studio Looks Like In Practice

A brand-driven experience is not a gimmick. It is a business response made visible.

For a company with a complex offer, The Blake Project’s Value Acceleration Studio might create a customer decision tool that helps prospects understand which solution fits their situation, reducing sales friction and improving conversion quality.
For a premium brand facing pricing pressure, it might build a value calculator that helps buyers understand the economic advantage of choosing the higher-value option, strengthening confidence and protecting margin.
For a company with a confused portfolio, it might create an interactive architecture experience that makes the role of each brand clearer for customers, sales teams, channel partners, and leadership.
For a sales organization struggling to communicate differentiation, it might build a guided selling platform that turns brand positioning into a more persuasive commercial conversation.
For a company with retention risk, it might create a loyalty or education experience that increases perceived value after purchase and gives customers stronger reasons to stay.
For a leadership team struggling with internal alignment, it might develop an employee activation system that helps people understand what the strategy means for their daily decisions, not just what it says in a deck.
For a brand with unused equity, it might prototype a licensing, partnership, or branded service model that tests whether meaning and trust can become a new revenue stream.

In each case, The Blake Project’s Value Acceleration Studio is not starting with the question, “What can we build?”

It is starting with a more valuable question:

What business problem can brand help solve?

Closing The Gap Between Insight And Implementation

One of the persistent weaknesses in brand strategy is the gap between strategic clarity and organizational action.

Leadership teams can leave a strategy engagement aligned and energized, only to see the work slow as it moves into the business. Functions interpret the strategy differently. Sales asks for tools. Marketing translates strategy into campaigns. Technology waits for direction. Finance asks what the return will be. Culture absorbs only fragments of the change.

The result is often a strong strategy with weak activation.

The Blake Project’s Value Acceleration Studio is designed to reduce that gap.

Its operating rhythm is straightforward:

Identify the opportunity.
Build the experience.
Launch quickly.
Measure honestly.
Scale what works.
Transfer capability into the organization.

This rhythm allows leadership teams to test how brand strategy can improve the business in practical, visible ways. It also creates evidence.

Market evidence.
Customer evidence.
Behavioral evidence.
Financial evidence.

That evidence helps leaders make better decisions about what to fund, what to refine, what to scale, and what to stop.

Stopping matters. A disciplined brand strategy should prevent poor investment as much as it creates new opportunity.

Why This Matters To CEOs, CMOs, And CFOs

For CEOs, the value is focus.

The Value Acceleration Studio helps concentrate leadership attention on the organizational problems that matter most to growth and enterprise value. It translates brand strategy into experiences that can inform capital allocation, customer experience, go-to-market priorities, portfolio decisions, and culture.

For CMOs, the value is proof.

The Studio creates a path beyond campaign performance. It helps show how brand can influence conversion, sales confidence, customer education, retention, pricing power, and demand quality. It positions marketing as a growth and value-creation discipline, not only a communications function.

For CFOs, the value is discipline.

The Studio helps distinguish brand investments with value-creation potential from activity that is difficult to justify. It gives finance a clearer way to evaluate brand-led initiatives against outcomes that matter: revenue quality, margin opportunity, retention, capital efficiency, and enterprise value.

For all three, the value is speed governed by judgment.

In a market where AI has made building easier, competitive advantage will not come from generating more ideas. It will come from applying sharper judgment to the opportunities that matter most.

Brand Must Change The Economics Of Choice

Every business is shaped by choices.

The customer’s choice to consider.
The buyer’s choice to trust.
The employee’s choice to act.
The channel partner’s choice to support.
The market’s choice to pay more.
The investor’s choice to believe the company can grow.

Brand influences these choices when it is managed with discipline.

That is why brand strategy must now be held to a higher standard. It must clarify meaning, but it must also improve decisions. It must differentiate the business, but it must also reduce friction. It must inspire people, but it must also help the organization execute. It must create belief, but it must also create value.

The Blake Project’s Value Acceleration Studio was created for leadership teams that want brand to do more than express the business.

It was created for leaders who want brand, their most valuable intangible asset, to help improve the business.

The Work Ahead

AI has made it easier to build.

It has not made it easier to know what is worth building.

That still requires strategy, judgment, customer understanding, organizational insight, and financial discipline.

The next era of brand strategy will belong to organizations that can identify the problems limiting growth, solve them faster, and scale what creates value without confusing speed for progress.

Because brand should help solve what limits business growth.

Learn More

Schedule a conversation with The Blake Project to explore whether the Value Acceleration Studio is right for your organization.

Branding Strategy Insider is a service of The Blake Project, a strategic brand consultancy focused on turning brand into pricing power, growth, and enterprise value.

When Honoring A Brand’s Past Means Changing Its Future

2026-05-12T16:14:17Z

For more than twenty years, The Blake Project carried the same identity into the world.

It was there when we opened our doors in 2003. It appeared on our first proposals, our first client deliverables, and our earliest expressions of a point of view that has never changed: brand is not decoration. Brand is a source of meaning, preference, trust, differentiation, and economic value.

Over time, that identity became familiar. To our clients, it signaled a certain kind of strategic seriousness. To us, it carried memory, the weight of more than 250 client engagements across six continents, built one relationship at a time.

So changing it was not easy.

This thought piece is about more than our new identity. It is about a decision many organizations eventually face: when the brand that helped you get here no longer says enough about where you are going.

The decision to reposition may be strategic, but the act of letting go is personal. A mark becomes more than a mark when you have built a business under it. It becomes a record of effort. It holds client trust, sacrifice, professional pride, and the quiet confidence that comes from staying in the work long enough to know what really matters.

That is where we found ourselves.

The Strategic Case For Repositioning

The Blake Project has repositioned for the mid-market because this is where our experience can create the greatest value now. Over two decades, we served global category leaders, national icons, and enterprise-scale organizations. That work showed us how brand decisions touch leadership alignment, pricing power, customer preference, portfolio clarity, culture, and enterprise value.

Today, we are bringing that pattern recognition to mid-market companies, private equity-backed businesses, growth-stage firms, and leadership teams at pivotal moments, where brand performance is not a marketing question. It is a boardroom question.

The repositioning is simple in principle and significant in practice: trusted by global brands, built for mid-market value creation.

That is why our identity had to change.

This article is part of Branding Strategy Insider’s FREE newsletter. Join the world’s smartest marketers and subscribe here for actionable insights delivered directly to your inbox.

Repositioning Is Not A Cosmetic Exercise

Think about what Deloitte did when it reorganized its global brand architecture in the early 2000s. Each member firm had operated with its own personality and its own way of going to market. The move toward a unified global identity was not driven by a desire for visual consistency. It was driven by a business reality: clients operating across borders needed to know that the Deloitte teams in Frankfurt and Singapore were drawing from the same methodology and standards of accountability. The identity change was the strategy made visible.

Or look at what PwC did when it simplified PricewaterhouseCoopers down to a two-letter mark and a new visual system in 2010. The firm had been operating under a name that accurately reflected a 1998 merger — but one that had stopped being useful for market positioning. The simplified identity was not a cosmetic decision. It was an acknowledgment that the brand had to work harder in a market where clients had more choices and less patience for institutional complexity.

A serious identity change starts not with a design brief, but with a harder question.

What must this brand now help the business become?

For The Blake Project, the answer became increasingly clear. We were no longer describing brand as a source of emotional and distinctive advantage. We were helping leaders understand brand as a financial asset; connecting brand decisions to EBITDA, enterprise value, pricing power, demand quality, and customer retention. The work had become more pointed. The stakes had become more commercial. The audience had become more specific.

Our old identity carried trust and heritage. It did that well. But it no longer carried enough of the urgency, discipline, and financial consequence of the work we are now doing.

That is the distinction every leadership team eventually has to make. Not whether the current identity still has value — it often does. But whether it still creates the right value for the next stage of the business.

The Hardest Part: Separating Equity From Attachment

I have advised clients for years to protect what matters and let go of what no longer serves the strategy. That counsel is easier to give than to follow when it is your own brand on the table.

The original identity of The Blake Project had equity. It had recognition, history, and emotional weight. It represented a firm that had earned its place through substance, not show.

But attachment can impersonate equity when you are too close to the work. That is the risk no one openly talks about.

Equity lives in the client’s mind. It helps people recognize, trust, choose, and return. Attachment lives inside the organization. It is real and meaningful, but it does not always serve the client.

McKinsey faced a version of this tension when internal debates about brand expression — whether to publish more, to become more visible, to let its consultants carry a more recognizable public identity — ran headlong into decades of institutional preference for discretion. The attachment to anonymity had once served the brand well. It signaled exclusivity and client focus. But as the market for strategic advice became more transparent and more competitive, that same discretion began working against the firm’s ability to demonstrate relevance and attract the next generation of clients and talent. The equity was real. So was the need to evolve.

We asked ourselves the same unsentimental question: were we holding on to the old identity because it still helped future clients understand the value we create? Or because it reminded us of what it took to get here?

The answer was uncomfortable. The old identity told the story of where we had been. It did not do enough to tell the story of where we are going.

That is when the decision became clear.

What The New Identity Needed To Signal

The new identity had to do more than look contemporary. It had to express a sharpened business strategy in the language of the people we are now built to serve.

Mid-market CEOs, CMOs, CFOs, and private equity operating partners are not looking for branding theater. They are not looking for a new language system that makes the organization sound more interesting while the business stays the same. They are looking for clarity, leverage, alignment, and advantage that shows up in the numbers.

When IBM Global Services rebranded as IBM Consulting in 2021, the name change was not about modernization. It was about telling a specific buying audience, C-suite leaders evaluating transformation partners, that this was no longer primarily a technology services operation. It was a strategic advisory business. The identity had to signal that shift before the first conversation, because in professional services, the brand does half the selling.

That logic guided our thinking.

The new identity needed to feel credible to a CEO, grounding to a CFO, and practical to a leadership team that needs brand to move the business. It needed to signal that we have worked at global and national scale, while making clear that we are built to work differently than the large consultancies: faster, closer to the business, and without the overhead structures that make enterprise firms expensive and slow for mid-market clients.

Our new identity is more assertive. More exacting. More performance-oriented. It signals strategic force rather than strategic heritage. That is intentional. We are not trying to look different for its own sake. We are making The Blake Project easier to understand for the leaders we are focused on serving.

How The Repositioning Shows Up In The Work

A repositioning is only credible when it changes what the organization does, not simply how it describes itself.

That is why the identity is only one expression of this shift. Another is the way we are building new tools and offerings for mid-market leaders who need brand strategy to move faster, prove value earlier, and connect more directly to growth.

Our new Value Acceleration Studio was built for that purpose. It helps leadership teams identify brand-driven growth opportunities, prototype them, launch them quickly, measure what works, and scale the ideas that can create real business value. The point is not to replace strategy with speed. The point is to bring strategy, human judgment, and AI-enabled execution together so that brand can move from insight to action with far less drag.

For organizations considering their own repositioning, this is an important lesson: the market will not believe a new identity unless the business beneath it has changed. A repositioning should show up in the offer, the operating model, the customer experience, and the measures of success.

What We Preserved

A repositioning should not erase the soul of the brand. That is one of the real dangers in identity change. In the pursuit of relevance, organizations can abandon the meaning that made them worth choosing in the first place.

When Andersen Consulting separated from Arthur Andersen and became Accenture in 2001, the firm faced a genuine question: what, beyond the name, had actually transferred to clients and what needed to be rebuilt? The answer shaped everything. The institutional credibility, methodologies, partner relationships, and delivery culture were worth protecting. The name was, by that point, a liability. The firm distinguished carefully between the two, and it showed in how the transition landed with clients. Accenture did not try to pretend the change was incremental. It was complete. But the underlying promise — transformation capability at scale — never moved.

We held the same line.

The Blake Project is still built on the belief that brands create value by shaping meaning in how people think, what they prefer, and why they choose. Emotional connection matters. Differentiation matters. Culture matters. Brand is one of the most powerful assets a business can build when it is managed with discipline and real strategic courage.

What changed is how we express those beliefs. We now speak more directly to the financial pressures mid-market leaders face; connecting brand to the board conversation, the balance sheet, the sales pipeline, and the enterprise value discussion.

The heart of the firm remains. The expression has become sharper.

What Others Can Learn From Our Journey

For any leadership team weighing a rebrand, refresh, or repositioning, I offer this from inside the decision:

1. Do not change your identity until you know what business truth is making the change necessary. Identity follows strategy. When that order gets reversed, the result is expensive decoration. When Booz & Company became Strategy& under PwC in 2014, the identity change was not a marketing exercise. It was a strategic acknowledgment that the firm’s positioning as an independent strategy shop had become untenable after the merger, and that its value to clients would now flow through the PwC relationship, not despite it. The brand had a job to do, and it was built around that job, not around aesthetics.

2. Respect the emotional reaction inside the firm. People build a sense of belonging around the symbols of the institutions they helped create. Dismissing that is a mistake. But letting it make the strategic decision is also a mistake. Both errors cost firms real time and money, and both are more common than anyone admits publicly.

3. Define what must be preserved before deciding what should change. When we began this process, the first question was not what the new identity should look like. It was what the old one had actually earned. Twenty-plus years of client relationships, a point of view on brand that had been tested across more than 250 engagements, and a reputation for strategic substance over creative show — those were worth protecting. The visual language and heritage signals of the original mark belonged to a version of the firm we were moving beyond. The name, and everything it had come to mean, was staying. That distinction — between what the identity had earned and what it was no longer able to carry forward — has to be made before a single design brief is written.

4. Ask whether your current identity helps the next client/customer understand your value faster. If it requires a paragraph of context before the value proposition can land, if it creates confusion about what you do or who you serve, it is working against you. In professional services, where relationships begin with perception, a brand that creates friction in the first impression is a competitive liability that compounds over time.

5. And make the change real inside the organization before asking the market to believe it outside. A new identity that is not backed by changed language, behavior, or measures of success is wallpaper. The firms that executed brand transitions well — Deloitte, Accenture, IBM Consulting — treated the internal launch as seriously as the external one. The people delivering the work are the brand. They have to understand and believe what it means before anyone else will.

Brand should strengthen competitive position, pricing power, and enterprise value. The Blake Project helps make that happen.

The Larger Lesson

The Blake Project’s new identity is not a design story. It is a strategy story.

It reflects a choice about where we can create the most value, who we are best equipped to serve, and how the breadth and depth of our brand experience can matter more in the next chapter of the firm.

We are proud of the original identity. We are grateful for what it carried. We are not running from it.

We are building from it.

The past should not be discarded casually. It should be understood, honored, and then translated into a future the client can see.

For The Blake Project, that future is clear. We are bringing the strategic discipline of global and national brand work to mid-market leaders who need brand to perform with greater consequence — in the boardroom, on the balance sheet, and in the market.

Because brand should not sit outside the economics of the business.

It should help change them.

Dr. Derrick Daye is the Managing Partner of The Blake Project and Publisher of Branding Strategy Insider.

Branding Strategy Insider is a service of The Blake Project, a strategic brand consultancy focused on turning brand into pricing power, growth, and enterprise value.