Ouch! But does branding really need to be painful?
In English, the German-derived word “brand” originally meant anything hot or burning; a fire-brand, a burning stick. By the European Middle Ages it had evolved into something more precise: the process of burning a mark into livestock with thick hides, cattle mostly, to identify ownership. A permanent mark. A symbol of belonging.
In the corporate world, branding still traces back to this original root meaning, though mercifully the cattle are no longer involved.
The three things a brand actually owns #
When we talk about branding in business, we are really talking about three distinct forms of ownership:
Ownership of our range of products and services. What we offer, what we are known for, and the promise implicit in every transaction.
Ownership of our approach. How we work with clients and suppliers; the values, the methods, the relationship style that makes working with us feel different from working with someone else.
Ownership of our voice. The message and visual identity we put out into the world, so that people instantly recognise who they are dealing with.
Simply put, our brand is our promise. And of those three forms of ownership, it is consistently the third, the voice, that gets left behind.
Why voice gets neglected #
It sounds counterintuitive. Of course businesses care about how they communicate. They invest in websites, logos, and marketing materials. But there is a meaningful difference between investing in the appearance of a voice and doing the deeper work of clarifying what that voice is actually trying to say.
The pattern is familiar. So much developmental emphasis gets placed on the product and service line-up, and on routes to market, that the voice, the actual promise being communicated, becomes an afterthought. The result is a conflict, a lack of consistency, a brand that looks polished on the surface but feels hollow or unclear underneath.
The cost of that inconsistency is measurable. Research by Lucidpress found that companies maintaining a consistent brand voice across touchpoints achieve revenue increases of between 23% and 33%. Fewer than 10% of companies studied report their branding as highly consistent, which means the majority are leaving a significant commercial advantage on the table, often without realising it.
The trust dimension compounds the problem further. Research across consumer behaviour consistently finds that around 81% of people need to trust a brand before making a purchase. Inconsistent voice erodes that trust quietly, long before anyone notices the revenue impact.
The pain paradox #
Here is what I have come to believe, having worked through a branding exercise for New Era: branding only genuinely hurts when there is a gap between what the voice is promising and what the business is actually delivering.
The company that talks about customer care but operates transactionally. The brand that positions itself as innovative but delivers yesterday’s solutions. The business that claims to value relationships but runs on efficiency metrics. These aren’t branding failures. They are honesty failures and the discomfort of maintaining them tends to manifest as “branding is hard” rather than “our promise doesn’t match our reality.”
When the voice reflects the truth of how a business actually works, the pain largely evaporates. You stop having to maintain a facade. Consistency stops being an effort and starts being inevitable, because everything flows from genuine belief rather than constructed positioning.
Finding the voice that fits #
The practical question, then, is not “how do we create a compelling brand?” but “how do we build a voice that honestly reflects how we work?”
Start with how the business actually operates, not how it aspires to operate, but how it genuinely does. Are you relationship-first or transaction-focused? Do you prefer working with a small number of clients in depth, or many clients at pace? Do you value speed or understanding? The answers to these questions are the raw material of an authentic voice.
Then consider who benefits most from that approach. A business that works best with a small number of clients slowly and deeply is not for everyone and that is not a weakness. It is a filter. A brand voice that communicates that reality clearly will put off the wrong prospects and draw in the right ones. That self-selection is a feature, not a limitation.
The Bezos formulation captures the destination neatly: “A brand for a company is like a reputation for a person. You earn reputation by trying to do hard things well.”
Earning it, though, requires that the things you are trying to do are honestly communicated. Reputation built on a promise you can genuinely keep compounds over time. Reputation built on a promise you can’t compounds in the other direction.
A note from someone who knows #
Through my own branding exercise, I hoped that any pain or discomfort would be temporary; just as it would be for a bull, from which part of my name derives. The exercise demands a kind of clarity that is occasionally uncomfortable: about who we serve best, about what we can genuinely promise, and about the voice that reflects both honestly.
But the discomfort is productive. It is the discomfort of getting things straight rather than the discomfort of getting things wrong.
That distinction is worth holding onto.
Thank you for reading.
Author: Richard Bull-Domican, founder of New Era Financial Introductions, a B2B lead generation consultancy with over twenty years of experience. The perspectives shared here come from two decades in the field; not theory, but practice.
I create small, digestible guides on Gumroad for business owners who hate aggressive tactics and prefer relationship-led approaches. New resources are added regularly. For longer reads on lead generation and the human side of sales, follow me on Medium and join the daily conversation on LinkedIn.
Gumroad: https://richardbulldomican.gumroad.com/
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