NEWS & Insights on Brand Strategy & Identity Design for UK Startups and SMEs — Bob Patten, Surrey

“I just need a new website” is one of the most common opening lines I hear. Sometimes it’s exactly right. The strategy holds, the identity holds, and the site itself has simply fallen behind — an old template, a slow build, something that made sense five years ago and doesn’t

The brand you built starts getting used by people you didn’t train. An agency picks up your last deck as a starting point. A new hire writes copy without ever seeing your guidelines, because nobody told them guidelines existed. A partner produces something with your logo on it and sends

The brand isn’t the logo. You’ve heard this. Everyone in this field says it. It has almost become a reflex — the first thing a brand strategist says to establish that they’re talking about something more serious than visual design. But it’s true. And I think it’s worth being clear

Something shifts, usually around year three. The clients get better. The conversations get more serious. Someone senior, at a business you actually want to work with, asks for a link before the call. You send it. And then you see it the way they’re about to see it. That slight

Everyone tells first-time founders the same thing. Get a customer first. Sort the brand later. Product before polish. Some of that’s true. None of it’s the whole story. I’ve watched founders take that advice literally — launch fast, worry about the brand once there’s traction — and then sit down

Ask most people how they’d choose between three service packages and they’ll tell you the same thing: go with the one in the middle. Not too basic, not too much. Somewhere safe. That instinct makes sense for a broadband contract. It doesn’t make much sense here. Essential, Grow and Pro

I disagree with clients sometimes. Not all the time. Not about small things, and not loudly. But genuinely, on things that matter. I didn’t always. Earlier in my career I found ways to make almost anything work. I was good at reframing. Good at finding the version of a client’s

Most brand projects have one conversation. The brief. What do you want, what have you got, what are we building, let’s get started. That conversation is necessary. But it’s not sufficient. The best brand projects have three. And the difference between a project that produces something good and one that

Founders think they’re paying for a logo. Sometimes they think they’re paying for a brand strategy, which feels more sophisticated and justified. A document. A framework. A rationale. What they’re actually paying for is clarity. And clarity — genuine, specific, honest clarity about what a business is and who it’s

There’s a moment in most brand projects where something changes. I’ve come to watch for it. It’s not always visible from the outside — it doesn’t come with an announcement. But you can feel it in how the conversation sits. The founder stops asking “is this what I asked for?”

“Make it look more premium.” I hear this more than almost anything else. In briefs, in first conversations, in follow-up emails where a founder is trying to articulate why they’re not quite happy with where the brand is. It sounds like a design directive. It isn’t. It’s usually a founder

Most people think the brief is where a brand project starts. It isn’t. The brief is where founders describe the version of their business they want me to see. It’s the edited version — considered, cleaned up, arranged into categories that make professional sense. It describes the problem they’ve already

There’s a version of this story that sounds simple. You find a brand designer. You explain what you need. They go away and build it. You come back to something polished and ready. Neat. Transactional. I understand why founders expect that. It’s how most professional service relationships work. You have

What Actually Happens in a Brand Strategy Session? Most founders I work with have heard that they need brand strategy. Very few of them know what that actually involves. Some picture a workshop with Post-it notes on a whiteboard. Others assume it’s an extended version of a brief — a

Your best salesperson works around the clock. They make a strong first impression without you being in the room. They communicate exactly the right things to exactly the right people. They disqualify poor fits early and attract good ones reliably. They build trust before a conversation has started, and they

It’s a question that doesn’t get asked often enough. Most businesses invest in a brand, launch it, and then move on — measuring everything around it (website traffic, leads, revenue) while rarely stopping to assess whether the brand itself is doing its job. Here are the criteria I’d use. None

Yes. And here’s why it matters more than it might seem. A logo designed without strategy is decoration. It might be beautiful decoration — skilled, considered, carefully crafted — but it’s still decoration, because it’s been designed in a vacuum. Without knowing who the business is for, what makes it

The conversation usually goes like this: the website isn’t working. Traffic is there but enquiries aren’t. People arrive and leave without getting in touch. Something is off and the working assumption is that the website is the problem — the design, the layout, the calls to action, the journey. So