The significance of brand cannot be overlooked, even in difficult times - Matt Kilb
When margins tighten, the first budget business to business (B2B) boards cut is brand. It's almost a reflex now – short-sighted, but automatic. Boards treat brand as marketing's vanity budget: nice when cash is flush, the obvious casualty when they are not.
The thinking is that brand can wait. Bigger fish to fry. It'll get sorted once the money's been made. Brand is viewed as an external cost rather than a structural asset, and the internal value is the piece very few talk about. If your brand is the easiest thing to cut, it was never doing any real work in the first place.
In our consultancy, we see this pattern especially among high-performing B2B businesses. Brand makes a cameo in the marketing review at the start of the year, then disappears. It's absent from the rooms where the consequential work happens: pricing decisions, hiring decisions, merger and acquisition conversations, or internal restructures. When brand isn't brought into those rooms, businesses make structural decisions in a vacuum. Every call becomes a shot in the dark rather than a step toward something cohesive.
A brand that's performing well is hardwired into the business, acting as guardrails for strategic decision-making, integral to every department. That's what a load-bearing brand looks like. Visual artefacts such as the logo, the website, the deck template are just the surface level things a brand puts out into the world. Cut those, and if nothing structural changes, it was never structural to begin with.
A strong brand is the operating logic a business uses to make decisions consistent over time and across departments. It's the thing that lets a CEO turn down a tempting deal because it doesn't fit the business they're trying to build, and lets the sales team know which customer to chase. When it's working, it's the language the internal culture already speaks, written down clearly enough that everyone inside can use it. People stay at businesses they believe in, and belief comes from a clear, repeatable story about what the business is for.
The businesses pulling ahead in Yorkshire are those treating brand as a board-level discipline and behaving more like a B2C operator. Their cultures are stronger, their retention is higher, and their sales cycles are shorter. The buyers have already convinced themselves before the first call, because the brand is straightforward to understand.
Behaving more like a B2C operator means treating reputation as something you build all the time. It means thinking about your story the way a consumer brand thinks about packaging: as the first thing the buyer touches.
Fullers Foods, based here in Leeds, is a good example of what this looks like in practice. They talk about food like a B2C food brand, not a logistics and supply company. They've put reputation and identity at the centre of their decision-making, and the gains show up where they matter: stronger relationships with buyers, easier recruitment, and more deals being made.
The longer businesses wait to invest in their internal brand, the more expensive the catch-up gets. When the next downturn comes, brand will still be the first budget cut, because the people cutting it can’t see what it is supposed to be holding up. The brand-led businesses will be using theirs to make work easier.
Matt Kilb is the founder of KISS Branding.