Category: Insights

  • How to Give Feedback on Creative – A B2B Marketer’s Guide

    How to Give Feedback on Creative – A B2B Marketer’s Guide

    How to Give Feedback on Creative - record

    Why this is harder than it looks

    How to give feedback on creative starts with accepting one thing… we are not rational. However seasoned a marketer you are, it’s worth reminding yourself of this.

    We react emotionally first.
    Then we build a reason to justify it.

    Psychologist Jonathan Haidt calls this post hoc reasoning a rationale built after the fact to explain a judgement we’d already made.

    And a first look at a new creative idea asks a lot of us. We’re assessing it on several levels at once:

    • Will it cut through and earn attention from a buying group that isn’t actively looking?
    • Will internal stakeholders buy into it?
    • Will it deliver against the brief and our commercial objectives?
    • Is it a true campaign platform that can flex across every channel and touchpoint, from brand to demand?
    • Does it build our distinctive brand assets or borrow someone else’s?

    Then there’s the question nobody says out loud. Do we actually like it and is it something we’re excited to work on? That’s not a bias to hide, as ideas need a champion – especially when you need to sell them in to the rest of the business. But it’s worth admitting, so it doesn’t quietly disguise itself as a strategic objection.

    The good news is that feedback is one of the most powerful tools you have. Done well, it’s what turns a promising idea into work that’s genuinely great and makes the agency want to go the extra mile for you.

    Before you’re in the room

    You get out what you put in.

    Take the time to make sure there’s a clear brief, audience and proposition you’ve both agreed on. Get these right and you’re starting from a solid place.

    It can also help for the agency to speak directly to the person responsible for the product or service you’re promoting. They often know the client and the detail better than anyone, and a short conversation can sharpen the brief considerably.

    Just as importantly, make sure your internal stakeholders have signed off the brief too, not just you. In partner-led firms especially, it’s much easier to align senior people on the brief than to debate the work later. If someone’s view only surfaces once they’ve seen the creative, you’ll be judging the idea against a brief the agency was never given.

    It also helps to agree the process upfront: how many rounds of feedback you have, who has final sign-off and when the agency can expect to hear back from you. That protects your timeline and your budget and means nobody is left waiting.

    When it comes to what you’ll see, the level of finish varies. Sometimes you’ll see rough thinking. Sometimes something more worked-up. It depends on timing, budget and how the agency usually works.

    A good agency will tell you what to expect before you walk in. If they don’t, ask. It’s a quick check-in, and it means you (and anyone else in the room) know what you’re actually looking at.

    If you have time, it’s always worth a quick scan of your brief or the agency’s creative brief beforehand.

    How the session itself should run

    Typically, the agency will open with a short recap of the brief to get everyone in the right mindset. They’ll then present the work, either pausing after each idea for feedback or running through all the ideas in one go.

    A few helpful suggestions:

    • Take notes as the work is presented. Instant reactions are hard to recall and hard to recreate as time passes.
    • Ask the agency which idea they’d back. Hearing their view first gives everyone in the room time to digest the work. Don’t be surprised if their opinions are divided.
    • Agree in advance who will comment first. Depending on your team, this helps everyone enjoy the process. It can be unnecessarily uncomfortable for junior members to be put on the spot.

    How to evaluate what you’re seeing

    Stay disciplined and keep bringing everything back to the proposition you agreed. It’s your fixed point and the fairest test of any idea.

    That discipline matters whatever your first reaction. 

    Sometimes you’ll feel the excitement of an idea that’s clearly right. Sometimes you’ll feel disappointment, because you’ve maybe waited weeks, built up a picture in your head and what’s been presented doesn’t match it. Either way, that gut response is useful information, but it isn’t feedback yet.

    • Start with what’s working. Before getting into problems, say what you like and why. It isn’t just politeness. Knowing what’s landing tells the agency what to protect and build on, which is as valuable as knowing what to fix.
    • Be as specific with praise as with criticism. ‘Love it’ is as hard to act on as ‘hate it’. Point to the line, the visual or the insight that’s doing the work and connect it back to the proposition, so it survives the next round intact.
    • Judge the idea, not the execution. Early work is rough by design. A non-compliant or technically incorrect line or placeholder image can be fixed – a weak idea can’t. Ask whether the thinking is right before worrying about how it looks.
    • Avoid jumping to the solution. It’s tempting to jump straight to your own solution, but explain what isn’t working first. The agency needs to understand why something misses the mark to fix it properly – that’s the expertise you’re paying for. Framing feedback as questions helps: ‘What was the thinking behind this line?’ or ‘Did you explore a version that leads with the client outcome?’ often gets you further than an instruction.
    • Show, don’t just tell. If you can’t find the words for what’s missing, a reference can help. A tone of voice, a piece of photography or a campaign from another sector can say in seconds what takes paragraphs to explain.
    • Strip out the emotive language. If the work isn’t landing, ‘I’m disappointed’’ or ‘it’s just not us’ gives the team nothing to act on. Translate the feeling into something specific: which part of the proposition it misses, or which audience it won’t reach.
    • Separate must-haves from nice-to-haves. Not every comment carries the same weight, so be clear which changes are essential and which are suggestions. And if a piece of feedback relies on information that wasn’t in the brief, be honest that it’s a re-brief, not a failure of the work.

    Five tests for B2B, financial and professional services

    Most guides on how to give feedback on creative are written for consumer brands. In financial and professional services, a few extra questions matter.

    • The swap test. Could a competitor put their logo on this and run it unchanged? In a sector where so many firms describe themselves as a ‘trusted partner’, work that could belong to anyone won’t be remembered by anyone. Credible isn’t the same as memorable, and this is the simplest way to check.
    • Safe isn’t the same as right. Regulated firms naturally lean towards the conservative, and senior stakeholders may push work in that direction. When an idea is described as ‘too risky’, ask whether it’s genuinely a compliance or reputational risk, or simply unfamiliar. Regulation constrains what you can say, not how distinctively you say it.
    • The jargon check. Financial services copy drifts into insider language, especially after technical stakeholders have had their say. Ask whether a client, not a colleague, would understand it. For retail-facing wealth firms, this also supports the FCA’s Consumer Duty expectations on consumer understanding.
    • Which audience are you judging for? Asset managers and platforms often need work to land with intermediaries and advisers as well as end investors. Be clear which audience the work is for, and make sure each reviewer is judging it through the right lens.
    • Will they remember it, not will they call tomorrow? Choosing a wealth manager, an asset manager or a consultancy is an infrequent, considered decision. At any given moment, most of your prospects aren’t in market. The right question isn’t whether the work will drive an immediate response, but whether it will make your firm the one they remember when they’re ready to buy.

    When the feedback isn’t just yours to give

    In financial and professional services, you’re rarely the only one whose opinion counts. A managing partner, a CEO, a head of distribution, head of sales, a portfolio manager or a senior adviser may all need to sign off, and many of them will have no marketing background at all. Your job isn’t just to have your own view. It’s to gather theirs and turn it into one clear, useful piece of feedback for the agency.

    • Ask everyone the same specific questions. A general ‘thoughts?’ invites vague, taste-based answers, especially from partners and fund managers who don’t have a marketing vocabulary to draw on. Ask instead – does it answer the brief? Would it resonate with the clients you speak to? What’s the one thing that isn’t working? Their knowledge of clients is valuable; their preference for navy over green usually isn’t.
    • Do the reconciling yourself. Relaying a list of conflicting opinions back to the agency isn’t feedback, it’s homework you haven’t done. Work out which problems several people have spotted independently and which are one person’s preference, then deliver a single, prioritised view. If two senior voices genuinely disagree, resolve it internally before it reaches the agency.
    • Protect what’s great. Group sign-off has a habit of sanding the edges off strong ideas, as each person asks for a small change. When you believe in the work, be its champion internally. Your job isn’t only to filter out problems, but also to keep the best of the idea alive.
    • Remember who your stakeholders are thinking about. Partners and advisers often judge work by how it would land with their biggest client, or how it compares with the firm down the road. That’s useful context, but bring it back to the proposition and the wider audience. The work has to reach the 95% of future buyers, not just please the client they had lunch or saw at an event with last week.
    • Plan for compliance from the start. Financial promotions sign-off, legal review and risk checks are a different kind of approval, so build them into the timeline upfront rather than treating them as a surprise objection after everyone else has agreed. Better still, involve compliance early and try to get one dedicated person to see through the work from start to finish. They’ll tell you what can’t be said, which leaves the agency free to be distinctive with everything that can.

    What happens after the room

    The presentation is over, but the most useful part of the feedback process is only just starting.

    • Don’t feel pressure to respond on the spot. There’s no obligation to give feedback there and then. However keen the agency is to hear your reaction, remember they’ve had the luxury of living with these ideas for weeks, while you’re seeing them for the first time. Thank the team, ask any clarifying questions, and give yourself time for that first emotional reaction to settle. It also gives you room to gather your stakeholders’ views before committing to a position you might need to walk back later. 
    • Stick to the timeline you agreed. Let the agency know when to expect your feedback, and keep to it. Late or piecemeal feedback costs time and budget and often leads to rushed work in the next round. 
    • Talk it through, then write it down. Feedback lands best as a conversation, so deliver it on a call where the agency can ask questions and you can explain the thinking behind each point. Then follow up in writing, so everyone is working from the same record of what was agreed, with must-haves clearly marked. Depending on the project, sending initial thoughts by email ahead of the call can help too, giving the team time to digest your points and making the session itself more productive.
    • Share the good news too. If stakeholders respond well, tell the agency. Knowing a partner loved the work, or that it sparked a conversation with a client, builds confidence and momentum for the next round.
    • Keep the strategy in the room. The best work always comes back to the proposition, so make sure someone is accountable for it all the way through. It’s reasonable to ask that the strategist stays involved beyond the brief and shares responsibility for the work alongside the creative director. That way, every round of feedback is tested against the thinking you agreed, not just how the work looks.

    When creative reviews keep turning into debates

    If disagreement over creative is a regular pattern for your team, it’s worth asking what’s actually being judged. Feedback only works when everyone is measuring the work against the same clear idea of what the brand stands for. Without that, every creative review quietly becomes a debate about the brand itself, dressed up as a debate about the work.

    That’s the upstream problem we solve at Find Your Angle. Our Un4gettable Framework pinpoints where your brand is blending in, and our 90-Day FIND Plan builds the positioning and brief that give every stakeholder, from partners to compliance, the same fixed point to judge the work against. We work alongside your internal team and existing agency, so the next creative review is about the idea, not the brand. And if the debate runs deeper than one campaign, it may be a sign that a rebrand is worth considering.

    If that sounds familiar, we’d love to chat – book a free 30-minute strategy call and we’ll help you work out where the disagreement is really coming from.

    Download the Creative Review Checklist

    Want to keep this guide to hand? Download our free Creative Review Checklist and share it with your team.

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    Frequently Asked Questions

    How many rounds of creative feedback should you have?

    Most projects work well with two or three rounds, but the right number depends on the scope and the budget. What matters more is agreeing it upfront, so everyone knows when the last opportunity for changes is. Clear, consolidated feedback in each round is the best way to avoid needing more.

    How do you give feedback on creative in a regulated industry?

    Involve compliance early, ideally at the brief stage, so the agency knows the boundaries before it starts. Then separate compliance requirements from creative preferences in your feedback, so the agency knows which changes are non-negotiable and which are open to discussion. Regulation defines what you can and can’t say, but it shouldn’t be a reason for work to look and sound like everyone else’s.

    Who should be involved in reviewing creative work?

    Keep the core review group small – the people accountable for the brief, plus anyone with final sign-off. Wider stakeholders, such as partners, fund managers or advisers, add valuable client insight, but their views are best gathered with specific questions and consolidated by the marketing lead into a single, prioritised response.

  • How to Choose a B2B Marketing Agency – Ask The Smart Question

    How to Choose a B2B Marketing Agency – Ask The Smart Question

    How to Choose a B2B Marketing Agency

    How to Choose a B2B Marketing Agency: Where to Start

    How to choose a B2B marketing agency is a question every wealth management, asset management or professional services firm eventually has to answer, and most run the same best-practice checklist to do it.

    It tends to start the same way.

    You and the team have done your homework and invited your shortlist of agencies or consultants to pitch. It probably took more time and energy than you expected.

    Most of the pitches sound good. 

    The teams presenting are enthusiastic. You may even be shown some speculative creative you weren’t expecting.

    The decks all have polished case studies and glowing testimonials. The slide with the client logos is impressive and everyone’s happy to work to your budget.

    Thankfully, there are one or two easy nos, because the rest are close.

    So how do you begin to narrow it down?

    Fast forward to the decision. You’ve chosen. The chemistry feels right. The contracts are signed.

    And yet, six months in, the work looks like everyone else’s.

    You wonder did we pick the right agency partner? 

    But sometimes, it’s a question that never got asked at the start.

    How to Choose a B2B Marketing Agency – The Checklist Everyone Runs

    The basics checklist does matter. 

    There’s no shortcut here and you need to run proper due diligence to weed out the agencies who on closer inspection are not a good fit (this may be easier if you’re paying for an intermediary such as the AAR).

    Sector experience means real experience, not ‘we’ve done B2B before,’ and not a case study the agency points to but didn’t actually work on. What about the actual people who delivered these case studies? Are they still at the agency, or have they left? Will they work on your business, not just the pitch?

    Ask what they actually think of your industry right now. You’ll know within thirty seconds whether they’re genuinely interested.

    What’s their actual process for finding the proposition that will make your firm distinctive and memorable? Not the workshops, the stakeholder interviews, the competitor reviews, but the strategic thinking underneath it, how they get from a room full of opinions to a single, defensible idea, and how that idea gets tested before it’s presented back to you.

    Interrogate the case studies. Ask what the proposition was, who arrived at it and over what timeframe. What were the challenges and how did they work through them? A logo on a slide proves nothing on its own.

    This checklist will help. But there’s something missing that actually helps you decide…

    What question does that checklist never ask?

    The hard truth – most of your buyers aren’t listening yet.

    At any given moment, around 95% of your potential buyers are out of market. Not just this quarter. Maybe not even this year. That’s not a Find Your Angle stat. It’s a well-established finding in B2B marketing research.

    So the game is being remembered for when a buyer is ready.

    And that’s the question most shortlists never ask an agency directly – how will you make sure we’re remembered at that key moment, the point of consideration?

    It’s worth asking outright and listening closely for whether the answer is about your sector specifically, or about marketing in general.

    A good answer needs two things: knowing exactly where your buyers actually form an opinion of you and proof it’s worked in a sector that is scrutinised. 

    For us, that means being able to show this working in sectors where the scrutiny is real – from Argon & Co to Ascot Lloyd and M&G Wealth.

    Where we’ve seen it go wrong

    We’ve been on pretty much every side of this process: pitching, defending our position as the incumbent, and watching clients bring in specialist support alongside us.

    A firm hires an agency that ticks every box. A thorough process is followed and the work is considered. They may even have had the time and budget to run some research. The new positioning is rolled-out across all comms.

    And yet, a year later, nobody outside the building can remember a single thing the brand said.

    Not because the work was wrong. Because it was invisible, safe and to the buyer, sadly forgettable.

    What to actually listen for

    Worth deciding before you brief anyone – do you want to see creative at all?

    Leave it open and the bigger, better-resourced agencies will show it regardless, because they can afford to. They know a visual is hard to look past in the room, it’s emotive and it quietly shifts the decision from who has the right process for us to who has excited us. If you’re trying to assess a strategic partner, it may be worth saying no to creative explicitly in the brief and judging everyone on the same thing.

    In addition, no agency pitching you should claim to already know what your brand should say – though they may share some thought starters. They should acknowledge they haven’t done the work yet. What you can assess is whether their process would actually get them there.

    Belief. Ask how they’d go about finding out what your firm genuinely stands for, not what they’ve assumed from the brief. What’s their process for testing whether it’s differentiated, rather than just plausible?

    Moments. Ask how they’d identify where your buyers actually form an opinion of you. They may from experience guess at channels, but what is the actual process for finding out – with consideration to your targets and possible media budget.

    Distinctiveness. Ask how they’d know if what they land on is genuinely ownable, rather than something any competitor’s positioning could also claim.

    Consistency. Ask how their process protects a proposition once it’s been through several rounds of stakeholder review. Examples of how they’ve done it before, not a promise.

    An agency that can walk you through a rigorous process for all four, with real regulated-sector examples of it holding up, is worth more of your time than one that jumps straight to answers they haven’t earned yet.

    Can a regulated brand really afford to be distinctive?

    You’re running a professional brand with an expectation of the highest standards, so the instinct to play it safe is a reasonable one.

    We’d ask it differently…can you afford not to be?

    Compliance governs what you’re allowed to claim. Not how memorable you’re allowed to be.

    First Direct has topped UK bank NPS rankings for years running, all while operating under the same FCA rules as every other bank. The constraint was never on distinctiveness. It was on substance.

    So what’s the one question worth asking?

    The basics checklist does matter. You need to know who’s actually doing the work, what experience they have, how they measure success and whether their process makes sense for your business.

    But there’s another question worth asking, particularly in a category where firms can start to sound remarkably similar: what will make your brand the one your buyers remember?

    Not ‘can you get to a proposition everyone can sign off on,’ most can. But ‘will anyone remember us when it counts.’

    Because 95% of the people you’re trying to reach aren’t listening yet. And the ones who eventually are will only remember the firms that gave them something to remember.

    That’s what sits behind our Un4gettable Framework: Belief. Moments. Distinctiveness. Consistency.

    Those aren’t just the four questions to ask an agency. They’re the framework we built to answer them ourselves – each one grounded in published research across cognitive science, marketing effectiveness and brand strategy, not opinion.

    Together, they show whether a brand is built to be remembered, or just built to blend in.

    If you want to know where your firm sits against all four, before you run another pitch, we’ll happily walk you through it.

    Contact

    Frequently Asked Questions

    How long does it take to see results from B2B marketing?

    Ninety days is a realistic minimum to see measurable movement – our own FIND Plan is built around that timeframe, and most clients see an improvement in marketing ROI within it.

    How much does a B2B marketing agency cost?

    Costs vary depending on scope, seniority of the team and whether you need strategy, execution or both. Where possible, share your budget range with the agencies you’re talking to – you’ll get more workable proposals back, tailored for you.

    What’s the difference between a marketing agency and a marketing consultancy?

    An agency is generally built to execute – creative, campaigns, channels. A consultancy is built to advise – positioning, strategy, the thinking behind what gets executed. In practice the line has blurred, and the better question isn’t which label a firm uses, but whether they can do both: set the right strategy and see it through.

    What should I ask before choosing a B2B marketing agency?

    Ask who’ll actually work on your account day to day, what real sector experience they have, and what their actual process is for arriving at your proposition. Then ask the question most shortlists skip: how they’ll make sure your firm is remembered at the point your buyers are ready to choose.

  • Why Credible Is Not The Same As Memorable

    Why Credible Is Not The Same As Memorable

    Brand Memorability Financial Services

    THE FOUR DIMENSIONS THAT DETERMINE WHETHER A FINANCIAL SERVICES BRAND GETS REMEMBERED AND WHY MOST B2B MARKETING MISSES THEM.

    In brand memorability financial services research, one finding stands out: most firms are credible. Very few are memorable.

    Open a few different professional services or wealth management websites and hide the logos. How many can you tell apart?

    The same navy blues, stock photography and language of ‘Trusted partner’, ‘Client-first’, ‘Long-term relationships’. These category conventions are built from a place of trying to please everyone from compliance to sales and marketing to management. But in doing so they dilute what sets them apart and they end up in a sea of sameness where they are credible but indistinguishable from each other and as a result unmemorable.

    This matters because in a market with long sales cycles where 95% of buyers are not in-market at any given time (Ehrenberg-Bass Institute), being credible doesn’t drive long term growth, brand memorability does.

    THE COMMERCIAL CASE FOR MEMORY

    This is the commercial case for brand memorability in financial services: it isn’t a nice-to-have, it’s what determines whether your firm makes the shortlist at all.

    When Forrester asked B2B buyers how they approach a new purchase, 92% said they started their search with at least one brand already in mind. The firms on that shortlist are not necessarily the most qualified. They are the ones that are remembered.

    McKinsey’s State of Marketing Europe 2026 found that branding is now the number one priority for European marketing leaders, above performance marketing, AI and martech. That shift reflects something the data has been pointing to for some time, that the long game in B2B marketing is not the number views or clicks. It’s building memory structures that put your firm on a consideration list before the buying process begins.

    Binet and Field’s analysis of the IPA Effectiveness Databank makes the mechanism clear. Emotional campaigns significantly outperform rational ones on long-term commercial growth. Not because emotion is inherently more powerful, but because it builds the memory structures that make a brand top of mind the moment a buyer starts looking for a new product or service to solve a business challenge.

    So how can professional services or wealth management brands build stronger memory structures with future buyers? The Un4gettable Framework has been designed specifically to answer this question.

    THE FRAMEWORK

    The Un4gettable Framework measures brand memorability across four dimensions. Each dimension is built from published research in cognitive science, advertising effectiveness and brand strategy. Together they diagnose why a brand is being remembered or overlooked and what can be done to make it unforgettable.

    DIMENSIONDIAGNOSTIC QUESTION
    BeliefWhat does brand stand for?
    MomentsWill the message resonate?
    DistinctivenessIs it instantly recognisable without the name or logo?
    ConsistencyDoes the brand feel familiar?

    BELIEF

    What does this brand stand for?

    Byron Sharp’s research in How Brands Grow shows that functional claims are easily copied and rarely build long-term memory and System1’s analysis of tens of thousands of ads confirms why. Emotional resonance, rooted in a genuine brand belief, is the single strongest predictor of long-term commercial performance.

    What endures is not what a brand does, but what it stands for, succinctly expressed in a way that is easy to understand and can’t be replicated by a competitor.

    This distinction matters in professional and financial services more than in almost any other sector, because the functional offer across firms is so similar. A wealth manager that leads with ‘personalised service and long-term relationships’ has said nothing a competitor cannot claim. 

    Vanguard’s belief of providing value to investors is underpinned by its ownership structure. Vanguard is owned by its own funds, which are owned by the people who invest in them. Fidelity, BlackRock and Schroders can’t say the same thing, because it isn’t true of them.

    So the test is simple. Does or could another firm say the same thing that your firm wants to be known for? If the answer is yes, then you don’t have an ownable belief. You have a category convention.

    MOMENTS

    Will the message resonate?

    Ehrenberg-Bass research on Category Entry Points identifies the specific triggers, situations, needs and emotions, that bring a brand to mind during the buying process. An ad can be emotionally compelling without being commercially effective if the moment it depicts has no connection to the buying decision.

    A wealth management brand that depicts the moment a client realises their money could be working harder is connecting to a category entry point. The emotion and the buying trigger align. The same warmth applied to a moment with no purchase relevance generates sentiment, not consideration. 

    Most B2B marketing fails to resonate because it does not deliver the right message to the right person at the right time. HubSpot is a great example of thinking about the buyer journey and the category entry points. Founders Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah put it plainly in their own account of the company’s origin, ‘buyers didn’t want to be interrupted by ads, they wanted helpful information’.

    DISTINCTIVENESS

    Is it instantly recognisable without the name or logo?

    The Ehrenberg-Bass Institute found fewer than 15% of brand assets are truly distinctive. Most brands compete with visual and verbal identities their audience cannot place. This is primarily down to B2B brands following tried and tested design and verbal cues that position the brand as safe and professional.

    Distinctiveness comes from owning assets, whether colours, language, tone or imagery, and using them consistently enough that they belong to the brand in the buyer’s mind. In professional services, where most firms share the same visual vocabulary, even modest differences create a real competitive advantage. The challenge is not only in finding those differences, but also committing to them long enough for them to stick.

    Frontiers in Neuroscience research on storytelling supports this saying that consistently recognisable brand signals activate multiple memory encoding pathways simultaneously, building stronger recall than rational claims made in isolation.

    Mailchimp’s yellow-and-black palette, and Freddie the chimp, are exactly the kind of distinctive assets Ehrenberg-Bass research is describing. Consistent and not conforming to category norms so that they become known and recognised for it.

    In 2020, Mailchimp tested how far that recognition went through its ‘Did You Mean Mailchimp?’ which leaned into the fact that people were mistyping searches for a folk singer, a wrestling event and startups, as ‘Mailchimp’. Not many B2B brands could run that same test and survive it.

    CONSISTENCY

    Does the brand feel familiar?

    System1 and the IPA’s Compound Creativity research shows brands that maintain their creative style across campaigns significantly outperform those that reinvent with every campaign. Ehrenberg-Bass makes the same point from memory science that distinctive assets only build mental availability through sustained use.

    Consistency therefore is not a constraint but instead a gate that helps increase memorability: a brand that looks different with every campaign is simply starting over. The strongest creative in the world will not build brand equity if the next campaign looks like it belongs to a different firm.

    IBM is a good example of a consistent identity system with Paul Rand’s eight-bar logo unchanged since 1972. The message and creative has evolved from Solutions for a Small Planet to Smarter Planet to Let’s Create, tracking the evolution of the business itself. But one idea has sat at the centre of all of it since Thomas Watson coined it in 1911, Think. It named IBM’s staff magazine in 1935, its laptops from the 1990s, and its flagship conference since 2018.

    So, what holds a hundred years of reinvention together isn’t a fixed message. It’s a fixed identity that lets the message change without the brand losing itself.

    WHAT THIS MEANS IN PRACTICE

    These four dimensions work together. A brand with a genuine belief but inconsistent execution loses the compounding effect that makes the belief stick. A brand that is distinctive but never reaches buyers at the right moment generates recognition without consideration. Memorability is not a single lever. It is a connected system.

    Most B2B brands are weak on at least two of these four dimensions. The firms that score well across all four are not always the biggest. They are the ones clients remember when it matters.

    The Un4gettable Framework is the diagnostic we use to assess how a brand performs across all four dimensions and how it compares to its competitors. The output identifies where a brand is building memory, where it is blending in, and where the most significant opportunities are.

    WHAT SCORING WELL ACROSS ALL FOUR DIMENSIONS LOOKS LIKE

    Vanguard, HubSpot and Mailchimp each show one dimension working hard. Hiscox, the business insurer, is a rare brand scoring high across all four dimensions.

    Since September 2023, Hiscox have run an ongoing platform called ‘The Most Disastrous Campaign Ever’, built around 21 deliberately chaotic outdoor sites (sparking wires, a misspelled Hiscox logo, a blank newspaper wrap), later extended into ads that mimic Specsavers, Weetabix and Cillit Bang to dramatise the real cost of copyright infringement.

    Belief. Insurance marketing almost universally reassures. Hiscox’s point of view goes the other way in that running a small business is genuinely risky, mistakes happen and pretending otherwise insults the audience’s intelligence. The chaos in the ads is that belief, made visible.

    Moments. Every execution dramatises a real risk a small business owner buys insurance to cover from a data breach to a client dispute to a copyright slip. Not an abstract brand value with no connection to the purchase.

    Distinctiveness. Red and black, built through visible chaos rather than polish. Recognisable as Hiscox from across the room, and nothing like the navy-blue reassurance the rest of the category defaults to.

    Consistency. The platform has run for more than two years, across multiple markets and executions, each one obviously another instalment of the same idea rather than a fresh start.

    The commercial result is a meaningful rise in unaided brand awareness and search volume, contributing to Hiscox’s highest-ever annual profit.

    FIND OUT WHERE YOUR BRAND STANDS

    Our Un4gettable Framework measures brand memorability in financial services across four dimensions, each grounded in research from Ehrenberg-Bass, Byron Sharp and System1. We use this framework to assess how memorable a brand is and what it can do to become un4gettable.

    Learn more

    RESEARCH REFERENCES

    Ehrenberg-Bass Institute (Prof. John Dawes). 95:5 Rule: 95% of B2B buyers are not in-market at any given time.

    Ehrenberg-Bass Institute (Jenni Romaniuk). Distinctive Asset research: fewer than 15% of brand assets are truly distinctive. Building Distinctive Brand Assets, Oxford University Press, 2018.

    Ehrenberg-Bass Institute. Category Entry Points: the buying triggers and situations that bring brands to mind during purchase decisions.

    Byron Sharp, How Brands Grow. Distinctiveness over differentiation. Physical and mental availability as the primary drivers of brand growth. Oxford University Press, 2010.

    Binet & Field, IPA Effectiveness Databank. The Long and Short of It: emotional campaigns outperform rational campaigns on long-term growth.

    System1 & IPA. Compound Creativity (Oct 2024): brands that maintain consistent creative style significantly outperform those that reinvent with every campaign.

    Forrester, 2024. 2024 B2B Buyers’ Journey Survey – 92% of B2B buyers start their evaluation with at least one vendor already in mind.

    McKinsey State of Marketing Europe 2026. Branding is the number one priority for European marketing leaders, above performance marketing, AI and martech.

  • To Record Or Not To Record?

    To Record Or Not To Record?

    Recording client meetings

    Should marketing agencies make recording client meetings the default? AI meeting assistants can capture transcripts, summaries and actions from every conversation. But does recording everything change the quality of the conversation itself?

    Honest, open conversations happen in person. Or on the phone.

    Forget email.

    With Teams, Zoom and AI meeting assistants, the line has blurred.

    For those in highly sensitive or regulated industries, it makes sense that strict rules and policies are in place.

    At board meetings only the company secretary can take the minutes, for example.

    But for many of us, off-the-record conversations are still needed. That’s where you can get to the truth.

    We see from other agencies, in particular media, that argue recording client meetings by default makes them more accountable, efficient, more professional.

    What is there to hide?

    But that misses the sensitivities you may have the privilege of being aware of.

    It’s unrealistic to think we work in a vacuum.

    Personalities matter within an organisation.

    Culture matters.

    And so does where a business is sitting at that moment.

    What else is going on?

    A new Head of Marketing finding their feet and pushing for a different direction.

    Maybe a change at board or partner level that’s shifted alignment on what the business should stand for. 

    Or a merger or acquisition on the horizon, bringing new cost pressures with it.

    Some of it may seem completely unrelated to marketing.

    But indirectly, it can shape everything, including how we work together.

    The decisions being made.

    The appetite for risk.

    The ambition.

    And ultimately, the goal and end result.

    Where the real insights happen

    In our years working with different clients, some of the best insights have come from the off-the-record chats.

    That’s where you find out who’s really making the decision.

    Whose job is on the line.

    How brave they can afford to be.

    What pressures are really sitting behind the brief.

    The things that don’t necessarily get said in the meeting.

    In a dream world, these conversations would happen over a cup of coffee.

    But in reality, we work faster and across different locations. The old-fashioned desk phone has become less common, while Teams and Zoom calls are here to stay.

    And AI meeting technology is changing things again. Transcripts, summaries and actions can be pulled out automatically.

    In our experience, that’s usually all anyone wants. Given the choice, people are far more relaxed with a transcript running than a camera. And if we’re honest, how often does anyone go back and watch a recording of a meeting? A transcript gives you everything you need, without the discomfort of being on camera.

    We’ve embraced AI at Find Your Angle. 

    We continue to be amazed by how quickly things are changing, and by what technology can now do to support our work and our clients.

    But we’ve also stopped to consider what it costs the client relationship.

    Does everyone want every word they say recorded?

    Do clients want an AI meeting assistant transcribing the conversation when they’re chatting among themselves before we dial in?

    Because often, those few minutes before a meeting starts are where a lot of the real work happens.

    And sometimes, it’s what gets said after we leave that matters most.

    What to ask before your next call

    If you’re the one being asked to join a call with an AI assistant in the room, it’s worth knowing what you’re agreeing to. 

    A few questions are worth asking any agency or supplier before you say yes by default.

    Who can access the recording once the call ends? Is it stored and if so, for how long? Is it being used to train anyone’s AI model beyond that one summary? And critically, can you ask for it to be switched off.

    You shouldn’t feel awkward asking. If you do, perhaps that’s telling you something.

    In the UK, recording a meeting means processing personal data. People should know it’s happening and why. 

    It’s the same principle running through everything above, we believe the conversation changes the moment someone isn’t sure who’s really listening, or where their words might end up. This is important to the client relationship.

    We’d rather you ask us these questions than assume the answer.

    Recording client meetings by default?

    For now, at Find Your Angle, recording client meetings isn’t something we do automatically.

    We don’t have a bot follow us into every meeting, not because we don’t find these tools useful or efficient. We do.

    But above everything, we value the client relationship and the trust that comes with knowing a conversation is confidential.

    We think it takes experience to know when recording client meetings is appropriate.

    It’s over twenty years of listening to clients in meetings has taught us.

    For us, it isn’t a blanket policy.

    It depends on the conversation.

    It depends on the people involved.

    And it depends on what we’re trying to achieve.

    Part of our FIND process to get to your brand proposition can involve talking to a client’s customers or stakeholders.

    These are typically off-the-record conversations.

    That creates the space for people to be honest.

    To tell us what they really think.

    Especially in internal stakeholder work, we’ve found it makes people franker. When there’s no recording running, people stop rehearsing the safe version of an answer. They say what’s going on, not the version that can’t be quoted back at them later.

    And that’s often where the most valuable insight comes from.

    It works differently when we’re gathering feedback for a client from their own customers or wider stakeholder group. There, we tell everyone upfront that what they say will be anonymised and reported back as group findings, never attributed to them by name. Knowing that seems to make people more open, not less. And because it isn’t a one-to-one, commercially sensitive conversation, a transcript earns its place there: something to check back against if a finding gets questioned, tangible evidence of the work you’ve commissioned, and it cuts the time it takes us to turn interviews into a summary you can act on.

    Are we really listening?

    There’s a question we ask ourselves too. Are we really listening if we know we’re being recorded?

    Do we lose some of our edge and our instinct to dig a little deeper when something said didn’t fully make sense, to challenge what we’ve heard and to make sure we’ve really understood?

    Meeting transcription can capture every word or hallucinate the words, in any case!

    But that doesn’t necessarily mean we’re capturing the conversation.

    Good consultancy relies on understanding what people say, what they don’t say and why. And sometimes you need the conditions for people to speak freely.

    What do you think?

    Should online meetings be recorded by default?

    Or are there still conversations that are better left off the record?

    We’d love to hear your view.

    If you’re weighing up recording client meetings yourself, or just looking for a clearer view of where your business sits and how to make your brand more memorable, we’d be happy to talk.

    And yes, recording this conversation is optional.

  • Harness Cognitive Bias Branding to Build a Powerful, Unforgettable B2B Brand

    Harness Cognitive Bias Branding to Build a Powerful, Unforgettable B2B Brand

    cognitive bias branding

    Invisible words

    Cognitive bias branding is the study of why some financial and professional services brands get remembered…and most don’t.

    Open any wealth management or professional services website and you will see the same words.

    Trusted.

    Long-term.

    Tailored.

    Client-centric.

    These are not bad words. They are just invisible ones. When every firm says the same thing, none of it gets remembered.

    The brands that cut through do not necessarily have better products or stronger track records. They have found ways to work with how the brain processes and stores information so that it gets noticed, feels credible, and comes to mind when a buyer is ready.

    The cognitive biases on this page show how B2B brands in complex, regulated markets can use them to their advantage to get noticed, remembered and chosen.

    They are not separate levers, they work together to make a brand unforgettable.

    Cognitive Bias – The Mere Exposure Effect 

    Brands that show up before a buyer is in-market get on the shortlist when they are ready

    ‘Repeated exposure increases liking and recall because familiarity generates preference before any evaluation begins’.

    The average buying cycle in professional services and wealth management is between 6-18 months. The organisations that get onto the shortlist do so through accumulated impressions. The Mere Exposure Effect explains why this matters and what to do about it.

    Robert Zajonc’s 1968 study showed that repeated exposure to a stimulus increases how much people like it. Subjects who had been subliminally exposed to stimuli reported liking them more, without any awareness of prior encounter.

    The firms showing up consistently in your prospects’ LinkedIn feeds, through thought leadership, speaking engagements and industry commentary, are accumulating a familiarity advantage that directly influences buying decisions.

    Les Binet and Peter Field’s IPA Effectiveness research found that brands that sustain consistent long-term investment outperform short-burst campaign activity by 4.5 times on market share growth.

    Research from the IPA and Ehrenberg-Bass Institute shows that 95% of your potential clients are not in the market at any given moment. They are not assessing options or evaluating fees, but they are reading, forming views, and building mental shortlists. The firms showing up consistently in that window are the ones that feel familiar, trustworthy, and low-risk when buyers are in-market.

    Go Compare: From 2009, the opera singer ads were voted among the most irritating on UK television, yet the constant repetition made the brand familiar and trusted enough to become one of the UK’s best-known comparison sites.

    Implication for your brand:

    Familiarity reduces the cognitive effort required to evaluate a new relationship. In a market where buyers are time-poor and risk-averse, that is a meaningful structural advantage.

    Every month a firm goes quiet is a month its competitors accumulate exposure.

    Cognitive Bias – Fluency Heuristic 

    The firms that feel easier to understand win more business

    ‘Things that are easy to process feel more credible and memorable. In complex markets, simplicity is a competitive advantage’.

    There is a persistent belief in wealth management and professional services that complexity signals expertise. The more detailed the analysis, the more comprehensive the proposal, the more rigorous the due diligence documentation, the more sophisticated the firm appears.

    The research says otherwise.

    Psychologist Daniel Oppenheimer (2005) showed that unnecessarily complex language reduces perceived credibility rather than increasing it. Readers interpreted simpler, clearer communication as a marker of greater intelligence and trustworthiness.

    This is the Fluency Heuristic. When something is easy to process, the brain interprets that ease as a signal of truth and reliability. When something feels hard to process, the brain registers friction, and friction kills both trust and recall.

    Consider two wealth management firms. One presents detailed pages of attribution analysis, factor exposure and risk-adjusted performance data. The other leads with a one-page summary of what they believe, why it matters to clients, and what they would do differently. Both are technically credible. Only one is easy to remember.

    In a sector where buyers are assembling shortlists from memory the brand that feels simple and clear has a structural advantage. Not because your clients are unsophisticated. Because their brains, like all human brains, favour what is easy to store.

    • Easy stock names: Research by Alter and Oppenheimer found that newly listed companies with easy-to-pronounce names and ticker symbols tended to outperform harder-to-say ones in their first days of trading.

    Implication for your brand:

    Look at your website and your LinkedIn content. Ask a single question: could a client recall your core proposition clearly, unprompted, a week after reading it? If the answer is no, the issue is almost certainly fluency. Complexity is not credibility, it is friction, and friction gets forgotten.

    Cognitive Bias – Distinctiveness Effect 

    The Commercial Cost of Sounding Like Everyone Else

    People remember things that stand out from the norm. In a category where everyone sounds the same, the brand that sounds different does not just stand out, it gets recalled when it matters most.

    Open 10 wealth management or professional services websites. Count how many use the words ‘trusted partner’, ’long-term relationship’, tailored solutions’ or client-centric approach’. The number will be close to ten.

    This is the sea of sameness, and it is not just aesthetically dull. It has a measurable commercial cost.

    The Distinctiveness Effect has its roots in a 1933 study by psychologist Hedwig von Restorff, who showed that items which differ from their surroundings are disproportionately encoded in memory. The effect has been replicated across nearly a century of cognitive research and applied to brand strategy most rigorously by the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute at the University of South Australia.

    Byron Sharp’s research into mental availability, the ease with which a brand comes to mind in a buying situation, shows that brands competing with identical language and visual codes erode each other’s memorability. When you sound like your competitors, your audience’s brain groups you alongside your competitors.

    Research by Bain and Google found that between 80% and 90% of B2B buyers come to market with a shortlist already formed, typically just two or three names they had in mind before doing any formal research or contacting a single supplier. Your firm’s position on that shortlist is not determined by who is best when the brief lands. It is determined by who has already become familiar before it does.

    This matters particularly in regulated sectors where firms often use compliance as a reason not to differentiate. But compliance constrains what you can claim about performance. It does not constrain your point of view, your tone of voice, your editorial stance, or how you frame problems. These are entirely yours to own and they are what make a firm memorable.

    Innocent smoothies: Chatty, playful copy on the bottles stands out on shelves where every other drink talks in dry nutritional claims. Its long-running Big Knit campaign with Age UK goes further, putting tiny knitted woolly hats on bottles to raise money for older people, which makes them impossible to miss.

    Implication for your brand:

    The test for distinctiveness is not whether your brand looks good. It is whether your brand could be identified without your name on it. Take your own website, strip out the name and and logo, and ask whether it could belong to any of your top five competitors. If the answer is yes, and for most firms in this sector that is the case, then distinctiveness should be a strategic priority.

    If you’d like to understand more about cognitive bias branding, or want help applying it to your own positioning please reach out.

  • Own a Word Branding: Vanguard’s One Powerful Word

    Own a Word Branding: Vanguard’s One Powerful Word

    Own a word branding

    Own a Word Branding: What Vanguard’s Rise Can Teach You

    Own a word branding is the discipline behind Vanguard’s rise from “Bogle’s Folly” to a firm managing trillions, built on a single word: Value.

    Vanguard built more than $8 trillion in assets on a single idea, with 1 powerful word.

    Here is what that means for every professional services and wealth management firm still searching for theirs. 

    In 1974, Jack Bogle was fired. 

    The mutual fund company he had built pushed him out in a boardroom dispute. He was given a consolation prize, permission to stay on and run the administrative business. He called it Vanguard, after the flagship of Admiral Nelson’s fleet at the Nile. And in 1976, from this modest starting point, he launched the first index fund available to ordinary investors. 

    The investment industry dismissed it. Actively managed funds were the product. Selecting stocks, beating the market, earning the fee, that was the game. Bogle’s fund, which simply tracked the S&P 500 and charged almost nothing to do so, was called Bogle’s Folly. 

    Today, Vanguard manages more than $8 trillion. 

    They did not win because they promised the highest returns. They did not win because they outspent competitors on advertising. They won because they built a business around one word, Value, and they never once deviated from it. 

    The brands that command attention do not compete on services, sectors or credentials. They own a position in their clients’ minds. 

    What owning one powerful word means 

    Owning a word is one of the oldest ideas in brand strategy. But in practice it is rarer than it sounds, especially in professional services and financial services, where most firms communicate in an almost identical way. 

    Trusted partner. Long-term relationships. Client-first. Decades of experience. 

    These words are shared across the sector and appear on websites and marketing communications for established brands, challenger brands, premium brands and mass-market brands. 

    Owning a word is different.

    It means that when buyers hear that word, one firm comes to mind. The brand has claimed a position in memory that competitors have not, and cannot easily take. That’s the essence of own a word branding: a single, ownable position that competitors can’t easily copy.

    Volvo owns Safe. Not because no other car is safe, but because for decades, every product decision, every communication, every brand action has been filtered through the same idea. The word is earned through consistency, not claimed through advertising. 

    Disney owns Magical. Not because other theme parks are grim (though arguably some are!). But, because every park, every film, every piece of content asks the same question, does this feel magical? 

    Vanguard owns Value. Not because other asset managers are expensive. Because Vanguard’s ownership structure where funds are owned by their investors, not by outside shareholders makes value for investors a business truth. 

    Why this matters commercially, not just strategically 

    The Ehrenberg-Bass Institute’s research on brand growth makes the case that buyers default to brands they already know when the moment to purchase arrives. Most of the time, most of your potential clients are not looking for what you offer. When they do start looking, the shortlist is not assembled by rational comparison of credentials. It is assembled from memory. 

    This is the 95:5 rule. Ninety-five per cent of your potential clients are not in the market at any given moment. The brands they consider when they do enter the market are the ones they remember from when they were not looking. 

    The content you publish today, the position you hold consistently, the word you own, all of it is doing commercial work months and years before a sale happens. 

    Forrester’s 2024 Buyers Journey Survey found that 92% of B2B buyers already have at least one brand in mind before formal evaluation begins. They are not starting from scratch. They are starting from memory. 

    The word you own today is quietly deciding which shortlists you appear on tomorrow. 

    Why professional services struggles with this 

    Most professional services firms were not built around a brand idea. They were built around expertise. The founding logic is straightforward: we are very good at this, and clients will pay us to do it. 

    That works until the market fills with very good firms all saying the same thing, credibility, expertise, partnership, client-centricity. All terms that have become so commonplace and dressed in similar imagery and colours they have become meaningless,  

    The result is a sea of sameness. As one CMO told us recently: 

    “Every firm’s website looks like it was done by the same marketing agency.”  

    If your competitors could copy and paste your homepage onto theirs, your positioning is not distinctive enough. And if nothing sets you apart, you won’t own a word. You’ll just be another firm clients can’t quite place when it matters most. 

    What it takes to own a word 

    • The word has be true. Vanguard’s ownership structure makes ‘value’ unchallengeable. Volvo’s engineering investment makes ‘safe’ credible. A word you claim without delivering against it is a positioning statement, not a brand truth. And buyers, even when they cannot articulate why, feel the difference. 
    • The word has to be held long enough to stick. Ehrenberg-Bass research shows that distinctive brand assets build mental availability only through sustained, consistent use. A new word every three years is not brand strategy. It is starting over. System1 and the IPA’s Creative Consistency Score shows that brands maintaining consistent creative style significantly outperform those that reinvent with every campaign. 
    • The word has to cost something to say. The test of a genuine brand position is whether it rules anything out. ‘Value’ cost Vanguard real margin for decades. ‘Safe’ cost Volvo the sporty segment. If your word pleases everyone, it belongs to no one. 

    The question worth sitting with 

    What word does your firm own? 

    Not what word appears in your brand guidelines. Not what you wish clients associated with you. What word comes to mind, unprompted and consistently when a client thinks of your firm? 

    If the answer takes longer than a few seconds, you’re not alone. Most professional services firms have three or four ideas competing for the same space. The problem is that clients don’t carry three or four ideas. They carry one. And if yours isn’t clear to you, it won’t be clear to them. 

    A single organising idea changes that. It’s the concept that holds your positioning, your culture, and your communication together, so every touchpoint reinforces the same thing. 

    If you’re not sure what yours is, own a word branding is exactly the conversation worth having – get in touch.

    Research references: Ehrenberg-Bass Institute (95:5 rule, distinctive assets); System1 / IPA Creative Consistency Score; Forrester Buyers Journey Survey 2024; Binet & Field IPA Effectiveness Databank. 

  • Thinking About a B2B Rebrand? Here’s What Makes It Work

    Thinking About a B2B Rebrand? Here’s What Makes It Work

    B2B Rebrand

    Considering a B2B rebrand?

    Get the timing and the reasoning wrong, and it becomes an expensive distraction rather than a strategic lever.

    In 8 minutes, you’ll learn:

    • When a rebrand is the wrong move and what to do instead.
    • The two questions that predict success: why you are rebranding and how well can you implement it?
    • Five principles that make rebrands stick.
    • Anonymised examples from wealth management and professional services.

    If you’re a CMO or senior B2B marketer in wealth management or professional services, a rebrand may be on your agenda. Perhaps the business has evolved its products or services, growth ambitions may demand a more focused and distinctive market positioning, or you are under more competitive pressure. 

    This is the stage where it is easy to move too fast. 

    In our experience, the difference between a successful and an expensive distraction comes down to two questions:

    1. What business problem is the rebrand solving?
      • Growth, relevance, trust, differentiation, or organisational alignment?
    2. How robustly can we implement it consistently across the organisation?
      • Not just in marketing, but across sales, advisers, leadership, and client touchpoints.

    If either answer is unclear, the rebrand risks becoming cosmetic and inconsistent, which will erode trust rather than strengthen it.

    The earliest stage of a rebrand is the most critical and the most often glossed over. It is where the biggest risks sit. Rebranding can be a powerful strategic lever, but it is not a cure-all. When undertaken for the wrong reasons, or without organisational commitment, it can create confusion, unsettle clients, and weaken credibility.

    This article is designed to help you pause, pressure-test your thinking, and make better decisions before momentum takes over. 

    If you are still questioning whether your organisation really needs to rebrand, focus on the sections on when rebranding is the wrong move and the warning signs to watch for. If you are already confident in the case for change, the examples and success principles later in the article will help you avoid common pitfalls and strengthen your approach.

    And if you want an honest, no-pressure view on whether rebranding is right for your organisation at all, please do get in touch for a straightforward strategic conversation. 

    When rebranding is the wrong move  

    In B2B marketing buying decisions are slow and complex, audiences are broad, and trust is built over time.  Therefore, rebranding must be carefully considered because the implications can be far reaching and long lasting.  

    A well-executed B2B rebrand can focus positioning, support growth, and improve marketing effectiveness. However, a poorly judged rebrand can create confusion across sales teams, partners, and customers.  

    Logo of Aberdeen before and after they completed a b2b rebrand

    Aberdeen illustrates the risks of prioritising novelty over clarity in a trust-led category. It attracted significant ridicule and confusion, and in 2025 the company moved back towards Aberdeen branding. 

    The difference between a successful or unsuccessful rebrand comes down to two questions. 

    1. Why is the organisation rebranding?

    A rebrand is not a good idea when the organisation cannot clearly articulate the business problem it is trying to solve. 

    If the motivation is vague such as a desire to look more modern, to keep up with competitors, or to satisfy internal preferences, the risk is that the rebrand becomes cosmetic. In B2B marketing visual change rarely delivers value. It can distract teams, unsettle long-standing clients, and consume budget without improving perception or performance. 

    Rebranding is also risky when the underlying strategy, proposition, or operating model has not yet stabilised. In these cases, the brand is asked to paper over uncertainty rather than express clarity. The result is often a brand that quickly feels outdated or disconnected from reality. 

    When there is no clear strategic rationale, rebranding can erode trust as clients and partners may question what has changed. 

    2. How robustly is the change implemented across the organisation?

    Even when the strategic case for rebranding is sound, poor implementation can undermine the outcome. 

    A rebrand that lives only in marketing assets, while sales teams, advisers, and partners continue to operate in the old world, creates fragmentation. Different parts of the organisation tell different stories, use different language, and project different levels of confidence. Over time, this inconsistency weakens credibility. 

    In complex B2B environments like wealth management, the brand is often experienced through people before platforms or campaigns. If employees do not understand what the brand stands for, how it supports the proposition, or how it should shape behaviour, the rebrand becomes superficial. 

    Incomplete implementation also leads to internal friction. Teams question decisions, revert to legacy materials, or dilute the brand through well-intentioned compromise. What was meant to create clarity instead introduces noise. 

    A robust rebrand requires governance, prioritisation, and sustained commitment. Without this, even a well-conceived strategy struggles to deliver lasting impact. 

    Why and when should B2B companies choose to rebrand?

    In B2B environments, rebranding is rarely driven by aesthetics. It is typically triggered by strategic pressure or organisational change that the existing brand can no longer carry. 

    Strategic repositioning and growth

    As B2B organisations expand into new markets, develop more complex offerings, or move up the value chain, their brand often lags behind the reality of the business. What once worked for a narrower proposition can start to undersell expertise or confuse buyers. 

    Research from the LinkedIn B2B Institute shows that long-term growth depends on building clear and consistent brand associations in buyers’ minds, particularly among future customers who are not yet in-market. Rebranding can help reset those associations when strategy evolves. 

    Mergers, acquisitions, and organisational complexity 

    M&A activity is a common trigger for rebranding. Multiple propositions, cultures, and operating models can create confusion both internally and externally. 

    In these situations, rebranding provides a mechanism for alignment. It helps unify disparate parts of the organisation around a shared narrative and makes it easier for customers to understand what the combined business now offers. 

    Loss of differentiation in mature markets 

    Many B2B categories suffer from convergence. Messaging becomes interchangeable, visual identities look similar and claims of expertise blur together. Research from the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute highlights the importance of distinctiveness and mental availability in driving brand choice, even in rational, high-consideration B2B categories. Rebranding can help rebuild that distinctiveness when it has eroded. 

    Trust, credibility and perception gaps 

    In long sales cycles, trust matters. Some organisations rebrand because their external perception no longer reflects how they operate today. This may follow changes in leadership, governance, sustainability practices, or operating standards. In these cases, rebranding acts as a signal of intent. It provides a platform to communicate change clearly and consistently over time. 

    Internal misalignment 

    A less visible but equally important driver is internal confusion. If employees struggle to articulate what the business stands for, or if brand, strategy, and culture are pulling in different directions, performance suffers. Rebranding can act as a catalyst for alignment, particularly when paired with clear positioning and behavioural guidance. 

    Across all these scenarios, rebranding is not about reinvention. It is about restoring clarity and relevance in a complex B2B environment. 

    What makes a B2B rebrand successful? 

    Iceberg illustration showing rebrand value drivers

    1. Strategy leads, design follows 

    Strong B2B rebrands begin with a clear strategic diagnosis. Leadership teams define the commercial problem the rebrand must solve and the role the brand should play in growth. This aligns with guidance from the LinkedIn B2B Institute, which consistently emphasises that brand building is a long-term investment, not a short-term campaign. Visual change without strategic clarity rarely delivers impact. 

    2. Clear positioning across complex buying groups 

    B2B brands speak to multiple stakeholders with different priorities. Procurement, technical buyers, senior stakeholders, and end users all interpret the brand through their own lens. Successful rebrands establish a clear core positioning that can flex across these audiences without losing coherence. This clarity supports sales conversations, thought leadership, and account-based marketing alike. 

    3. Internal alignment before external activation 

    The brand is often delivered by people long before it is experienced through marketing. Sales teams, account managers, and subject matter experts play a critical role in shaping perception. Rebrands that invest in internal understanding and adoption perform better over time. Employees need to understand what has changed, why it matters, and how it should influence behaviour and decision-making. 

    4. Disciplined execution across priority touchpoints 

    B2B rebranding succeeds when treated as a structured change programme. Organisations prioritise high-impact touchpoints such as the website, sales materials, proposals, and thought leadership before attempting full rollout. This approach reduces risk and ensures consistency where it matters most in the buying journey. 

    5. Built for longevity, not launch day 

    The most effective B2B rebrands are designed to endure. They create systems and principles that support future growth, new offerings, and organisational change without requiring another reset. This long-term mindset reflects what research repeatedly shows. Brands grow by being remembered and recognised over time. 

    What we’ve learned from rebranding wealth management and professional services brands

    The examples below reflect patterns we see repeatedly across successful B2B rebranding programmes. 

    Wealth management example: appealing to existing and future clients 

    In one wealth management business, growth ambitions depended on attracting a new generation of clients while continuing to serve long-standing relationships built over decades. 

    Externally, the firm was trusted but often perceived as traditional and narrowly focused. Internally, teams knew the business had evolved, with broader capabilities, more sophisticated advice, and a more progressive outlook than the brand suggested. 

    Rather than starting with design, the rebrand began with conversations. Existing clients were asked why they chose the firm, what they valued most, and how they described it to others. The insight was clear. Clients trusted the firm not because of heritage alone, but because of the quality of relationships, the depth of thinking, and the clarity of advice. 

    The rebrand focused on amplifying those strengths. The result was a brand that felt reassuring to existing clients while signalling relevance and confidence to future ones. 

    Professional services example: standing out from a sea of sameness 

    For a professional services firm operating in the highly competitive infrastructure category, leadership recognised that the brand had become indistinguishable from peers. The market was crowded with similar promises, similar visual identities, and similar tone of voice. Despite strong performance and loyal clients, the brand was not helping the firm stand out and support business development through long term contract tenders. 

    Client research revealed that what truly differentiated the firm was not a range of products and services but how it worked. Clients valued its holistic approach and ability to simplify complex issues. 

    The rebrand focused the positioning on these qualities with visual and messaging designed to reinforce this brand narrative. The firm emerged with a brand that felt distinct, credible, and easier for teams to use in conversations with prospective clients. 

    Professional services example: competing for C-suite attention 

    A global management consulting firm had grown rapidly through mergers and acquisitions, expanding its capabilities and geographic reach. Despite this growth, the brand struggled to compete with established market leaders for C-suite attention. 

    Senior executives found it difficult to quickly understand what the firm stood for and why it was different. Yet client insight revealed a clear strength. The firm was trusted for delivering practical, implementable solutions that helped organisations transform operations and adapt to change, rather than offering purely conceptual advice. 

    The rebrand focused on sharpening this positioning. The brand narrative emphasised action, outcomes, and real-world impact, speaking directly to C-suite concerns around execution risk and long-term resilience. 

    With senior leadership involved from day one and a clear rationale shared across the organisation, the result was a confident, coherent brand. One that supported competitive pitching, unified teams across markets, and strengthened credibility at the highest level of decision-making. 

    What made these B2B rebrands successful

    While the contexts differed, the success factors were consistent. 

    Client insight was treated as essential, not optional. Understanding why clients chose the firm and what they believed set it apart grounded the rebrand. What clients say in a conversation often reveals the emotional drivers behind rational decisions such as trust, confidence, responsiveness, and the feeling of being understood. 

    AI can help synthesise themes and segment audiences at speed, and it can be a useful tool for organising insight once it has been gathered. However, it does not replace the value of hearing directly from clients and colleagues. Face-to-face discussions uncover nuance that rarely makes its way into surveys or secondary research, such as what makes people hesitate, what language they naturally use, and what they fear losing if a brand changes. 

    Internal insight mattered. The strongest rebrands involved conversations with internal teams across marketing, sales, advisers and leadership teams. These discussions surfaced where the organisation felt most confident, where it felt exposed, and where teams were already improvising because the current brand did not reflect how they worked. That input helped create a brand that people could deliver, not just describe. 

    Senior leadership were active participants from day one. Their involvement ensured strategic clarity, faster decision-making, and organisational buy-in. In practice, this meant in-person workshops and working sessions with the senior leadership team to sense-check what had been learned, align on the rationale for the brand strategy, and make the trade-offs that every strong positioning demands. These sessions also created space to address concerns early, rather than letting doubt grow quietly and emerge later as resistance. 

    The process was transparent and collaborative. Data, insight, and rationale were shared across the organisation, so colleagues understood both the direction and the reasoning behind it. This is where human interaction is critical again. A deck shared by email rarely builds belief. Workshops, town halls, and small-group sessions give people the chance to ask questions, challenge assumptions, and contribute. When colleagues feel listened to and can see their input reflected, adoption becomes far more natural. It also builds consistency, because people understand the why and not just the what. 

    In each case, rebranding was not about reinvention. It was about making the organisation’s value clearer, more distinctive, and more relevant to the world it was operating in. The human work of listening, aligning, and bringing people with you is what turns a rebrand from a new identity into a change that sticks. 

    B2B rebranding: Find Your Angle

    People working together on a b2b rebrand

    AI can accelerate research and help structure thinking quickly, but nothing replaces in-person conversations and workshops with clients, colleagues and leadership teams. These discussions test assumptions, surface nuance, address concerns early, and create shared ownership. That ownership builds the confidence and alignment needed to roll out the brand strategy consistently.

    If you’re considering rebranding or want an honest conversation about whether you need one at all, please reach out.

    Get in touch

  • Cognitive Bias Examples in Branding: 3 Simple Illustrations

    Cognitive Bias Examples in Branding: 3 Simple Illustrations

    Cognitive bias examples in branding

    Understanding cognitive biases

    Cognitive bias examples in branding show why some brands cut through complexity and stick in the minds of prospective customers, while others disappear, even when they have a better product or service.

    The examples below bring this to life through everyday experiences, to show how we unconsciously notice, remember, and choose. For the research and evidence behind these examples, see our full breakdown of cognitive bias branding.

    No 1 Fluency Heuristic

    Fluency Heuristic: Things that are easy to process feel more credible and memorable.

    Cognitive Bias Number 1

    Complexity creates friction. And friction kills recall.

    This coffee might look impressive. But it also looks complicated and difficult.

    Whereas this coffee looks easier. Fewer steps, less complicated, similar outcome.

    Easy to process means easier to trust. That’s the cognitive bias of Fluency Heuristic at work. B2B buyers don’t reward cleverness. They remember simplicity. If your message feels hard, it won’t stick. Make it simple or it will be forgotten.

    No 2 Distinctiveness Effect

    Distinctiveness effect: People remember things that stand out from the norm.

    Cognitive bias number 2
    Most brands ski the same slope. Using similar messages, language and promises.

    In crowded markets, sameness is invisible.

    Your audience’s brain groups you with everyone else.
    Who do you notice most on this slope? Both can ski…but there’s no missing that orange.
    Cognitive bias 2


    Our brains remember what breaks the pattern.​

    This is a cognitive bias called the Distinctiveness Effect. Standing out like this is one of the clearest cognitive bias examples in branding, the brand that breaks the pattern is the one that gets remembered.

    No 3 Mere Exposure Effect

    Mere Exposure Effect: Repeated exposure increases liking and recall.

    Cognitive bias 3

    What has gardening got to do with brand building?

    Cognitive bias 3
    A single watering doesn’t yield any results.
    Neither does one campaign.
    Cognitive bias 3
    But watering over and over again delivers growth.
    Cognitive bias 3

    And the same is true in advertising, with consistently repeated messages yielding results over time.

    This repeated consistency builds familiarity.

    This is a cognitive bias called the Mere Exposure Effect which makes repeated brands easier to recall, trust and choose.

    Brand memory is built little by little over time.Which means consistency beats bursts of brilliance.

    These cognitive bias examples in branding all point to the same conclusion: if you want to be remembered, keep showing up.

    To discuss your brand please say hello.

  • McKinsey State of Marketing Europe 2026: 3 Bold Insights

    McKinsey State of Marketing Europe 2026: 3 Bold Insights

    McKinsey State of Marketing Europe 2026

    Why Brand and Memorability Matter

    McKinsey State of Marketing Europe 2026 is a survey of 500 senior European marketing leaders, and the findings are a useful gut-check for anyone questioning whether brand investment still pays off. Branding came out as the number one priority for CMOs this year, ahead of performance marketing, martech and even generative AI.

    Here are three insights from the report, and what they mean for B2B marketers.

    What McKinsey State of Marketing Europe 2026 found: 1. Brand is the number one priority for CMOs in 2026

    In 2026, branding now outranks performance marketing, martech, and AI as the top focus for marketing leaders.

    McKinsey’s survey of 500 senior European marketing leaders found that branding outranks performance marketing tactics, martech, and even generative AI as the top priority for 2026. This isn’t brand for brand’s sake, it’s a strategic response to market complexity and economic uncertainty where brand distinctiveness and memorability become competitive differentiators. 

    Why this matters for B2B marketers

    In complex B2B buying processes, prospective buyers are more likely to progress and convert with brands they recognise and trust. Brand familiarity reduces perceived risk, accelerates decision-making and can improve long-term ROI by lowering overall cost per lead and increasing conversion rate.

    2. Emotional connection is a key driver of business growth

    Authentic, trusted brands are easier to choose, especially when decisions feel risky.

    The report highlights that authenticity, trust, and emotional connection are increasingly essential for differentiation in a crowded market. Purpose-driven, authentic brand experiences are seen as essential by 70% of marketing leaders. 

    Why this matters for B2B marketers

    B2B purchase decisions are usually complex, committee-driven and risk-averse. AI and martech are tools for improving marketing efficiency but brands need to leverage their human traits to connect emotionally with prospective buyers. Brands that can build emotional resonance make it easier for buyers to remember, trust and choose them over competitors.

    3. Shift from siloed campaigns to integrated full funnel approaches

    Leading organisations are integrating brand building with demand generation, not treating them as separate levers.

    McKinsey finds that many organisations are shifting from siloed campaign thinking to integrated full-funnel approaches that marry brand building with performance marketing, e.g. tight coordination of marketing, sales and customer experience. 

    Why this matters for B2B marketers

    Brand memorability drives upper-funnel recall and interest, while coordinated activation campaigns convert that interest into qualified pipeline. This orchestration increases the efficiency of demand generation, boosts the effectiveness of sales engagements and spreads fixed brand investments across multiple stages of growth. Memorability pays dividends over the entire customer lifecycle by improving conversion rates at every stage, reducing reliance on constant paid performance spend, improving lead quality and lowering average cost per acquisition.

    That’s the clearest signal from State of Marketing Europe 2026: brand and memorability aren’t a nice-to-have, they’re what determines whether B2B marketers get remembered when it counts.

    For the full McKinsey & Company report, please visit here or to schedule a call with Find Your Angle to discuss your brand, please contact us here

  • Memorable Brands ROI: 1 Costly Mistake to Avoid

    Memorable Brands ROI: 1 Costly Mistake to Avoid

    Memorable Brands ROI

    THE MOST EXPENSIVE PROBLEM IN B2B MARKETING? BEING FORGETTABLE

    Memorable brands ROI starts with a simple truth: in B2B marketing, forgettable brands pay a tax. Unforgettable brands stand out, while others converge on the same colour palettes, value propositions, tone of voice, and promises: ‘partnership’, ‘innovation’, ‘customer centricity’, ‘solutions’.

    This results in a sea of competent, credible and completely indistinguishable brands and marketing comms. The problem is that indistinguishable brands don’t convert efficiently.

    THE 95:5 RULE

    When a brand looks and sounds like everyone else, performance suffers in predictable ways:

    • Cost per lead creeps up
    • Conversion rates stagnate
    • Sales cycles lengthen
    • Marketing becomes increasingly reliant on short-term activation rather than long-term demand

    The issue isn’t media efficiency or funnel design. It’s memory. Most of your audience isn’t buying yet. Around 95% of B2B buyers are not in-market at any given moment. They see your advertising, content, or campaigns long before they are ready to purchase.

    When they are looking to buy, they don’t conduct a blank-sheet review of every possible supplier. They default to what they remember. Not what they liked. Not what had the best targeting. What they remembered. Being top of mind isn’t a vanity metric, it’s a commercial one.

    PERFORMANCE MARKETING CAN’T FIX ANONYMITY

    Unforgettable brands stand out

    Many B2B organisations attempt to compensate for weak brand memory by doubling down on performance tactics:

    More gated content

    More retargeting

    More urgency messaging

    More sales enablement

    But activation works best when it’s activating something that already exists in the buyer’s mind. If there’s no distinctive memory structure to draw on, performance marketing becomes increasingly expensive and increasingly fragile.

    WHY SAMENESS KILLS MEMORABILITY

    Brands become forgettable because they optimise for:

    Category norms rather than differentiation

    Consensus language rather than conviction

    Polished messaging rather than perspective

    Ironically, many B2B brands are afraid to stand out precisely because the stakes feel high. The result is a kind of institutional beige: inoffensive, professional and invisible.

    LinkedIn 2025: A snapshot of wealth & asset management comms. To read more about the 2025 wealth management landscape click here.
    Hiscox 2025 campaign. Isn’t afraid to be unforgettable – standing out and educating by reimagining famous ads to spotlight infringement risk.

    POINT OF VIEW

    Unforgettable brands are more valuable, not louder.

    The brands that stick don’t do it by shouting more. They do it by being more valuable to their audience before a buying decision exists.

    They:

    Share knowledge buyers genuinely care about

    Teach, reframe or challenge assumptions

    Invest in content that helps people think better at work

    Show they understand the world their customers operate in

    Crucially, they don’t just inform, they take a point of view.

    PERSPECTIVE

    Distinctiveness comes from perspective, not positioning statements. Being unforgettable isn’t about a clever tagline or a beautifully written brand manifesto. It’s about consistently showing up with a recognisable point of view:

    A clear stance on what matters and what doesn’t

    Interprets industry trends in its own way

    Has opinions, not just observations

    Is willing to sound different, even if that means being disagreed with

    This is where thought leadership stops being a content tactic and becomes a memory-building system. Thought leadership isn’t selling, and that’s the point. The fastest way to make content forgettable is to make it transactional.

    Agreement isn’t the goal. Trium Capital shares a point of view making it unforgettable at the point of consideration.

    MEMORABLE BRANDS

    Buyers don’t remember brands that are constantly selling. They remember brands that helped them see something differently. When you share insight without an immediate ask, you earn:

    Attention before intent

    Trust before contact

    Preference before procurement

    By the time the buyer is ready, the decision often feels pre-made.

    The real competitive advantage: mental availability

    In crowded B2B markets, competitive advantage doesn’t come from having a slightly better offer. It comes from being the brand that is easiest to recall when the problem arises.

    Memorable brands:

    Reduce cost per lead because demand comes to them

    Convert more efficiently because familiarity lowers risk

    Command higher value because they feel established and trusted

    Forgettable brands are forced to compete on price, pressure and persistence.

    This is memorable brands ROI in practice: lower acquisition costs, higher conversion, and pricing power that comes from being remembered rather than rediscovered every time.

    30 years of NatWest’s Chief Economist’s weekly brief shows that consistent thought leadership earns trust long before a decision is made. All content laddering-up to create an unforgettable brand.

    THE UNCOMFORTABLE TRUTH

    Allen & Overy’s brand regularly makes the top lists – a reminder that distinctiveness begins with recognition, even in the legal sector where firms struggle to differentiate.

    If your brand disappeared tomorrow and your audience barely noticed, that’s not a media problem. It’s a memory problem.

    And memory is built through:

    • Distinctiveness over conformity
    • Value over volume
    • Perspective over promotion

    Memorable brands ROI comes down to this: in a market where everyone is saying something, the brands that win are the ones people remember without being reminded.

    Want the full breakdown? Download the Unforgettable guide.

    DOWNLOAD UNFORGETTABLE

    Wondering whether your brand is memorable or just familiar?

    Let us know your organisation’s name and the sector you operate in, and we’d be happy to share a few practical ideas and quick wins to help make your brand unforgettable in 2026.

    No obligation, just a clear strategic perspective.

    Please contact us here