There is, at present, a rather crowded marketplace of branding frameworks. Pyramids, onions, wheels, houses, ladders, circles, diamonds, canvases and other geometrical comforts arrive dressed as clarity, carrying the promise that, at last, strategy may be tamed into a neat sequence of boxes. It is all terribly reassuring. One fills in the sections, nods at the post-its, and leaves the workshop believing something meaningful has occurred.
Sometimes it has. Often it has not.
The great problem with branding frameworks is not that they exist. Heaven forbid we declare war on structure. The real problem is that far too many of them offer a shortcut around thinking, while pretending to be the very vehicle for it. They invite people:
- To complete rather than to question
- To label rather than to understand
- To produce an output rather than arrive at a conclusion.
And that, as one might imagine, is a rather elegant route to strategic mediocrity.
A framework should be a provocation. Instead, many have become a sedative.
One sees it everywhere. Teams gather with admirable enthusiasm to define purpose, values, audience, promise, personality and positioning, as though the mere act of naming these things could somehow align company, business and brand, improve customer experience, generate value, produce results and have meaningful impact on the world. It is quite the fantasy. One almost admires its ambition. The corporate equivalent of believing that buying a notebook makes one Virginia Woolf.
The trouble is that branding is not an exercise in administrative completion. It is not a ritual of filling spaces until a blank page feels less threatening. It is an effort to think clearly about what a business is, what it wants, where it can win, what it must refuse, and how its brand should help make all of that happen in the real world, where customers are busy, organisations are messy, and reality has the bad manners not to fit inside a template.
And, if I may be slightly less diplomatic for a moment, I am thoroughly fed up with LinkedIn’s endless parade of idealised diagrams and immaculate strategic certainties. Day after day, one is invited to admire yet another polished framework presented as though it had descended from the mountain carrying universal truth in a tasteful colour palette. Everything looks frictionless, coherent, elegantly resolved.
But a model is only that: a representation. A reduction. A helpful fiction, at best. Reality, meanwhile, is far less obedient. It is full of contradictions, politics, half-made decisions, awkward trade-offs, operational limits, human egos, customer indifference and the occasional executive delusion. Which is precisely why strategy matters. Not to produce a prettier abstraction, but to help us deal with the untidiness of actual business life.
This is where the conversation becomes slightly awkward, because it forces us to admit that many branding models are not really designed to help people think deeply. They are designed to help people feel strategically productive. There is a difference, and not a subtle one. It is the difference between writing a diagnosis and decorating a chart. Between deciding and describing. Between strategy and stationery.
I have long argued that strategy must be synthesised rather than merely simplified, because that is where the real discipline lies. Synthesis is demanding. It forces me to say what matters and only what matters, without hiding behind jargon, excessive volume or the false sophistication of visual complexity. A sound strategy may well require pages of analysis to support it, but its essence should still be expressible with precision and force. If it cannot, then something is likely wrong. And when that happens, yes, Houston is indeed having one of those days.
And yet the branding world remains strangely enamoured of what might uncharitably be called framework theatre. Entire exercises are built around completing ever more sophisticated diagrams, each suggesting that order itself is insight. It rarely is. Order can be useful, of course, but it is no substitute for judgment. A beautifully completed brand pyramid can still rest on weak assumptions, vague ambitions and entirely untested beliefs. It can look splendid in a keynote and still be strategically hollow. Much like certain luxury developments, one might say.
What makes this more serious than a mere irritation is that the misuse of frameworks creates an illusion of alignment. Once a model is filled in, organisations often behave as though the work has been done:
- The words exist; therefore the meaning must be shared.
- The architecture has been drawn; therefore the business must be coherent.
- The experience principles have been named; therefore customers will naturally feel them.
This is charmingly optimistic and, unfortunately, untrue.
Alignment does not come from a slide. It comes from difficult choices, repeated conversations, organisational discipline and behaviour over time. It comes from deciding what the company means to do, what the brand must enable, and how both should be expressed consistently through actions, not merely language. In the more current thinking on brand strategy, including the material on value creation and the holistic brand model, the brand is no longer just a communications device or a polished façade applied at the end. It is part of the business system itself. It creates value not simply by being recognised, but by helping shape how the firm behaves, innovates, interacts and grows.
That, incidentally, is where many classic frameworks begin to look a little dated. Not useless, but insufficient. They often start too far downstream, once the business questions have already been politely skipped over. One is asked to define the brand’s personality before properly understanding the company’s strategic tensions. One is invited to articulate emotional benefits before confronting operational truth. One maps customer journeys as if experience were something designed after strategy, rather than one of the very ways strategy becomes real.
The consequence is a peculiar kind of polished emptiness. Brands say sensible things about themselves, sometimes even attractive things, yet remain disconnected from how the business actually works. The model is complete, the organisation is not. The framework is aligned, the reality remains delightfully chaotic.
What, then, makes a model useful? Not its fame, certainly. Not its elegance. And not the number of consultants who can present it while standing beside an oversized touchscreen. A useful framework is one that forces thought before language, judgment before declaration, and action before self-congratulation. It should corner a team into making choices. It should expose contradictions. It should make it harder, not easier, to remain vague. It should ask not only what the brand wishes to say, but what the business is prepared to do. Above all, it should lead to something beyond itself.
Because branding, if it is to matter at all, must eventually leave the workshop.
It must enter decisions, behaviours, experiences, priorities, investments, rituals and routines. It must survive contact with customer service, with product design, with leadership meetings, with the awkward politics of real organisations and the deeply inconvenient habits of actual people. If it cannot do that, then one has not built a brand strategy. One has produced a branded document.
This is why the most interesting idea in your framing is also the most important one: the best model is the one that obliges people to think, then do, then critique, then redo. Not once, but repeatedly. Not as a tidy process of corporate enlightenment, but as an ongoing discipline of strategic honesty. A framework should
- Not spare us from ambiguity, help us move through it.
- Not protect our first answer, pressure-test it.
- Not end with completion, begin there.
There is something rather refreshing in that, even if it does deprive people of the false comfort of having “finished the brand”. Brands are never finished. Businesses evolve, markets shift, cultures move, technologies interfere, customers behave with astonishing inconsistency, and organisations discover -usually rather late- that what looked clear in theory becomes far less so in practice.
A sensible branding approach must therefore be iterative without becoming aimless, structured without becoming formulaic, and strategic without lapsing into the sort of abstract poetry that clients are expected to applaud and then quietly ignore.
So yes, by all means use frameworks. Borrow them, adapt them, break them, improve them. Use them as scaffolding if they help. But do not confuse them with the building. A framework is only valuable if it sharpens thought and strengthens action. If it merely helps a team populate a page, then it is not a model of strategy. It is clerical work with better typography.
And perhaps that is the sentence worth keeping in view whenever the next workshop begins and someone unveils a pristine canvas with seventeen labelled compartments and the sort of earnest expression usually reserved for wellness retreats and mission statements.
Before anyone picks up a marker, one might suggest a brief pause…
Not a coffee break.
A thinking break.
Image
RDNE Stock project, Pexels
