Converse Shoes

I was at the gym the other day and the bloke next to me was running on the treadmill in a pair of Converse high tops.

Actually running. Not walking.

If you’ve never looked closely at a pair, they’re a flat rubber sole with a bit of canvas on top. The design hasn’t changed much since 1917, when it was built for basketball on wooden courts. No cushioning, no arch support, nothing that’s going to help you when you’re putting a few thousand steps through those good old knees of yours. My first thought was… why…  that it looks painful, and at my age that’s the sort of thing I notice.

But comfort was never what he was choosing for. He picked those shoes for what they say about him, not what they actually do. And fair enough, most of us have done a version of that.

What I keep coming back to is how neatly that maps onto the brands I see every week. Businesses that have had the logo done properly, the website built, the colours updated, everything’s tidy (on the surface). And the whole thing still isn’t doing any real work.

If that’s landed a bit close to home, this piece is for you. Here’s what a brand actually does when it’s working, the four jobs it has to perform, and how to tell whether yours is earning its keep or just sitting there looking pretty.

Contents

The problem with the way most people define a brand

The term ‘brand’ can get confusing and often misinterpreted, at its core, it’s the set of associations, meanings and expectations that live in someone else’s mind about your business. It’s not your logo and not your website, they are part of your brand but are simply the tools you use to shape it, not the brand itself.

The trouble with that definition is that it’s abstract, and abstract definitions are exactly why so many business owners end up buying decoration and calling it strategy. If you can’t say what a brand does, you’ve got no way to judge whether yours is working. You fall back on the only test available to you, which is whether it looks alright, and it probably does look alright. That’s the problem.

So let’s make sense of it together.

What a brand actually does: the four jobs

A functioning brand does four things. Not just aesthetically but commercially.

1. It makes you attractive to the right people and unappealing to the wrong ones

A brand that’s working repels as much as it attracts. It sends a clear enough signal about who you’re for so that the wrong enquiries stop arriving. If you’re getting plenty of leads but they’re all price shoppers and time wasters, your brand isn’t broken at the top of the funnel. It’s broken at the foundations and is not filtering properly.

2. It holds your price up when you’re not in the room

This is the one most owners feel and misdiagnose. You quote, they go quiet, they come back asking about the number. You assume it’s a pricing problem (it’s almost never a pricing problem). Price only feels expensive in the absence of perceived value, and perceived value is built long before anyone sees a proposal. That’s brand work, and I’ve written about how premium positioning is signalled rather than announced.

3. It makes the decision easy for someone comparing you to someone else

Most buying decisions aren’t a careful evaluation. They’re a shortcut, your prospect has three tabs open, limited information, and a low tolerance for ambiguity, so they choose the one that feels safest and clearest. A brand that’s doing its job removes friction from that moment. A brand that causes more friction just adds another tab that looks like the others.

4. It compounds

Every touchpoint either adds to the story or contradicts it. Done well, that accumulates into something you can’t buy in a quarter. Done inconsistently, you spend a decade starting again every time someone meets you. This is where brand messaging does more heavy lifting than most owners expect, because consistency of language compounds faster than consistency of visuals.

If your brand isn’t doing at least three of those four, it isn’t working and this is just like the Converse analogy, they are chosen for the wrong reasons.

Form and function are not the same thing

Here’s the thing about the Converse on the treadmill. That shoe isn’t badly made, in fact it’s beautifully made and it’s one of the most successful footwear designs in history. It’s been in continuous production for over a century, Nike bought the company in 2003 and it still sells in enormous numbers.

The shoe isn’t the failure, the application is.

That’s the distinction most business owners never get shown. Your logo can be very well designed, your website can be well built, and the brand can still be failing, because form and function are two separate questions and only one of them is easy to assess.

Form only Form and function
What you’re buying A visual identity system A visual identity built on a strategic position
The brief starts with What should it look like Who are we for and why us
How success gets judged Do we like it Are the right clients arriving and converting
What it does to price Nothing reliable Supports a higher number without a fight
Effect on the sales conversation You still have to explain yourself The brand has done some of the explaining
What happens in 3 years Looks dated, needs redoing Still holding, deepens with use
Typical owner reaction after 12 months “It looks better but nothing’s changed” “We’re getting better enquiries”

The right-hand column costs more up front and less over a decade. The left-hand column is what most people have bought at least once, and it’s the reason so many established owners are sceptical of everything an agency says. Reasonably so.

Why so many brands only get half built

Three reasons, and none of them involve anyone being a villain.

Form is easy to sell and easy to approve. A logo can be presented in a room and reacted to in four seconds. A positioning decision can’t, given the choice between a deliverable people can respond to instantly and one that requires a hard conversation about who you’re not for, most engagements drift toward the first. That’s also why so much creative work gets judged on taste rather than on whether it’s expressing a decision anyone actually made.

Function is invisible until it’s missing. Nobody notices arch support until their knees hurt at kilometre three. Nobody notices the absence of a clear position until they’re twelve months in, wondering why the new website didn’t change the enquiries.

And most business owners were never offered the choice. This is the part that gets me. The bloke on the treadmill knew exactly what he was trading. Style over support, eyes open, no complaints. But if you’re an established owner who’s been burned before, you probably weren’t sitting there weighing form against function. You were sold the look and told it was the strategy, then you spent two years wondering why nothing changed, and quietly concluded that branding doesn’t work.

Branding does work, what you bought wasn’t branding, it was decoration with a brand invoice on it. Those are different products and they should never have been sold to you as the same one.

Signs your brand isn’t working

Run through these properly. If three or more land, you’ve got a function problem, not a design problem.

  • You keep attracting the wrong clients, and the right ones seem to go elsewhere.
  • You lose work to businesses you know aren’t as good as you, and they simply looked more professional.
  • Every quote turns into a negotiation about the number.
  • You struggle to explain what makes you different without listing your services.
  • Your website could have your competitor’s logo on it and nothing would seem out of place.
  • Referrals are your only reliable source of work, because your brand can’t do the introducing for you.
  • You hesitate for half a second before you send someone the link.
  • You’ve already redone the logo or the site once and it changed nothing.

That last one is the tell. If a visual refresh didn’t move the commercial needle, the problem was never visual. There’s more detail on this in my piece on the signs you’ve outgrown your brand. And if the pattern you recognise most is losing on price, that’s usually a differentiation problem rather than a pricing one.

How to test whether your brand is doing its job

Four quick tests you can run this week without hiring anyone.

The logo cover test. Take your homepage, your LinkedIn banner and your last three social posts. Cover the logo. Could a stranger tell it was you rather than any competitor? If not, you have visual identity without brand voice, and voice is where recognition actually lives.

The five second test. Show your homepage to someone outside your industry for five seconds, then take it away and ask what you do and who you do it for. If they can’t answer both, your brand is failing the job of making the decision easy, and that’s usually a website structure problem as much as a copy problem.

The quote test. Look at your last ten proposals. How many turned into a conversation about price? If it’s more than three, your brand isn’t supporting your number before the number arrives.

The enquiry test. Look at your last twenty enquiries. How many were people you actually wanted? That percentage is your brand’s filter working or not working, and it’s the single most honest metric you have.

None of those require a budget. All of them will tell you more than another round of design will.


FAQs

What does a brand actually do for a business?

A brand does four commercial jobs: it attracts the right customers and filters out the wrong ones, it supports your price before you’re in the room, it makes you the easy choice when someone is comparing options, and it compounds in value over time. Everything else, including your logo, is a tool for doing those jobs. If a brand isn’t performing at least three of them, it’s decoration rather than infrastructure.

No. A logo is an identifier, and a brand is the meaning attached to it. The logo is the handle on the door and the brand is what’s inside the room. This is why redesigning a logo without changing positioning, messaging or customer experience so rarely changes commercial results.

Why hasn’t my rebrand changed anything?

Most likely because it was an identity project rather than a strategy project. If the work started with what it should look like instead of who you’re for and why you’re the obvious choice, you changed the surface and left the foundation untouched. The visual outcome can be excellent and the commercial outcome still be nil.

What’s the difference between brand form and brand function?

Form is how a brand looks and feels, and function is what it does commercially. Form is judged by taste and function is judged by outcomes. You need both, but form built without function is the most common and most expensive mistake in branding.

Can a good looking brand still be a bad brand?

Yes, and this is more common than most people realise. A brand can be beautifully designed and still fail to position you, differentiate you, or support your price. Craft and effectiveness are separate qualities, and only one of them shows up in the presentation.

Do I need a new brand or just better marketing?

If your marketing generates traffic and enquiries but the wrong ones, that’s usually a brand problem. If nobody knows you exist at all, that’s usually a marketing problem. Marketing spend on top of an unclear brand tends to accelerate the wrong outcome rather than fix it.

My takeaways

The bloke on the treadmill wasn’t making a mistake. He made a trade, knowingly, and he was happy with it. Sore feet were an acceptable price for looking the way he wanted to look.

You never got that conversation.

Nobody sat you down and said, right, we can make this look excellent, or we can make it work, and doing both properly takes longer and costs more. You were shown the mood board and told this was the strategy.

So if you’ve been quietly assuming branding is a bit of a con because you’ve bought it once and nothing changed, I’d gently suggest the opposite. You didn’t buy branding. You bought the canvas upper without the arch support, and then you were asked to run in it.

If you want to fix that, start with positioning rather than design. Get clear on who you’re for, what you do better than the alternatives, and why that matters commercially to the buyer, then let the visual work express that decision. Doing it in the other order is how most people end up paying twice, and it’s the sequence brand strategy exists to sort out.

A brand that only looks good is a shoe that only looks good.

Fine, right up until you have to run in it.