What actually happens when B2B branding starts to work?
There’s a question we hear in almost every first conversation with a new client. It comes in different forms, but it’s always the same underneath.
What’s the return on brand?
It’s one of the most honest questions in business. And genuinely one of the hardest to answer well – especially for those of us who don’t work directly with consumer products.
Brand investment is real. The pressure to justify it is real. But the evidence has been notoriously difficult to pin down.
We’re not going to pretend we have all the answers. Nobody does. But we’re getting better at finding the signals.
The principle – simplify to amplify
At the heart of everything we do at Manasian&Co sits a conviction we keep coming back to. Most organisations needing our help don’t lack substance or ambition – they lack clarity. The story is there. But somewhere along the way – through growth, reorganisation, or the slow accumulation of complexity – it gets harder to see.
Our job is to help find it again. To work through everything an organisation has become and surface a credible and authentic truth describing what it is and why it matters. Then to express that truth in a way that’s clear, compelling and that cuts through.
In short, we help B2B organisations simplify their story – to amplify it, reaching the right audiences, in the right places, at the right times.
That sounds straightforward. It rarely is.
Brand is the way an organisation makes people think, feel and act. That can’t be reduced to a single number – and we’re wary of anything that suggests it can. But we can look for signals. The moments when clarity starts to create momentum. When the story starts getting retold. When the numbers that matter start moving in the right direction.
That’s what we try to measure, however nuanced it can become. The question is what signals are most relevant to watch?
The signals – brand impact you can measure
We’ve always believed that great B2B storytelling creates tangible business outcomes. This week, our work with the Institute of Directors won Gold at the DBA Design Effectiveness Awards – the most rigorous standard in our industry for measuring the impact of design on business performance. The DBA doesn’t judge aesthetics. It judges evidence.
And the evidence for the IoD tells a remarkable story.
When we started working together, the IoD was a 117-year-old institution with a membership profile that was increasingly out of step with the business leaders it needed to attract. The brand’s promise – convening power, professional development, a credible voice in public policy – was strong. But it was wrapped in language and imagery that felt like another era.
We repositioned the IoD around a new story – Better directors for a better world. Simple, clear, forward-looking. The resulting brand embraced the core purpose and history of the institution, while embracing a refined logo and refreshed visual system.
The impact was immediate and measurable:
- One in three new joiners is now female
- The average age of new members dropped from 57 to 43
- Overall memberships increased by 6% since launch in 2022
- Revenue from professional development programmes has grown by 156%
- Annual revenue has increased by 41% since launch in 2022
- And more results published on the DBA website
“Five years ago, this organisation was struggling. Today it’s growing again – in membership, revenue and relevance. The only thing that changed was the brand, developed in close partnership with Manasian&Co.”
~ Jon Geldart, Director General, Institute of Directors
This is what the DBA recognised. Not just a rebrand – but a measurably effective one. A freshly framed story that saved an institution on the verge of closure. With no advertising budget to spend, or initiatives across separate departments, it’s one of those rare instances where we can draw a clear line between the brand work and the outcomes – something that’s unheard of in our industry, especially for those of us who specialise in corporate branding.
A pattern taking shape
The IoD is not an isolated example. Across our client portfolio, we see the same theme taking shape – when the story gets clearer, commercial clarity tends to follow. We’re careful about attribution – brand works alongside many other factors – but the direction of travel is consistent.
Marketing Sheffield came to us with a challenge familiar to many cities – to become a top-five UK city to live, work and visit. The city has tremendous assets, genuine ambition, but no unified way to talk about what makes Sheffield distinctive. We developed the positioning Sheffield inspires. Always has. Always will.
Since launch, there have been many positive signals that indicate reconsideration of Sheffield and are the result of many activities working together. Sheffield has grown to become England’s 4th largest city and the 5th most economically active. Rental yields are among the UK’s highest at 7.5%, reflecting increasing demand and desirability. Its creative businesses are generating £1bn in economic impact annually, supporting 9,000 jobs. It recently won an award for global place brand of the year, which last year went to New Zealand. And the impact on local pride has been palpable. No single brand refresh causes that kind of momentum – it’s the result of many factors. But a clear, unified story creates the conditions in which growth becomes more possible.
Eagle Eye Solutions is a SaaS business powering personalised marketing for some of the world’s biggest retailers. When we met them, they were technically brilliant but struggling to cut through in a crowded market. We refreshed their brand expression around a bold, simple proposition – Powering the personalised marketing revolution.
The result was a 139% increase in content engagement within a year after the refreshed brand expression launched. Another rare example of when the brand work links directly to the outcome. A clear story, a clear signal.
Centrica Business Solutions needed to distinguish themselves as a B2B player. We created the The power of power story – positioning them as a strategic energy partner, not a commodity supplier. Since launch, the new brand has helped Centrica build a global partner base with 7,000+ businesses.
Different sectors, different scales, and still the same pattern. Which leads us to ask what else are we not seeing? What can we feel but haven’t tried tracking yet?
Measuring what matters – and being honest about what we can’t
Since corporate brand strategy became a deliberate tool in B2B marketing, demonstrating its commercial impact has been one of the hardest challenges in our industry. The connection between a clearer brand story and better business outcomes is intuitive – most leaders feel it – but proving it with data has been slow, expensive and often imprecise.
Part of what makes this difficult is that brand works over time. Eighteen months is a starting point, not a conclusion. The pressure to validate brand investment immediately – before the story has had a chance to compound – is one of the most common tensions we navigate with clients. How do you provide ‘proof’ without a timeline?
We’ve also learned that financial ROI, while important, only tells part of the story. Some of the most meaningful brand impacts show up elsewhere – in the talent a brand attracts (or fails to), in how an organisation is perceived by the partners it wants to reach, in whether it piques people’s interest or indifference. These things matter commercially in ways that don’t always reduce to a single number.
What we try to do is agree with our clients upfront – before the work begins – what success looks like for them. What are the signals that matter? Where would we expect to see movement, and when?
Those conversations make the work more honest and hold everyone accountable for progress, whatever it looks like.
What we believe
We’ve spent sixteen years working with B2B and hybrid (B2B2C) organisations of every type and scale – from FTSE 100 multinationals to ambitious start-ups, from UK cities to global industrial groups. The lesson we keep finding is the same – people forget strategies, but they remember stories.
The organisations that grow fastest, attract the best talent, and command the most loyalty are the ones that can articulate what they stand for in clear, human language. Not mission statements. Not brand pyramids. Stories.
Great brand stories unlock and inspire, motivate and guide, differentiate and delight. They don’t sit on a website. They live in people’s minds. They get retold – by employees, by customers, by investors, by the media. And this retelling compounds.
That’s what we mean by simplify to amplify.
Find the truth. Tell it powerfully. Track what you can. Iterate and evolve.
How is brand impacting your business?
If you’re a B2B leader wrestling with complexity – a story that’s got tangled, a brand that’s not pulling its weight, or an ambition that’s hard to track – we’d love to chat.