We'll do brand later

It’s one of the most respectable ways a company can misunderstand growth.

Nobody says they’re against brand. That would sound crude. Too obviously shortsighted. What they say instead is something much more polished.

We’ll do brand later.

Not now - not while pipeline is under pressure, the category is still taking shape, or budget is tight.

Not before product-market fit is firmer, sales is more predictable, attribution is cleaner, the website is better, the team is bigger, the board is calmer, or the next round is closed.

Later is where brand is supposed to live.

The assumption survives because it sounds prudent. It presents itself as sequencing.

First get the fundamentals working. First capture what is already there. First prove the channels closest to revenue.

Then, once the business is larger and safer, it can afford the broader visibility, stronger associations, recognisable presence, and repeated exposure that brand seems to require.

The problem is that brand is almost always postponed in favour of the very things that make it harder to build later.

A founder can believe they’re delaying brand in order to become more commercially disciplined, when what they are often doing is creating a company whose habits, metrics, expectations, and creative instincts become increasingly hostile to the consistency and patience brand requires.

This chapter is about that drift - the habit that often follows once better targeting has made the reachable market look cleaner. It follows what happens when a business treats future familiarity as something to come back to once the serious work is done.

In most categories, that future familiarity is part of the serious work.

What brand means in this book

The word itself doesn’t help. Brand is one of those terms that can mean too many things at once.

For some people it means logos, colours, and verbal style. For others it means reputation. For others it means awareness, or trust, or emotional preference, or all of them at once.

Inside companies, the vagueness of the word often helps the delay. If nobody can quite agree what brand means, it’s easy to push it into a later phase, when there will supposedly be more time to tidy it up.

For the purpose of this book, the practical meaning is simpler.

A brand is the set of associations, expectations, recognisable cues, and remembered impressions that make a company easier to notice, easier to place, and easier to choose.

That includes visual identity, but it’s not limited to it. It includes what people think the company is for, what situations it comes to mind in, what kind of risk it seems to represent, how easy it is to recognise, and whether it feels like a known quantity or an unknown one.

Seen that way, saying “we’ll do brand later” starts to sound stranger. The work being delayed is the gradual work of becoming easier to buy from later.

This is especially important in B2B, where buying moments are infrequent, often involve groups rather than individuals, and rarely begin with every viable supplier receiving equal consideration. The B2B Institute’s How B2B Brands Grow programme argues that sustainable growth in B2B depends heavily on mental availability - in plain English, being easier to recall and recognise in relevant buying situations - alongside the practical ability to buy.

Capture still matters. If someone is searching, comparing, shortlisting, or talking to sales now, the company still needs to be easy to find and easy to buy.

Binet and Field’s B2B work, as summarised by LinkedIn’s B2B Institute, treats long-term brand building and short-term activation as different jobs. Delaying the first until some imaginary future stage of maturity is the habit this chapter follows - not a neutral sequencing choice.

Founders often get caught by their own timeline here.

In the early years of a company, delay feels harmless. The founder is still the main brand asset anyway. The category may be warm. The network is active.

A handful of customers generate enough proof to keep things moving. The website says what it needs to say. Paid activity picks off the obvious demand. A few strong pieces of content travel further than expected.

The company can tell itself that all of this proves brand can wait.

What it often proves is only that the business is still living off conditions that are more forgiving than they will be later.

Two companies, same category

Imagine two firms in the same category, both selling workflow software into operations teams.

The first takes a familiar route. It tells itself that brand can come once revenue is steadier.

So it focuses on lead generation, sales enablement, demo bookings, intent capture, and bottom-funnel content. Its homepage gets rewritten every few months to improve conversion. Ads become increasingly explicit. Messaging is tested mainly for immediate response.

Anything that can’t be linked to pipeline in the short term is treated with caution.

The second firm also takes current revenue seriously. It still has to make the quarter work.

It runs search. It optimises conversion. It supports sales. But at the same time it behaves as if being known later is part of the present job.

It keeps its market story more consistent. It invests in recognisable creative territory. It repeats more. It shows up outside narrow buying moments.

It gives itself a chance to become familiar before urgency appears.

For a while, the first company may look more efficient. It is easier to explain. It may even appear more hard-headed.

The second can look slightly indulgent because some of its work is aimed at improving future buying odds rather than harvesting current demand.

But later is where the bill arrives.

As competition intensifies, the first company discovers that its short-term discipline has trained it into short-term dependence. It needs every quarter to produce enough visible intent.

It has not built enough recognisability to make the next wave of buyers more likely to know it. Each campaign is asked to perform almost from zero. Each new audience has to be persuaded without much stored familiarity behind it.

Each creative cycle starts to feel anxious and over-explanatory. The company keeps saying it will invest in brand once things are more stable, while the absence of brand is one of the reasons things never feel stable enough.

The second company is not immune to pressure. But it is carrying more stored advantage.

More people in the category have seen it before. More of the market can place it faster. More buying situations bring it to mind. More of its communication can build on what is already known rather than explain everything afresh.

One company delayed brand because it thought brand was what came after traction.

The other treated brand as part of how traction becomes more durable.

That difference compounds.

Suppose both companies spend £500,000 over a period. The one putting most of it into immediate response may show more attributable leads early. The more balanced split may look weaker at first and stronger later. These numbers show the direction of the trade-off rather than provide a model.

If the more balanced company modestly improves future consideration, direct traffic, branded search, and shortlist entry over time, its later efficiency may improve even when its early metrics looked weaker.

As I argue in Budget amnesia, a company can win the dashboard for six months and still weaken its next two years.

When “later” becomes culture

Over time, delay becomes a cultural problem as well as a budget problem.

When a company keeps saying “later”, it teaches itself a series of habits.

It teaches marketing that repeated exposure will always be harder to defend than immediate response. It teaches finance that brand is the thing with the vaguer story. It teaches sales that the point of marketing is mainly to serve the current quarter.

It teaches creative teams that distinctiveness is secondary to explanation. It teaches the founder that consistency is nice to have, not commercially central.

Over time, “later” becomes a culture, not a timetable.

And that culture has visible outputs.

The brand identity stays inconsistent because it was never prioritised enough to be properly embedded. Messaging keeps changing because every quarter produces a new pressure.

Campaigns feel disconnected from one another because they were built to serve moments rather than accumulate memory. Creative gets overburdened with explanation because the company assumes it has not earned the right to be simpler yet.

Every piece of activity is expected to prove itself as if no prior exposure exists, which is often true precisely because the firm has spent so long postponing the work that creates prior exposure.

This is one reason the phrase “we’re not big enough for brand” is so misleading.

In many cases, brand is part of how a company becomes bigger with less friction.

Those same growth principles make this explicit: mental availability, excess share of voice, and balancing brand with activation are presented as growth levers in B2B, including for firms that are still trying to become familiar.

A small B2B company still has to work within its budget, category, and sales model. It should not pretend to be a mass advertiser.

If you are serving a genuinely tiny market, running a broad awareness campaign in the style of a consumer brand may be absurd.

But this is where many founders make a second mistake.

They assume the only alternative to total delay is oversized, expensive brand theatre.

Modest ways to start

Early brand building can mean choosing and sticking to recognisable assets rather than changing them every quarter. It can mean making sure the company’s point of view and category associations are consistent enough to accumulate.

It can mean running some activity beyond the narrowest buying moments. It can mean accepting that not every useful marketing effect will announce itself inside a single month.

It can mean resisting the urge to make every message a conversion prompt. It can mean showing up in enough places, consistently enough, that the firm starts to become a known option rather than a surprise encounter.

None of this is especially extravagant. It is the practical work of giving memory something to accumulate around.

The reason many companies still avoid them is that short-term marketing produces more visible emotional relief. When the team is worried, lead generation feels like action.

Optimisation feels like progress. Sales-enablement content feels useful. Brand work often feels exposed by comparison because it asks the business to believe in cumulative effects before those effects are fully visible.

That is why founder judgement matters so much here.

The founder decides whether the company only trusts what is easiest to count, whether marketing is allowed to build tomorrow’s buying conditions as well as today’s pipeline, and whether consistency gets protected when pressure rises or every quarter resets the story.

Marketing teams rarely choose this horizon alone. They inherit it.

The useful question is what the business is giving up each time it defers the work.

If the company keeps waiting until it is stable enough, large enough, or well-funded enough to start becoming known properly, it may find that the habits it built in the meantime are exactly what keeps that moment receding.

It is a decision about how much future familiarity, recognition, and remembered meaning the company is willing to forego now.

And after a company has delayed brand for long enough, it usually finds a way to make that delay sound more principled.

It starts talking as though brand and performance were separate things all along.

Once brand has been deferred long enough, the next sentence that sounds balanced is performance drives revenue.