BrandingBusiness

09/22/2026

If AI were asked today what your company does, would it give the answer your strategy was built to establish?

Your corporate brand now has an audience it may never have been designed for: machines.

AI increasingly interprets companies for customers, procurement teams, investors, employees, candidates, analysts and journalists—often before those audiences encounter the companies themselves.

This creates a fundamental challenge. Your corporate positioning and messaging may be clear inside the organization, yet AI can present several different and incomplete versions to the market.

One platform may emphasize your scale, another your products and a third an outdated category. Better-defined competitors may establish the terms of comparison. In some cases, your company may not appear at all.

Corporate marketing and communications must now address two audiences: humans and machines. The machines increasingly influence what the humans find, understand and consider.

The strategic response is clarity: the ability to be understood as intended across the entire information environment. Before a company can strengthen its clarity, it must know where its meaning is being lost, why it is happening and what needs to change.

The Clarity Audit developed by BrandingBusiness provides that diagnosis. It compares what a company intends to mean, what its communications actually say and what its audiences—and the AI systems informing them—have sufficient evidence to conclude.

How a Clarity Audit identifies where corporate meaning is being lost, and what you can do to rectify it. For decades, brand strategy and corporate marketing have rested on one unshakable assumption: the audience is human. People bring with them accumulated experience, emotion, memory, judgment an...

09/17/2026

The value of brand strategy is frequently questioned. Yet its commercial effects are evident in some of the most tangible measures of business performance.

A strong B2B brand can support premium pricing, accelerate sales, improve win rates, reduce customer acquisition costs, and increase enterprise value.

Its influence begins long before a prospect contacts sales. More than 90% of B2B buyers have formed a shortlist before they show intent. A company that fails to make that shortlist loses an opportunity its sales team may never know existed.

Ryan Rieches examines the evidence for brand ROI, the financial models available to measure it and the experience of companies including Salesforce, IBM, Caterpillar, and Microsoft. He explains how brand leaders can connect awareness, preference and reputation to pipeline, margin and valuation—and make the business case in terms executives understand.

Brand strategy creates economic value. Leadership teams need to know where that value appears, how to measure it and how to manage it.
#𝐁𝐫𝐚𝐧𝐝𝐕𝐚𝐥𝐮𝐞

In my last blog post on the topic of brand ROI, I shared a step-by-step approach to create executive buy-in for brand strategy by shifting the conversation to business outcomes rather than brand or marketing topics. In this post, I will share more data from respected institutions along with real-...

08/27/2026

The .com has been the premium address of business for 40 years. But AI-enabled search is changing the equation. Increasingly, we can find companies, compare products and get answers without ever visiting a website — just as premium .com domains are commanding extraordinary prices. At the same time, alternatives such as .ai, .co, and .io are becoming more familiar, each bringing associations and implications of its own.

What’s behind this paradox? Does a great business name still need the exact-match .com?

The answer is changing.

Alphabet is one of the most valuable companies in the world. It owns Google, YouTube, Waymo and a collection of technology businesses that reach billions of people. Its market value runs into the trillions. Yet when Google created Alphabet as its new parent company in 2015 to give its expanding b...

08/13/2026

Acquisitions create larger companies. They don't automatically create stronger brands.

Every acquisition begins with a business case.

Executives naturally focus on the mechanics of integration: organizational structures, IT systems, supply chains, legal entities, and financial reporting. All are essential. Yet customers, employees, investors, and partners are asking a different question:

What has this acquisition made possible, and why does it matter?

Customers want to understand the value of the combined organization beyond a larger portfolio. Employees need a shared purpose that reaches across legacy cultures. Investors want to see how the acquisition creates competitive advantage beyond greater size. Without a coherent strategic narrative, each audience is left to interpret the deal for itself.

The most consequential acquisitions create something genuinely new. They combine capabilities that allow the organization to compete in ways neither business could achieve independently. Brand strategy identifies that new source of value, gives it clear expression, and aligns the organization around it.

When that happens, employees understand the future they are building together. Customers see a stronger partner. Investors see a clearer strategic direction. The market can begin to value the enterprise for what it has become.

That was the challenge we addressed with Inventronics following its acquisition of the Digital Systems business from ams OSRAM. The transaction created one of the world's leading providers of LED power and control technologies. Our task was to define the enterprise the acquisition had made possible and give it a clear, unified expression.

An acquisition can change the size and scope of a company overnight. Building a global brand that captures the value of what has been created takes a different kind of work.

The Inventronics case study shows how we did it.

Engineering a global brand. ...

07/28/2026

The news that Cracker Barrel's CEO is stepping down illustrates how quickly a business transformation can become reduced to a debate over logos.
The "rebrand" became the story. The broader strategic agenda disappeared beneath the controversy.
That's the problem with the word rebrand, says Alan Brew. It has become one of the most overused—and misused—terms in business.
Here, he calls for a more precise language in branding—one that begins with the business challenge rather than prematurely defining the solution.

07/07/2026

Henry Ford never said, "If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses."
Peter Drucker probably never said, "What gets measured gets managed."
Albert Einstein almost certainly never defined insanity as "doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results."
Yet these quotations have become part of the language of modern business.
Why?
Because famous names lend borrowed authority to ideas. Repeat them often enough and familiarity begins to masquerade as truth.
That's the real story behind fake quotations—and it has implications far beyond sloppy attribution. It tells us something about how arguments gain credibility, why misinformation spreads so easily, and why verification has become an increasingly valuable professional discipline.
Alan Brew explores the surprisingly important lessons hidden inside the fake quote industry.

Every fake Einstein quotation reveals something about human nature. Every AI repetition reveals something about the limits of artificial intelligence. Spend ten minutes looking for the perfect quote for your presentation, and you’ll find an extraordinary gathering of famous people dispensin...

06/23/2026

When Chip Register set out to build a different kind of consulting company, he needed a powerful brand idea to express his vision and give it a coherent shape.

The answer was Argano, a name inspired by a Renaissance invention that helped make one of history's great architectural achievements possible. More than a name, it became an organizing idea, a way to explain the company's purpose, ambition, and role in the world.

Six years later, Argano CEO Chip Register made a revealing observation:
"The brand helped me explain it to myself."

That insight gets to the heart of storytelling as a business discipline. Before a brand can persuade customers, attract talent, or unite acquisitions, it can help leaders articulate what they are trying to build.

Our latest case study explores the creation of the Argano brand and the role it played in defining and communicating a vision that would eventually grow into one of the industry's fastest-growing digital consultancies.

For additional perspective, listen to our BrandingBusiness podcast conversation with Chip Register on leadership, growth, and building a company around a clear idea.

Bringing a new kind of digital consultancy to life. ...

06/09/2026

What does it take to build a consulting business from zero to nearly $1 billion in revenue in just six years?

In the latest edition of Expert Opinion, Alan Brew sits down with Chip Register, CEO of Argano, to discuss one of the more remarkable growth stories in professional services.

Backed by Trinity Hunt Partners, Argano has grown through more than 30 acquisitions while maintaining the entrepreneurial energy, client focus, and employee engagement typically associated with boutique firms.

The conversation explores:
• Why Argano set out to build something "new, different, and better" rather than another consulting firm
• How the company scaled a platform of specialist boutiques without losing what made them successful
• The role of culture, purpose, and storytelling in integrating acquisitions and attracting talent
• The Four Cs that guide Argano's acquisition strategy: Completeness, Connectedness, Claim, and (yes) Quality
• Why Chip believes leaders should distinguish between obstacles and barriers when building companies
• How Trinity Hunt's long-term perspective helped create the conditions for sustained growth
• The origin story behind the Argano brand and the powerful metaphor that continues to guide the company's mission

It's an insightful dialog about growth, culture, private equity, brand building, and what it takes to create an organization people want to join and clients want to trust.

What does it take to build a consulting business from zero to nearly $1 billion in revenue in just six years? In the latest edition of Expert Opinion, Alan Brew sits down with Chip Register, CEO of Argano, to discuss one of the more remarkable growth stories in professional services. Backed by Tr.....

06/03/2026

We would like to thank the team at Acumetis for their partnership and the trust they placed in us to help bring the new Acumetis brand to life. We are proud of what we have created together.

Acumetis is the new global commercialization company created through the evolution and integration of Herspiegel, Adivo Associates, Decisive Consulting, Fiecon and Sixsense Strategy Group. BrandingBusiness partnered with the leadership team to develop the positioning, naming, messaging, and visual identity behind the launch.

One primary issue sat at the center of the assignment: differentiation in a crowded market where many firms sound increasingly alike.

It quickly became clear that the life sciences commercialization category is saturated with familiar claims and repetitive language. The opportunity was to create a brand that expressed a distinct way of thinking, grounded in client needs to improve patient impact by approaching problems from new angles.

The new name, Acumetis, combines “acumen” and “metis,” the Greek concept of practical wisdom. Fused together, they create a distinctive name built around judgment, knowledge, and decisive action.

The brandline “Reframe What’s Possible” reflects the belief that effective solutions emerge when experienced people challenge assumptions and uncover different ways of seeing and understanding problems.

It also captures the reality of commercialization today. Markets are more constrained, evidence demands continue to rise, organizations operate in silos, and leaders face higher-stakes decisions. In that environment, clients need sharper thinking, connected expertise, and practical ways to tackle entrenched challenges.

“The most rewarding part of creating Acumetis,” says Andrea Fabbri, “was helping transform a group of highly respected specialist firms into one unified enterprise with a clear market position and a shared philosophy about how better commercialization decisions get made.”
www.acumetisglobal.com

https://www.brandingbusiness.com/insights/brandingbusiness-partners-with-acumetis-to-create-and-launch-a-new-global-brand-for-life-sciences-commercialization/

Irvine, CA – BrandingBusiness, the B2B brand strategy and development firm, today announced its role in the creation and launch of Acumetis, a new global expert commercialization partner formed by the integration of five leading life sciences consultancies: Herspiegel, Adivo Associates, Decisive ....

05/28/2026

At a moment when AI messaging has become crowded with automation promises and agentic hype, Cornerstone, a workforce agility and learning company, has taken a different position: AI should strengthen human capability, not diminish it.
AI can process information at extraordinary speed. But judgment, discernment, ethics, creativity, leadership, and contextual understanding remain profoundly human capabilities.
Andrea Fabbri argues that the organizations that thrive in the AI era will not be those that simply deploy more AI. They will be the ones that help people think more clearly, learn more continuously, and make better decisions.

There are moments in the life of a technology company when a product launch does more than signal innovation — it reframes the market conversation. Last week’s Cornerstone Connect NYC, the company’s annual customer and analyst event, felt like one of those moments: a company with deep heritage...