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O Street are a branding studio that have been working for over 17yrs with some of the worlds leading companies. With a mix of corporate and consumer clients, O Street brings lessons learned in the B2B space into the B2C world & vice versa. Find us at www.ostreet.co.uk

In our experience at O Street, corporate clients tend to invest far less in branding than consumer clients. On the surface, this makes sense. Consumer brands often need to engage much larger audiences to sell their products or services, requiring scale and visibility. Corporate brands, by contrast, typically direct more of their budget toward improving service delivery.

To put this into context, we run a 12-person corporate design studio and could sustain the business with around 30 clients a year. One of the craft breweries we work with could have the same-sized team but needs to engage with tens, or even hundreds, of thousands of consumers.

But does that mean corporate brands should invest less in branding? Or that they shouldn’t care about creating a public persona that helps them win new work?

Below are three lessons we’ve learned from consumer clients that corporate brands could learn from:

Launching with a “quick-fit” brand and fixing it later often results in lost recognition and duplicated cost. Businesses end up paying for branding twice.

We worked with a start-up brewery eight years ago that had ambitions to sell nationwide. Despite high production costs, they recognised their brand was as important as their product. They set aside budget early to define their values, name, logo, packaging system and website.

Eight years later, they sell nationwide through major UK supermarkets. The packaging is largely unchanged from the original design, and the website has evolved consistently rather than being rebuilt from scratch.

By contrast, we recently worked with a corporate client who realised, after almost five years, that their name and logo confused customers and failed to reflect the quality of their work. Relaunching meant unpicking years of brand equity, re-educating customers and teams, pulping thousands of business cards, replacing signage and rebuilding their website. Even small brand changes become expensive once a business is established.

Invest in your brand, like you’d invest in your service

How much you invest in your brand should reflect how much you value your service.

A global brand manager we work with once shared a story that reshaped my understanding of branding. He explained that the cork in their entry-level malt whisky costs twice as much as producing the liquid inside the bottle. This is before label design, packaging or advertising.

That investment reinforces heritage, quality and trust. Even the sound of the cork popping is part of the experience. They could have reduced costs with a screw-top lid and pocketed the difference, but they didn’t. Today, Scotch whisky contributes almost 3% of the Scottish economy.

We often see corporate brands opting for low-cost logo solutions, perhaps created by a freelancer or adapted from clip-art. The visual equivalent of a screw-top lid. These same businesses then question why they struggle to attract high-quality, high-paying clients. The reality is that many potential customers never get far enough to assess the service because the brand signals low value upfront.

If you want champagne clients, your brand can’t look like it comes in a plastic bottle.

Customers make significant decisions in a split second looking at your brand

Think about the last time you bought something in an airport duty-free shop. These environments are fiercely competitive, and consumer brands invest heavily in understanding how decisions are made.

Marketers refer to this as “micro decisions”: unconscious judgments made in a fraction of a second. Today, thanks to digital channels, those decisions are often made before a customer even encounters the product in person.

Design plays a critical role in shaping these perceptions. Typeface choice, colour psychology and composition influence audiences without them being consciously aware. For example, to communicate strength, a designer might use a bold sans serif typeface, a purple hue historically associated with power, and a balanced, symmetrical composition.

This approach is far more effective than literal cues like naming a brand “Atlas” or using imagery of physical strength, which can often have the opposite effect. Consumer brands understand the value of these subtleties. Corporate brands too often rely on literal, functional messaging instead.

Conclusion

As markets become more competitive, the science behind effective branding becomes a powerful strategic tool. O Street delivers this work as part of Bolden’s wider digital services. Get in touch to find out how we can strengthen your business.