The impression we hold of a business is shaped by everything we know, observe, hear and experience. When the story and the reality stop matching, one moment can change how we interpret the whole brand.
Several years ago, I travelled for around two hours to an introductory meeting with BrewDog. When I arrived, I discovered that the person I was supposed to be meeting was away. They hadn’t just been called away unexpectedly; they were away for the week.
These things happen. Meetings get missed, messages go astray and diaries go wrong. What bothered me more was that I did not receive an apology or any meaningful follow-up afterwards. Four hours of my time had been wasted and, as far as I could tell, nobody was particularly concerned about it.
Until then, I had bought into BrewDog’s story. It was disruptive, rebellious, entrepreneurial and, frankly, quite cool. I liked the attitude and the way the business had challenged a fairly conservative category.
The failed meeting did more than leave me irritated. It made me question whether the version of the business I had accepted was real.
After that, I began looking at BrewDog differently. Advertising that had once appeared bold began to feel like shock without much substance. I read accounts from former employees alleging a culture of fear and poor treatment inside the company. I also saw the Advertising Standards Authority’s ruling that claims made during its promotional gold-can competition were misleading.
None of those later discoveries caused the original change in my opinion. They appeared to confirm a story I had already started telling myself about the business.
BrewDog came under new ownership in March 2026, long after my experience and the controversies that followed it. The business today is not necessarily the same business that disappointed me then. But a change of ownership does not reset a brand in people’s minds. My gut feeling did not change when the paperwork changed. Trust would have to be earned back through repeated evidence that the business now behaves differently. That experience has stayed with me because it says something important about what a brand actually is.
The story we tell ourselves
We often talk about a brand as a gut feeling. I still think that is true, but it is only part of the explanation. In How people choose: emotion, reason and the power of creative marketing, I explored how feeling, experience, mental shortcuts and conscious reasoning combine when people make decisions. This article follows one part of that argument further: how those separate impressions become the meaning we attach to a business.
A brand is the meaning a business holds in someone’s mind: the story they construct from everything they know, observe, hear and experience, compressed into a gut feeling and a set of expectations.
I like the word story here because it reflects how people make sense of things. I do not mean that we consciously sit down and construct a tidy narrative about every company we encounter. The story may be incomplete, contradictory and difficult to articulate. It might consist of memories, associations, fragments of information and assumptions we have never properly examined.
More often than not, we experience the compressed version. We like them. We trust them. We think they are clever, responsible, dependable, aloof, cheap, exciting or full of themselves. We feel that a brand is for people like us or decide almost instantly that it’s not.
Behind that simple judgement may sit years of accumulated evidence. Or it may have formed before we’ve even bought the product.
You do not have to be a customer to know the brand
Oatly is a useful example for me because I have a fairly clear impression of the brand without having purchased the product.
My perception is shaped largely by its personality, its apparent values and the way both are expressed through its visual identity and communications. I have still formed a view about what the business believes, the sort of character it has and the people it seems to be speaking to.
My view may be incomplete. It may even be wrong. But the gut feeling exists. We sometimes talk as though a customer’s relationship with a brand begins when they buy something. In reality, it can start much earlier. We notice an advert, see the packaging on a shelf, hear someone talk about the company, observe the people who use it or pick up a sense of its reputation. These indirect experiences become part of the story too.
Visual identity plays an important role in this. It is not the whole brand, but it is one of the principal ways brand meaning is recognised and recalled.
The typeface, colour, imagery, packaging and design language can give us our first impression of the personality. Once we know the brand, the same identity can bring a much wider set of associations back to mind. A logo is not simply an identifying mark at that point. It becomes a trigger for everything we have come to associate with the business.
That is why saying “a logo isn’t a brand” is correct but can also become rather dismissive. Visual identity cannot create and sustain the entire meaning on its own, but it is far from incidental.
Values and personality need to work together here. Values influence what a brand believes. Personality influences how those beliefs speak, behave and present themselves. They are not interchangeable, but they need to complement each other. A brand that claims warm, human values but communicates with a cold or self-important personality has already introduced a disconnect.
The brand in my mind is not necessarily the one in yours
My feelings about MINI are quite different from my feelings about Oatly, partly because we have owned a MINI for years.
There is pride in that relationship, along with excitement, affection and enjoyment. I see the car as a design icon. It feels cool and fun without being too showy. When we originally bought one, I suspect it was partly a statement about how I wanted to be seen: someone who appreciated good design, individuality and character.
There were sensible reasons too. It was economical to run, which made it feel like the more environmentally responsible choice. It was also made at Cowley, only about ten miles from where we live, and that local connection genuinely contributes to how I feel about it.
Some of those reasons may be post-rationalisation. I probably felt the emotional pull before assembling the practical case. But that does not make the reasons irrelevant or untrue. They have all become part of my relationship with the brand.
Someone living elsewhere will carry a different version of MINI in their mind. They may see German ownership rather than British manufacturing. They may think of heritage, driving pleasure, impracticality, fashion or an expensive small car. The business can influence those stories, but it cannot make every person hold precisely the same one.
The story also helps us express something about ourselves. That is more obvious with cars, clothes, technology or guitars. A Martin guitar does not only say something about the instrument; it can say something about the owner’s appreciation of heritage, musicianship and craftsmanship. The Body Shop may mean something about ethics and values as well as the products it sells.
But identity is not restricted to culturally loaded purchases. Even dishwasher tablets can take on symbolic meaning. A brand such as SMOL allows someone to feel they are making a more considered choice about waste, convenience and the way they live.
Nobody needs to display their dishwasher tablets to the neighbours. Identity does not have to be performative. Sometimes it is simply the story we tell ourselves about the kind of person we are and the decisions we make.
There is no universal hierarchy
We began this discussion by trying to decide which parts of a brand carry the greatest influence.
Is it the product? The visual identity? Advertising? Reputation? Customer service? Recommendations from friends? The conduct of the founder? The honest answer is that it depends.
I am a visual person, so advertising and visual identity are likely to influence me more strongly than they might influence someone else. Reputation and recommendations from people I trust probably sit near the top for me. Product experience matters, but an outstanding product experience could instantly catapult it to be the strongest influence of all.
For somebody else, price, convenience or customer service may dominate. The category changes things. So does the context, the person’s previous experience and what they happen to value.
MINI’s product design and my years of ownership carry considerable weight in my relationship with that brand. With Oatly, personality and visual identity have shaped an impression before product use. With BrewDog, one interpersonal experience and what I later learnt about the business overwhelmed much of the positive meaning that had come before.
It is therefore unhelpful to invent a universal hierarchy of brand inputs. They do not carry fixed numerical scores, and a brand is not the neat total of a set of equally weighted encounters. Some experiences pass almost unnoticed. Others rearrange the whole story.
When a moment becomes evidence of character
General courtesy has a surprisingly strong influence on my gut feeling about a business.
People failing to appear for a Teams call is an obvious example. On its own, a missed meeting doesn’t tell you everything about a company. There may be a perfectly reasonable explanation.
What follows the mistake affects its meaning. A sincere apology can soften the experience because it suggests the other person understands that your time has value. If the same thing happens again, however, it begins to look less like an unfortunate incident and more like evidence. You start to think:
Actually, I don’t want to do business with someone who treats other people like that.
The way an experience progresses is important. An incident happens. The business responds well or badly. The behaviour is then repeated or corrected.
From that, we infer something about its character.
We do this because we cannot directly see a company’s values or culture. We judge them through behaviour.
A small discourtesy can therefore carry considerable weight if it appears to reveal something larger. Equally, an excellent response to a mistake can strengthen the relationship. The weight of an experience is affected not only by what happened, but by what happens next.
The greatest damage often comes from contradiction. Poor service from a business that has never promised much may simply be disappointing. Poor service from a brand that presents itself as unusually caring and customer-focused makes you question the promise. A sustainability-led brand accused of misleading environmental claims creates a similar tension. The issue is not only that something went wrong. It is that the experience appears to reveal a gap between the projected story and reality.
When that gap becomes visible, people may reinterpret everything that came before it. The bold advertising now seems performative. The friendly language feels scripted. The values begin to look like a marketing exercise rather than a genuine belief. The more compelling the original story was, the greater the potential sense of disappointment.
Marketing cannot be a veneer
This is why marketing and business strategy have to be intertwined.
Marketing should not be a lick of paint applied to the workings of the business. It cannot create a lasting impression of care, quality, responsibility or expertise when the product, service and behaviour repeatedly provide evidence to the contrary.
That does not mean the marketing team owns every part of the customer experience. Nor does it mean a creative agency should pretend to be an operational or management consultancy.
It means that the customer understanding, promise and strategic position expressed through marketing should influence the decisions that shape the experience. Product, service, behaviour, identity and communication need to support a recognisable and broadly coherent story.
Perfect consistency is neither possible nor particularly human. Businesses make mistakes. People behave inconsistently and circumstances change. Coherence does not mean every interaction is scripted or that a company can never get anything wrong.
It means the different parts of the business generally point in the same direction. Coherence makes a brand easier to understand, trust and remember. Contradiction introduces doubt and can weaken the relationship.
When we work with a client on its brand and marketing, our role is to lead the conversation about that story. We can help establish what the business should mean, who it is for, what it promises and how its values and personality should be expressed. We can identify important disconnects across the customer-facing experience and help define the behaviour that the brand requires. We then translate that thinking into the marketing strategy, visual identity, packaging, campaign, content or other creative work.
We do not solve the company’s operational or cultural issues for them. Those changes remain the responsibility of the people running the business. But we should be prepared to identify where those issues are undermining the brand, rather than pretending that better copy or a new campaign will make the contradiction disappear.
That diagnosis is part of the value of good brand and creative work. The objective is not simply to make the business appear more coherent. It is to help the business communicate a coherent story that has enough truth behind it to withstand what customers actually encounter.
What story are people telling themselves about you?
It is tempting to begin a brand project by asking what you would like people to think.
A more revealing place to start may be to ask what they think today. Recently, I analysed a client’s online reviews to understand what its customers valued most. The business owner was concerned about price and how strongly it might be affecting people’s decisions.
But price barely featured in the reviews. When it was mentioned, customers described the business as offering good value for money. What came through far more strongly was the attention to detail, the calm and helpful guidance, and the sense that the team took ownership from beginning to end.
That was the brand story its customers were already telling. It was not necessarily the one the business owner had expected, but it revealed where the real value lay.
What have your customers seen, heard and experienced? Which interactions have carried the greatest weight? What expectations have you created? Does your visual identity bring the right meaning to mind? Do your people, products and service reinforce the promise, or are they telling a different story?
There may be a coherent thread running through everything you do, even if you have not articulated it clearly enough. The marketing work may need to make that story more visible, distinctive and memorable.
There may also be cracks. The personality might not match the values. The campaign promise may not survive the buying experience. The identity may communicate a level of quality the product does not deliver. Customer service may undermine a position based on care and expertise. Those are not always problems that marketing can solve alone, but they are problems that marketing should help the business see.
A brand is the story people tell themselves after combining everything they know, observe, hear and experience. Most of the time, they will never explain that story in full. They will reduce it to something simpler.
A feeling. An expectation. And ultimately, a decision about whether they want to do business with you.