Brand Lessons From Businesses You Know: Oatly, HubSpot and Octopus Energy

Oatly: tone of voice as a competitive weapon

Oatly didn’t win the oat milk category by inventing oat milk. It won by talking to people like a person would, at a time when every other carton in the aisle was conservative.

Oatly’s packaging read like it had opinions. The out-of-home ads picked fights with the dairy industry and dared you to disagree. It was funny, occasionally annoying on purpose, and completely unmistakable from two metres away in a supermarket. It’s the same approach Innocent Smoothies opened up in the UK years earlier, and Oatly learnt from it and drew on it.

I appreciate that, as I write this, this approach is now perhaps overdone; it sometimes feels like you can’t walk down the supermarket aisle without every packet trying to be your mate. The lesson here isn’t “be quirky.”

You can’t copy Oatly’s jokes, or earn a space in the hearts of your target audience, without doing Oatly’s thinking first.

The actual lesson is narrower and more useful: a distinctive voice carries real commercial weight the moment everyone else in your category has started to sound the same. Sameness is the default state of most industries, because writing safely is the path of least resistance for anyone without a strong point of view to defend. The businesses that break out are the ones willing to sound like themselves in a room full of companies that all sound like each other.

It’s likely that nobody sat down and decided what your brand sounds like, and it shows: some pages sound corporate, some sound casual and warm, perhaps some sound like a founder ranting on LinkedIn, and a prospect reading a few of them in a row could struggle to believe they came from the same company.

Fixing that doesn’t touch your logo, your colours or your product, although I’d say a bold tone works best alongside a bold visual identity. But that aside, getting your tone of voice right is a decision about who you’re talking to, what you’d actually say to them if you weren’t worried about sounding too corporate, and the discipline to write that way everywhere, not just on the pages that marketing controls. Why brand distinctiveness is your competitive advantage goes deeper into why that distinctiveness is an advantage once you commit to it.

HubSpot: the brand is bigger than the logo

We recently had a brief from a company that wanted a new logo, with the instruction: “we tried to do this in-house but it didn’t work, and we really like HubSpot’s logo.”

HubSpot’s own brand guidelines describe their sprocket logo with almost comic plainness: “The sprocket. It’s big, it’s orange, and it’s pretty recognisable.” That’s it. No claim that the shape itself means automation, or connection, or growth. It only carries that meaning because of everything HubSpot built around it: a stated mission “to help millions of organisations grow better,” a tone of voice that stays human, helpful and smart whether you’re reading their blog, their support replies or their sales emails, and a visual system disciplined enough that HubSpot feels like HubSpot in every single place you meet it.

The proof is in the numbers. HubSpot’s revenue went from $15.6 million in 2010 to $2.63 billion in 2024, which is what happens when a company decides early what it stands for and refuses to dilute it for fifteen years straight, across every product line, every acquisition and every market it entered.

HubSpot itself frames the affection its customers feel not as logo-love but as trust: “I trust this company, they feel clear, confident and right for my needs.”

For a founder still thinking “rebrand equals new logo,” this is the reframe worth understanding: the logo design is not the most important part of the job. It’s the tip of something much bigger, or it’s nothing at all, a shape with no accumulated meaning behind it.

What you’re actually deciding, when you rebrand, is what the business stands for and whether every part of it, from the careers page to the support inbox, is going to say the same thing about you. Get that right and the mark takes care of itself. Get a new mark without doing that work and you’ve just spent money changing a tiny part of the brand.

Octopus Energy: positioning strategy, not visual identity.

Marketing strategist Alex M H Smith put this well in a Substack note from May 2026:

“A great question to ask when looking for opportunity is: what is getting worse? If you’d asked me 2 years ago I’d have said this question was weak… but now something’s different.”

He’s right that this used to be a weak question. For most of the last decade, quality was rising fairly uniformly across most industries, so there wasn’t much to find by looking for the gaps. That’s no longer true, and Smith names the reasons directly: “enshittification, digitisation, AI adoption, offshoring, rising staff and energy costs, demographic shifts and work-from-home culture” are all pulling standards down at once, across sectors that had spent years slowly getting better.

He goes on to say,

“I’ve often said having good customer service isn’t a viable strategy because everyone tries to do that. But now this simply isn’t true.”

Octopus Energy is his example, and it’s a good one. The UK energy market had, by most accounts, largely given up on the basics: long call queues, confusing bills, and a customer service reputation so poor it became a running joke. Octopus built its position on doing the unglamorous fundamentals properly in a market that had stopped bothering.

Which?’s most recent customer service research put Octopus at 79% overall satisfaction against British Gas’s 65%, a fourteen-point gap built on treating its customers like people and clearly helping them manage bills and rising energy costs. “Just being good” became a genuine, defensible differentiator, not because Octopus reinvented energy retail, but because almost nobody else was still trying.

Of the three, I feel this has the least to do with visual identity and everything to do with positioning strategy. It’s a smart move to decide, deliberately, which unglamorous fundamental your category has quietly abandoned, and then make your reliability on it visible and provable rather than assumed.

If you’re a founder-led scale-up watching bigger, more bureaucratic competitors slowly get worse at the basics as they scale, automate and offshore their way through growth, you don’t need a big visual rebrand to compete with them. You need to ask Smith’s question about your own category, work out what’s actually slipping, and build your positioning around being the business that still does it properly.

We’ve written about this before in why 2026 will reward brands that put people before process. Although the title’s dated 2026, the argument still holds: the businesses that win in the next few years won’t be the ones with the shiniest systems, they’ll be the ones that never stopped noticing what those systems were costing their customers.

If you’re keen to learn more about this, check out How to avoid sounding like every other company in your industry. It covers the pattern that shows up across all three: most businesses converge on the same safe language, the same safe promises and the same safe visual choices, and the ones willing to make an actual decision instead of a safe one tend to see the biggest market share gain.

What this actually means for you.

None of that was a design-only or design-first rebrand approach. It needed Oatly’s decision about what to sound like, HubSpot’s patience to build fifteen years of consistency behind a logo that means nothing on its own, and Octopus’s willingness to ask an unglamorous question about its own market. The logo, if you still want one, comes after that thinking.

It’s about listening to the market and understanding what people want and where the frustrations and gaps are. This is exactly what our B2P approach is built to solve.

It’s a strategy conversation, not a design brief, and it’s exactly where a rebrand starts before anyone touches a logo file. If you’re wondering whether there is a gap costing you deals against competitors who’ve done this work, that’s the market differentiation challenge we help scale-ups work through, and it’s worth a conversation before you brief anyone.

To learn more about how we can help, check out our brand strategy services