How to build a B2B brand that works across channels

You’ve spent months refining your brand, you feel the vision is clear, the identity and applications look sharp, and the messaging is perfect.

But then, a few months after the launch, you see the sales team from one of the divisions pitch using an older deck, a LinkedIn post goes live in a tone that doesn’t quite align, and internal comms seem to have adopted a strange custom-designed logo for an HR initiative, using a shade of green that isn’t even in the guidelines.

The brand you worked so hard to create is being destroyed and, in that moment, you feel like you’ve lost control.

Teams that sit outside leadership or marketing roles often don’t see this as a problem or a huge concern. However, inconsistency is the achilles heel for marketers and brand leaders as it makes the business appear unreliable.

Why consistency builds muscle memory, even in B2B

Think about Selfridges in London (I’ve chosen a well-known brand here as it’s easier to understand). As you glide through the store, the yellow pops on signage guide you effortlessly through the store. Own-brand products are beautifully labelled and on-brand. Staff greet you with warmth, and you leave swinging a yellow bag on black, woven handles, feeling a little bit special. It feels seamless, premium and consistent.

Now compare that to your brand world – is it that seamless? You might run a construction company, an IT firm, or a finance SaaS brand, the touch points will change from the Selfridges example – it’s more likely you’ll be focused on a website, sales presentation slides and LinkedIn content rather than in-store signage. Still, you need to create a seamless experience for your brand too. Even if you’ve invested in your brand, without consistency in application, it gets devalued. Research proves it.

Consistency isn’t a dull repeat; it’s the difference between a brand that gets remembered and one that can easily get forgotten.

It’s generally noted that people need between 5-7 impressions or interactions with a brand to start recalling it, but in some cases, it can be as high as 27 before a purchase decision is made! In B2B the buying experience is also much longer than B2C, which means that you need to show up consistently for a longer period of time.

Internal and external cohesion

This is a question I get asked a lot.

It’s important to remember that when you create a brand identity in the first place, you’re not just creating a logo, colours and a style with some rules; the aim should be to create a sliding scale of applications so that there is a consistent brand but it can flex tonally to talk to different audiences.

Check out the work we did for Growth Partner. The brand is adaptable to suit their different audience types.

Internally, your brand must guide staff behaviour: from the behaviours you look for at candidate interviews to how sales teams pitch and how leaders present and respond. So in this instance, the brand may appear less formal but still on brand.

Take our work for Informa as an example. Note how the internal applications are less formal than the external ones, yet they remain on brand.

Externally, it must provide prospects and clients with a seamless experience, whether they read a white paper, attend a webinar, or scroll through your LinkedIn page it needs cohesion.

When both sides align, you build trust that actually compounds. Staff feel supported, proud, and confident in the delivery of their work and who they work for. Clients feel reassured and offer you more loyalty.

The ‘brand operating system’ mindset

In my experience, too many large businesses cling to PDF brand guidelines. The reality is that they sit on a server, and go unread, or worse, people are using different versions. As a brand and culture is a living thing, it evolves and therefore can become outdated over time. Then there is the challenge of where you save all the brand assets, e.g. the central place where people can find the logo, the presentation templates to use, and the values to hire people by.

But there is a solution.

Think of your rebrand project as creating a brand operating system.  A living framework that has options within it in how your brand flexes to different audiences and can evolve and update with your brand and culture vs a rigid set of rules. They demonstrate and inspire teams on how to utilise tone, messaging, and visuals across every channel, and they update in real-time should anything need to change. And more than just showing you have a set of core assets that any of your team can download and use across divisions and office locations.

Digital platforms like Frontify and Bynder (two we have used at Nalla – but there are others) make this possible, ensuring every LinkedIn banner, sales deck, and customer service script pulls in the same direction.