If Armando Iannucci ever wrote The Thick of It for the branding world, it would be a masterclass in indecision.
We’ve all been there – the colour debate that won’t die, the senior stakeholder who swoops in late, the “just one more round” that everyone knows won’t be the last.
From the outside, it’s funny. From the inside, it’s expensive.
After years of helping brands define who they are, one pattern keeps reappearing: extraordinary lengths to avoid making a decision. It’s rarely intentional. Often it comes from fear, politics, or simple fatigue. But indecision leaves fingerprints all over a project – and those marks are easy to spot.
1. The Detail Distraction
When a conversation starts with colourways or brochure finishes, you can sense it: a loss of altitude.
Detail feels safe – it’s tangible, familiar, and everyone has an opinion. Strategy feels risky. So attention drifts toward what can be seen and away from what needs to be decided.
Colour debates, font preferences, paper stock discussions – they’re all easier to talk about than what the brand really stands for. But when teams fixate on surface, progress stalls. Because until you know what story you’re trying to tell, the colour doesn’t matter.
2. The Folklore Rulebook
“We can never use that colour.”
“We don’t use serif fonts.”
Rules like these often come from nowhere – or from somewhere irrelevant, like a CEO’s long-held preference or a moment of corporate superstition that hardened into policy.
They’re the ghosts of past decisions still haunting the present. When brand decisions are governed by folklore rather than strategy, creativity becomes compliance. And compliance never builds belief.
3. The Frankenstein Fix
This is the feedback classic: “Can we take a bit from route A and a bit from route B, just to see how it looks?”
Or its cousin: “Let’s rework the copy one more time – we’re nearly there.”
Both are forms of deferral. They give the illusion of progress while postponing commitment. But branding isn’t a collage exercise. When you stitch together bits from everywhere, you lose the coherence that makes an idea powerful in the first place.
It’s creativity by committee – which is to say, not creativity at all.
4. The Late Arrival
A senior stakeholder joins the process late, brimming with questions, energy and opinions.
They haven’t seen the journey, only the destination – and suddenly the whole thing feels up for debate again. It’s often an attempt to reduce risk: “Let’s get someone more senior to sign it off.” But it does the opposite. Late arrivals restart the clock, drain momentum and make the next round of indecision almost inevitable.
5. The Overthink Loop
This one pretends to be diligence: another workshop, more competitor analysis, a new round of testing. Collaboration, benchmarking and data are all good things – until they become a way to avoid responsibility. Decision fatigue disguised as consensus-building is still fatigue. And “just one more round” usually means we’re afraid to say “enough.”
6. The Everything Brand
This is what happens when indecision makes it all the way to the strategy.
The brand framework overflows – values, missions, purposes, visions, beliefs, reasons to believe. Every stakeholder’s word gets a place. Nothing gets left out.
It feels inclusive, but it kills clarity. A brand that tries to be everything to everyone quickly becomes nothing to anyone.
What’s really going on
At the heart of indecision is fear – fear of getting it wrong, fear of standing out, fear of being blamed. Branding makes things visible, and visibility feels vulnerable. So people delay, dissect or delegate rather than decide.
But indecision is a decision too – just one that costs more and achieves less. Often, indecision points to something deeper: a weak or undefined brand core. When no one’s sure what the brand stands for, every detail feels debatable. Without shared conviction, everything feels risky because nothing feels certain.
So what’s our job in all this?
To help clients get over the line.
We can’t complain about indecision if we aren’t confident enough to lead. If we keep acquiescing to every new round of tweaks, we’re not brand consultants – we’re an expensive artwork house.
Our role is to guide. To explain why some things work and others don’t. To bring objectivity when internal politics make objectivity impossible. To help teams see when “good enough” is actually the right call, because progress itself builds belief.