But here's what our experience has taught us: technical superiority isn’t enough. If the market can’t see the value you deliver, it won’t pay for it.
You can have the best engineers, the most reliable products, and rock-solid performance, and still lose on margin, market share or deal velocity.
Every year you fail to make your value clear, you bleed pricing power. And your competitors thank you for it.
This isn’t a branding problem. It’s a business problem. It's the recognition gap, the space between the value you believe you deliver and the value your customers actually perceive.
When we work with businesses that acknowledge and take the recognition gap seriously, this is what happens:
- AEG Power Tools: Repositioning led to +35% price per tool, +54% sales value, and delivered 7,000% ROI on strategic identity work
- 365 Retail Markets: Clearer story drove +525% web enquiries and +80% higher conversion with no extra marketing spend
- Devro: Simplified brand architecture cut 25% off annual marketing costs
- EWOS: Streamlined brand helped support a $1.5B acquisition, up from a $700M valuation just two years earlier
These aren’t creative awards. They’re commercial outcomes.
Bain found that industrial companies with stronger brand recognition command 13–15% price premiums, even when technical specs are comparable. That’s profit walking out the door if you’re relying on specs alone to carry the weight.
Even more telling, 74% of B2B buyers do their research online before speaking to a sales rep. If your strategic value isn’t unmistakably clear on your website and in your pitch decks, you’ve already lost the deal before your best people even get involved.
Here’s where things get uncomfortable. The more technical your team, the more likely you’re making this mistake.
- You’re asking buyers to do the translation from features to value. Most won’t bother
- You’re speaking in specs, while your competitors are telling clear, simple stories
- You’re selling to a buying committee, not just an engineer, and most of them can’t decode your datasheets
You think your datasheets speak for themselves. They don’t.
They make you look like everyone else—and that’s costing you millions.
Digital is now twice as important as traditional channels for industrial buyers. If your website reads like an instruction manual, you’re already invisible.
Strategic clarity makes your value easier to see - and your business easier to run. Efficiency, speed, fewer internal arguments. That’s what clarity unlocks.
The companies winning today are the ones who can answer these without hesitation:
- What makes us meaningfully different? Not better. Different
- How does that difference drive measurable value for the customer?
- What’s the hard proof behind our claims?
- How does that come through in every interaction—online, in person, post-sale?
If your website, pitch deck or product page can’t answer those four questions, don’t change your logo. Change your strategy.
Technical excellence might win you the battle of specs. But that’s not the game anymore. Today, the companies that are pulling ahead aren’t just better at making things; they’re better at making those things matter.
The best product doesn’t always win. The best explained one does.
So, where do you go from here?
Not to a rebrand. Not to a new logo. But back to the fundamentals—getting clear on the value you already deliver, and why it isn’t being recognised.
Because the biggest problems industrial businesses face - lost margin, slow sales, price pressure, internal confusion - aren’t marketing problems. They’re clarity problems.
And when you fix clarity, everything else starts to move.
That’s what brand strategy, done properly, is really for.