Articles by Chris Lumsden

Article | 30th Jan 2026

How the Halo Effect Causes Businesses to Misread Brand Performance

Businesses often judge brand health through short-term performance. That’s a mistake, and it leads to the wrong decisions at the wrong time.

Article | 9th Jan 2026

When Brand Values Are Tested, Reality Shows Up

Most brand values work perfectly, right up until the moment they’re tested. And when that moment comes, the gap between what organisations say and what they do becomes very hard to ignore.

Article | 24th Nov 2025

Why B2B Brands Mishandle Change (and What Banks Can Teach Them)

Two emails from two banks show how simple, clear communication can turn a moment of change into a trust-building advantage. B2B brands rarely treat change this way, even though they should.

Article | 7th Nov 2025

Why indecision is the silent killer of branding

Branding projects rarely fail because of bad ideas – they fail because no one makes a decision. Indecision creeps in quietly, draining momentum, confidence and belief.

Article | 21st Oct 2025

5 Reasons Internal Brand Understanding Matters More Than You Think

Most businesses focus on how their brand shows up in the market. But the real test is how well it’s understood inside the organisation. If your people don’t understand, believe in, and know how to use the brand, nothing else will stick – not campaigns, not culture, not consistency.

Article | 29th Sep 2025

Why Measuring Brand Results is So Hard

Measuring brand should be simple in theory, but in reality, it’s often messy, political, and difficult to pin down. Here’s why it’s so hard – and why doing something, however imperfect, is always better than nothing.

Article | 11th Sep 2025

How to Refresh Your Brand Without Losing What Works

Refreshing a brand doesn’t always mean starting over. Done well, it’s about subtle evolution – strengthening what already works while removing the clutter that’s built up over time. In this piece, we look at why boards fear brand change, why that perception is wrong, and how we approach brand refreshes, so they build confidence rather than cause chaos.

Article | 26th Aug 2025

How Do You Measure Brand Value in B2B?

You measure brand value in B2B by tracking two things: leading indicators that show early momentum (like share of search, sales confidence, and customer sentiment) and lagging indicators that prove commercial impact over time (like margin uplift, win rate, and customer acquisition cost). The mistake most companies make is waiting for the lagging indicators and measuring nothing in the meantime, then concluding that the brand can't be measured.

Article | 5th Aug 2025

You Don’t Have a Brand Problem. You Have a Brand Belief Problem.

We asked senior B2B brand leaders where brand breaks down. The issue isn’t strategy – it’s belief. Most have clear brand foundations, but they’re not being used. This piece explores why brand gets sidelined and what it takes to build belief where it matters most.

Article | 30th Jun 2025

Professional Services Branding: 5 Hard Truths Every Firm Needs to Hear

Too many professional services firms confuse complexity with credibility. They sell expertise, but their brands don’t show it. In this piece, we share five hard truths firms need to hear – from fixing muddled messaging to breaking free from bland, lookalike branding. If your firm is serious about standing out, start here.

Article | 25th Jun 2025

Why Most Agency Strategy Isn’t Strategy at All – It’s Synthesis

Agencies say strategy. What they really mean is synthesis: the skill of turning noise into something clear, useful and true. Let’s call it what it is.

Article | 19th Jun 2025

10 Signs You Might Need to Rebrand.

Something feels off. The brand doesn’t quite fit anymore. You’re not sure what’s wrong, but you’ve started wondering, do we need to rebrand?

Article | 21st May 2025

Why Brand, Not Sales Tactics, Could Be Killing Your Conversion Rates.

Let’s get one thing straight. Sales performance isn’t just a pipeline problem. Or a training problem. Or even a strategy problem. These things matter, yes, but if your sales team keeps coming up short, chances are the real problem lies elsewhere.

Article | 6th May 2025

If a 5-to-1 ROI Isn’t Enough, What Hope Do We Have?

I was listening to The Rest Is Politics: US the other day, and they were discussing the latest round of government cuts in America. One point jumped out – federal funding for R&D is being slashed, despite the fact that for every $1 invested, the return is estimated at $5 or more.

Article | 24th Mar 2025

Brand Strategy Isn’t About a Clean Slate: Here’s What Really Works

Stop waiting for perfect conditions to fix your brand. Most branding projects don’t start from scratch. They start in the middle of the mess - while a website is already being built, a marketing campaign is in progress, or a leadership team is debating next steps.

Article | 14th Feb 2025

What Does Brand Positioning Really Mean?

Brand positioning is the process of defining the distinct space your company occupies in customers' minds. What you stand for, how you're perceived, and why buyers should choose you over alternatives. It's not a tagline or a messaging exercise. It's a strategic commitment to owning a specific, defensible position in your market that shapes every decision the business makes.

Article | 10th Feb 2025

Why Marketing Campaigns Fail – And How to Fix It

You’re pouring money into your marketing, ticking all the right boxes, but the leads just aren’t coming. The campaigns aren’t landing, and the ROI isn’t there. Why do marketing campaigns fail?

Article | 31st Jan 2025

Why B2B Tech Branding is the Key to Unlocking Growth

In the competitive world of B2B tech, branding is often an afterthought. Companies tend to focus on technical features, leaving their brand foundations weak and messaging fragmented. But without a strong foundation in B2B Tech Branding, even the most innovative technologies struggle to resonate with customers and drive growth.

Article | 21st Jan 2025

The Outcomes of Branding: Beyond ROI

In our 20 years of working with B2B brands, we’ve learned a simple truth: branding’s impact is rarely immediate, linear, or easily captured in a spreadsheet.

Article | 11th Dec 2024

Emotion in B2B Buying

Emotion is a word that’s thrown around a lot in branding, often associated with happiness, joy, or love. In B2C, it’s easy to see why.

Article | 26th Nov 2024

Brand Bike Shedding: Why Avoiding the Big Brand Questions Costs You More

Branding often mirrors a curious behavioural quirk in decision-making: Bike Shedding. It's a term coined by British historian and writer Cyril Northcote Parkinson in his 1957 essay on organisational inefficiency.

Article | 1st Oct 2024

81% of B2B Ads Fail: Here’s How Better Branding Can Fix It

A recent study by the B2B Institute in partnership with MediaScience reveals a shocking truth: only 19% of an ad’s audience can attribute it to the correct brand.

Article | 20th Aug 2024

B2B Branding: What Happened to “Hello”?

In the rush to showcase technical prowess, many B2B brands forget the simple yet powerful act of introducing themselves. Without a proper “hello,” even the best products struggle to make an impact.

Article | 22nd Jul 2024

The importance of storytelling for B2B Tech brands

B2B Tech brand marketers must learn to step away from a technical features approach and embrace a brand-led storytelling to stand out and differentiate their products.

Article | 7th May 2024

5 signs your brand needs a simplification audit.

In our experience, B2B portfolios are too complex and create a lot of confusion. Here are 5 tell-tale signs that your portfolio needs to be simplified.

Article | 22nd Apr 2024

The Practical Side of Brand Architecture: What Theory Doesn’t Tell You

A recent uptick of enquires around specialist brand architecture projects has prompted me to reflect on the complexities these businesses face and how theoretical understanding impacts practical application.

Article | 8th Apr 2024

Navigating the AI Revolution in Brand Consulting

In a recent discussion, Sam Altman suggested a future where AI could automate 95% of tasks traditionally performed by marketers, agencies, and creatives offering instant, nearly perfect outputs at negligible costs.

Article | 13th Feb 2024

Decoding Brand Confusion: Aligning Agency Expertise with Executive Vision

We’re often brought into branding projects when things have gone wrong, or a previous branding project has run out of steam.

Article | 10th Jan 2024

The Lost Art of Brand Naming

Like deciphering coffee menus, obscure business branding can lead to confusion, affecting sales.

Article | 4th Dec 2023

Does Your Business Need a Sub Brand?

This is a recurring issue in the B2B work we do – and our answer to the question ‘should we create a new sub brand?’ is almost always ‘no’.

Article | 29th Aug 2023

From Frivolous to Fruitful: Agency Challenges in Promoting B2B Brand Characters

We recently had an agency debate about which brands had the best brand character. Over the course of a week, we voted on different options and Captain Birdseye won. (A fine choice, don’t you agree?)

Article | 10th Aug 2023

The Power of Simplicity for B2B Tech Brands: Less is More

Exploring the why and how of B2B tech's fear of simplicity

Article | 21st Mar 2023

Why do Private Equity firms ignore the role of brand in creating value?

This is the question that’s been keeping me up at night. I’m slightly scared to ask it publicly, but I’m genuinely struggling to answer it.

Article | 6th Mar 2023

Reflections on a 10 year client partnership

Agencies aren't partners with their clients unless they share in the commercial risk of the enterprise.

Article | 6th Mar 2023

Brand mistakes made by B2B Tech firms

These mistakes may not be brand killers, but they could cause yours to bleed value and equity and feed the competition's business.

Article | 23rd Feb 2023

Helping B2B understand why it should invest in brand

I think that outside the realm of B2B marketing, clients generally have a poor understanding of brand and why they should invest in it. I also think that’s because we (agencies) do a bad job of explaining why.

Article | 25th Jan 2023

B2B Tech Firms must dig deeper to differentiate

It feels like every other B2B tech firm I look at conforms to the same visual and verbal convention.

Article | 23rd Nov 2022

Why the status quo is the real competition

Even if we offer customers something new, better and cheaper it’s not necessarily the case that they’ll jump at it straight off the bat.

Article | 9th Nov 2022

Tips for a good brand homepage

One thing we’re always telling clients is that the clarity and coherence of their organisation needs to come through in the first contact with the brand. Often, this first contact comes via a company’s website.

Article | 7th Nov 2022

Tips on how to run a brand workshop

I had an experience recently that forced me to boil down the essence of a brand workshop to its constituent parts, so that we could be through it in an hour. This wasn’t particularly easy, given that we usually run these sessions over a half day period.

Article | 17th Aug 2022

Why Brands Need a Serious Brand Strategy

When businesses decide on a growth strategy, there are several options open to them. Growth through acquisition is a commonly chosen path. Shopping lists are written and deals are done, often in quick succession – a demonstrable commitment to growth.

Article | 1st Aug 2022

How brands can make their ESG meaningful

ESG is making a bigger impact on brands than ever before. But the challenge is that many of them just can’t leverage their ESG credentials in a credible way. I wanted to take a look at why and what can be done about it.

Article | 20th Jun 2022

Creating the vision for your brand.

Creating a vision for your brand seems straightforward when looking at other companies. They seem so self-evident, so obvious.

Article | 17th Mar 2022

The Value of Brand Values.

I’ve recently been doing some B2B research, I looked at 34 large corporate entities. They were all a certain size, with average revenues in the $3bn mark, a global footprint and more than 1,000 employees. So, they’re not mom and pop shops.

Article | 2nd Mar 2022

Brand Strategy is Business Strategy

At Good, we’re of the view that if clients want to spend money on brand, then they should have a right to know what it’s likely to do for them.

Article | 22nd Nov 2021

Sustainability Disclosure Requirements: What it means for brands.

The UK government recently announced that there’s legislation pending on the thorny topic of sustainability.

Article | 5th Nov 2021

When should you hire a brand consultancy?

The last 2 years have been mad. We’re all doing things differently and business has never been as strange. One thing we’ve noticed in our consulting is that some clients reviewing their brand values in house. And I get why.

Article | 24th Sep 2021

Why content is more important than brand.

I think that content v branding is like David v Goliath. Branding gets all the headline billing and razzmatazz, but content is ruthlessly efficient in getting the job done.

Article | 17th Sep 2021

Why Are All Whisky Brands The Same?

In our time as a brand firm, we’ve done our fair share of work in the whisky sector. And the one thing that has been consistent across it has been that all the brands seem to be saying more or less the same thing.

Article | 12th Aug 2021

How to Buy Branding Services

Every month we get, on average three new business inquiries through the website. What’s interesting is how these inquiries vary in terms of approach. Some are highly professional, others… well, leave some things to be desired.

Article | 6th Aug 2021

Branding for global, local or both?

When you take on a brand project with a global business, the thorny issue about how to deal with the various regions and the language translations is always there, sitting just below the surface.

Article | 11th Jun 2021

Sustainability is Damaging Brands

Post pandemic, it feels like the sustainability trend is going to dominate. For a tired old brand cynic, it’s the next cab off the rank for brands to fetishise now that AR, QR codes and social media seem to have normalised.

Article | 9th Jun 2021

Brand Building Recipe for Success

There’s a formula for brand success and it’s really no different from that tried-and-true recipe you always go back to. When it comes to brand, we know what works – simplicity, quality and consistency – and it’s what’s worked for a very long time.

Article | 18th May 2021

The Most Important Aspect of Modern Branding? Discipline

The world of branding is notorious for making changes to brands all the time. It's as if we need to keep changing to attract attention, when in actual fact, it's the opposite that's true. The more brands stay the same, the more recognisable they become.

Article | 22nd Apr 2021

Introducing Clarity Reports

We’re delighted to announce the launch of our first product from Good, the Clarity Report. We’ve been working on creating these reports for about eight months now, so it’s a relief to get it out in the world.

Article | 15th Apr 2021

How We Found Clarity During the Pandemic

From a business perspective, the pandemic’s been shit. It’s forced lots of businesses to close, increased layoffs and generated tons of debt. At Good we were not spared. We stared into the abyss along with everyone else and wondered…will we make it out?

Article | 13th Apr 2021

7 Reasons Why Brand Language Matters

There’s loads written on tone of voice and it’s an important component of a successful brand. I want to go a bit further and say that language is about more than just TOV, it can work harder for brands.

Article | 25th Mar 2021

Branding By Algorithm

I’ve been thinking a wee bit about what happens to brand in this digital world, and one of my conclusions is that it’s being overpowered, and we’re now “branding by algorithm”.

Article | 23rd Mar 2021

Six Ways Recruitment Firm Brands Bleed Value to their Competition

One industry I think is particularly behind the curve in the brand space is recruitment. They misunderstand the value of ‘brand’ and the disproportionately important role it plays in customer interaction which happens primarily in the digital sphere.

Article | 29th Oct 2020

How to Tell if Your Brand is Leaking Value

I like the term ‘leaking value’ when it’s attached to brand. For me, it perfectly encapsulates the idea of what happens to organisations when they have a brand problem that’s hidden from view.

Article | 23rd Sep 2020

Do clients choose us or do we choose them?

For us, I suppose the reality is that it’s somewhere in between.

Article | 14th Aug 2020

How many products does a brand need?

There’s not necessarily a right or wrong answer here. But in my opinion, the fewer, the better

Article | 14th Aug 2020

Do you need to write a brief?

This is going to sound controversial, but many of the written briefs we receive are crap and aren’t worth it.

Article | 29th Apr 2020

Time to Review Your Brand Architecture

Brand architecture challenges are the branding equivalent of pulled muscles. They cause pain and frustration, but they don’t create enough of a problem to take you entirely offline to focus on the fix.

Article | 15th Apr 2020

Understanding Business Change During Coronavirus

I've got an old school pal who has a cracking family business. It's the oldest craft bakery in Scotland and has been in his family for 190 years. (No pressure there then).

Article | 18th Mar 2020

Good is Good Enough

One of our worst habits as a business is trying to make things brilliant, when they only need to be good.

Article | 9th Mar 2020

Brand Paranoia

Let’s talk about paranoia in branding. It’s something I’ve noticed a lot over the years - mostly with clients overestimating how much equity there is in their brand.

Article | 3rd Feb 2020

Brand Architecture - Don’t forget the due diligence

When businesses merge or acquire other businesses, they don’t spend enough time thinking about what to do with the brands, products and portfolios. This is our experience anyway.

Article | 9th Jan 2020

Brand Consultant vs Management Consultant

Is it ridiculous for us to consider ourselves a management consultancy?

Article | 25th Nov 2019

The Good MBO - Learnings From The Journey

We recently completed a Management Buyout at Good. Keith, my co-founder and partner of 15 years, left the business and I now have four new partners from the management team.

Article | 17th Sep 2019

Tips on Working Internationally

When we started, our first ambition was to open an office in London. It’s an inconvenient truth that we needed to have an office there in order to be taken seriously by clients. (Thankfully, I think it’s beginning to change now).

Article | 14th Aug 2019

The Importance of Brand Expertise

I’ve been asked to prepare a presentation on how Good has come to appreciate and sell the value of design. When I sat down to think about this journey, it was hard to plot how we got to where we are.

Article | 24th Jun 2019

How to build a brand: Start with words

From time to time we face an interesting moment during that first client presentation when we’re introducing a new brand. We’ll take them through values and positioning matrices. Through the insight we’ve gleaned to give the brand the best possible start.

Article | 18th Dec 2018

Creating the right marketing strategy

This might sound overly simplistic, but one of the questions we keep asking ourselves (and our clients) is ‘how does this contribute to the plan?’

Article | 27th Nov 2018

Five Tips for your next Naming Project

TalkTalk have launched FibreNation – a company to help build a new broadband network for Britain. And we worked with them to name and brand the new organisation.

Article | 26th Jul 2018

Measuring Design Effectiveness

Let's be honest. There’s no straightforward methodology to measuring design effectiveness.

Article | 22nd Jan 2018

The Role of Brand in Internal Comms

Our top 5 tips for creating effective internal comms.

Article | 18th Dec 2017

What's the Difference between Branding and Marketing?

We need to share our expertise in order to build a better understanding of difference between the two.

Article | 29th Aug 2017

Positioning Makes Marketing Simple

A strong well positioned brand acts like a marketing rudder. It creates coherence and simplicity, effortlessly sorting tactics from strategic activity.

Article | 30th Mar 2017

Why brand onions don’t work

I don’t know about you, but I’ve always had a problem with the brand onion, aka brand wheel, brand key, brand house.

Article | 16th Jan 2017

How to buy design services

Now, before I start, I want to make it clear. This isn’t a rant. I’m not using this piece to have a go at clients, the system, or any third party who has ever sought to influence how and where work is placed.

Article | 16th Jun 2016

What Is Brand Architecture and How Should a B2B Company Structure It?

Brand architecture is the system that defines how a company's master brand, sub-brands, products, and services relate to one another. It determines whether customers understand what belongs to you, what each offer does, and how your portfolio fits together. For most B2B companies, the right brand architecture is simpler than they think, and the answer is almost always to consolidate around the parent brand rather than create more sub-brands.

Article | 3rd Feb 2016

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