How to Build a Winning B2B Brand Strategy?

How to Build a Brand That's Cohesive, Relevant, Easy, and Different: The CRED Framework

In their book Rebrand Right, the authors introduce a powerful diagnostic called the CRED framework — four dimensions that determine whether a brand is truly working: Cohesion, Relevance, Ease, and Difference. Most brands overinvest in one or two of these while ignoring the rest. A visually stunning brand that's hard to buy is broken. A brand everyone recognises but nobody finds relevant is wasting its awareness. CRED forces you to look at the complete picture.

What follows is a detailed breakdown of what it takes to build a brand across each of these four dimensions. Think of it as a practical playbook — not just what to check, but how to think about each element.

C — Cohesion: Make Your Brand Speak With One Voice

A cohesive brand isn't just one that looks consistent. It's one where strategy, identity, experience, and culture are all aligned — where every part of the organisation is pulling in the same direction. When cohesion breaks down, even the best brand strategy becomes a PowerPoint deck that nobody follows.

1. Balance past strengths with future associations

Every brand carries equity from its history — associations, memories, and perceptions that were earned over time. The temptation during a rebrand is to throw all of that away and start fresh. That's almost always a mistake. The real skill lies in deciding which existing associations to carry forward and which new ones need to be built to stay competitive. A technology company known for reliability, for example, might need to layer in perceptions of innovation — but shouldn't abandon the reliability that won it customers in the first place. Audit what your brand is known for today, decide what it needs to be known for tomorrow, and build a bridge between the two rather than burning the first one down.

2. Ensure colleagues understand and use the brand strategy

A brand strategy that lives only in the marketing department is not a brand strategy — it's a marketing document. For a brand to be cohesive, the people across the organisation need to understand what the brand stands for and, more importantly, use that understanding to make daily decisions. When a product team is designing a feature, they should be asking whether it reinforces the brand's positioning. When a customer success team is handling a complaint, their approach should reflect the brand's values. This doesn't happen by sending a PDF around once. It requires ongoing education, accessible frameworks, and making the brand strategy a practical decision-making tool rather than an abstract statement.

3. Leadership must role-model and communicate the strategy

Culture flows from the top. If the leadership team doesn't visibly embody the brand strategy in how they make decisions, communicate priorities, and allocate resources, nobody else will either. When a CEO repeatedly makes choices that contradict the brand's stated positioning — say, cutting corners on quality when the brand promises premium — employees notice. And if employees don't believe in the brand, customers won't either. Leaders need to consistently articulate why the brand strategy matters, demonstrate it in their own behaviour, and hold others accountable to it. The brand strategy should show up in town halls, in how projects are prioritised, and in what gets celebrated.

4. Embed brand strategy in HR policies and procedures

This is where most companies fall short. The brand promises a certain kind of experience, but the HR practices — hiring criteria, onboarding, performance reviews, promotion decisions — tell a completely different story. If your brand is built around innovation and risk-taking, but your performance management system punishes failure, you have a cohesion problem. Brand strategy should inform who you hire (do they embody the brand's values?), how you onboard them (do they understand the brand from day one?), how you evaluate them (are brand-aligned behaviours rewarded?), and how you develop them. The employee experience is the brand experience from the inside out.

5. Keep identity, messaging, and experiences cohesive across touchpoints

This is the most visible aspect of cohesion, and it goes far beyond logo consistency. It's about whether a buyer who encounters your brand on LinkedIn, then visits your website, then speaks with a salesperson, then reads your proposal — whether that entire journey feels like it came from the same organisation with the same personality, standards, and point of view. In practice, this means having clear guidelines not just for visual identity but for tone of voice, messaging hierarchy, and experience standards. It also means regularly auditing every touchpoint to catch drift — because drift is inevitable when multiple teams and agencies are producing content and experiences independently.

6. Price must reflect perceived value

Pricing is a brand signal, whether you intend it to be or not. If your brand positions itself as premium but your pricing is aggressive and discount-driven, buyers receive a contradictory message. Conversely, if your brand is positioned as accessible but your pricing is out of reach for your target audience, the brand promise rings hollow. Cohesion requires that pricing strategy and brand strategy are developed in conversation with each other. This doesn't mean premium brands must always be expensive — it means the price-to-value equation needs to feel consistent with everything else the brand communicates.

7. Integrate brand and demand campaigns

Brand building and demand generation are often run by different teams with different budgets, different KPIs, and sometimes different agencies. The result is frequently a disconnect — the brand campaign tells one story about who you are, and the demand campaign tells a completely different story focused purely on features and offers. Cohesive brands integrate these efforts so that demand campaigns are recognisably from the same brand, reinforce the same positioning, and build the same associations — even while they're optimising for short-term conversions. The best demand campaigns don't just generate leads; they compound the effect of brand-building work.

8. Get the long/short campaign split right for your business

The balance between long-term brand building and short-term activation is one of the most important strategic decisions a brand can make, and there's no universal right answer. The oft-cited 60/40 split (60% brand, 40% activation) from Binet and Field is a useful starting point, but the right ratio depends on your category, your market position, your growth stage, and your business model. A well-known incumbent might lean more heavily into activation because they already have strong mental availability. A challenger brand might need to invest disproportionately in brand building to establish itself. The key is to make this an intentional, evidence-based decision rather than defaulting to whatever the team is most comfortable with.

9. Integrate, customise, and localise executions effectively

As brands scale across markets, channels, and audiences, the challenge of maintaining cohesion while allowing for necessary adaptation becomes acute. The goal is not rigid uniformity — it's coherence with flexibility. Your brand should be recognisable whether someone encounters it in Mumbai or Munich, on Instagram or at a trade show. But the specific execution might need to be adapted for local cultural context, language, media format, or audience segment. The best brands achieve this by being very clear about what's fixed (the non-negotiables of the brand) and what's flexible (the elements that can be adapted). Without this clarity, localisation either becomes so rigid that it ignores local needs, or so loose that the brand fragments.

10. Align employer branding with the overall brand strategy

Too many organisations treat employer branding as a separate discipline with its own strategy, its own identity, and its own messaging — as if the people who might work for you exist in a different universe from the people who might buy from you. In reality, buyers and potential employees often overlap, and even when they don't, any perception gap between the employer brand and the customer brand creates confusion. A company that markets itself as cutting-edge and dynamic to customers but comes across as bureaucratic and risk-averse to potential recruits has a cohesion problem. The employer brand should be a natural extension of the overall brand strategy — the same story told from a different perspective.

11. Clarify what sits at brand level versus product/service level

This is particularly important for portfolio brands and companies with multiple product lines. Buyers need to understand the relationship between your master brand and its sub-brands or products. What does the parent brand promise? What does each product add to that promise? And how should communications reflect this hierarchy? Without clarity here, you end up either with a confusing proliferation of messages (every product telling its own unrelated story) or an oversimplified approach (the master brand trying to be all things to all people). Map out your brand architecture deliberately and ensure that communications at every level reinforce rather than contradict each other.

R — Relevance: Connect Your Brand to What People Actually Care About

A brand can be beautifully cohesive and still fail if it's not relevant — if it doesn't connect to the priorities of the people it's trying to reach. Relevance requires a deep understanding of your market, your audience, and the specific role your brand plays in their lives or businesses.

1. Connect your rebrand to C-suite priorities

A rebrand requires investment, and investment requires buy-in from the people who control budgets. The biggest mistake brand teams make is pitching a rebrand in marketing language — talking about brand equity, distinctiveness, and perceptions — to executives who think in terms of revenue growth, margin expansion, and competitive advantage. To secure the investment you need, you must frame the rebrand in terms of the business outcomes it will drive. Will it support premium pricing? Open new market segments? Improve talent acquisition? Reduce customer acquisition costs? The brand strategy needs to be articulated as a business strategy, with a clear link between brand investment and commercial outcomes that matter to the C-suite.

2. Know your growth remit

Not all growth is the same, and your brand strategy should be designed to drive the specific kind of growth your business needs. Are you trying to attract entirely new buyers who don't know you yet? Are you trying to increase the perceived value of your offering so you can raise prices? Are you stretching into adjacent categories? Or are you focused on deepening engagement and loyalty with existing customers? Each of these growth paths requires different brand strategies, different messaging, and different investments. A brand trying to attract new buyers needs to prioritise awareness and mental availability. A brand trying to raise perceived value needs to invest in premium signaling and category leadership. Be precise about what growth means for you, and let that precision guide every brand decision.

3. Understand the people you need to reach and what they care about

This sounds obvious, but most brands operate with a surprisingly shallow understanding of their audience. They know demographics and firmographics. They might know some surface-level needs. But they rarely understand the deeper motivations, anxieties, and contexts that drive buying decisions. What keeps your target buyer up at night? What does success look like for them personally, not just professionally? What are the social dynamics within their buying committee? What's their relationship with risk? The brands that win are the ones that understand their audience deeply enough to be genuinely useful and resonant — not just present.

4. Build associations that are meaningful to your audience

It's not enough to decide what your brand should be associated with — those associations need to matter to the people you're trying to reach. A B2B technology company might want to be associated with "innovation," but if its buyers primarily care about reliability and ease of implementation, that association won't drive preference. The art is in finding the intersection between what your brand can credibly own and what your audience genuinely values. This requires moving beyond internal workshops where teams decide what the brand should stand for, and actually validating those associations with real buyers and prospects.

5. Understand market and cultural shifts influencing your audience

Brands don't exist in a vacuum. The expectations, behaviours, and values of your buyers and employees are constantly evolving in response to broader market and cultural forces. Economic uncertainty changes how people make decisions. Technological shifts create new expectations for speed and convenience. Generational changes bring different values and communication preferences. Cultural movements reshape what people expect from the brands they engage with. A brand that was perfectly relevant five years ago might be completely out of step today — not because it did anything wrong, but because the world moved. Staying relevant requires ongoing monitoring of these shifts and a willingness to adapt your brand strategy in response.

6. Know why buyers come shopping and which triggers to focus on

People don't wake up and decide to buy from you randomly. There are specific triggers — situations, problems, events, or changes — that push them into buying mode. Understanding these Category Entry Points (to borrow from the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute's terminology) is critical. For a B2B branding agency, triggers might include a new round of funding, a merger or acquisition, a new CEO who wants to make their mark, a competitive threat, or entering a new market. Not all triggers are equally common or equally valuable. Know which ones drive the most volume and the most valuable opportunities, and ensure your brand is mentally available when those triggers fire.

7. Map and fix your buyer's journey funnel

Understanding the buyer's journey from initial awareness through to purchase intent — and knowing where that journey leaks — is essential for relevance. A brand might have high awareness but low understanding of what it actually offers. Or it might be well understood but not considered when it's time to buy. Each stage of the funnel requires different interventions. Awareness problems need reach and frequency. Understanding problems need clearer messaging. Consideration problems might indicate a positioning gap or a lack of proof points. Preference problems might suggest competitors are outperforming you on key criteria. Diagnose where the funnel leaks and focus your efforts there, rather than spreading your brand investment evenly across stages that don't all need the same level of attention.

8. Understand what drives — and blocks — recommendation

Recommendation is the ultimate test of brand strength. When buyers willingly recommend your brand to peers, it's the strongest signal that your brand is delivering real value and creating genuine affinity. But understanding recommendation requires understanding both sides: why people recommend you, and equally importantly, why they don't. The reasons for non-recommendation are often more actionable than the reasons for recommendation. Is it because of a specific product shortcoming? A service failure? A perception problem? A competitive alternative that's more compelling? Similarly, understanding what makes employees proud to work for you — or reluctant to recommend the company to friends — reveals the internal brand reality that external marketing can't paper over.

E — Ease: Remove Every Unnecessary Friction

The best brand in the world will fail if it's hard to find, hard to understand, hard to buy, or hard to use. Ease is about making every interaction with your brand as effortless as possible — not just the transactional moments, but the cognitive ones. Can people think of you when they need what you offer? Can they find you? Can they navigate your offering? Ease is the unsexy dimension of brand building that disproportionately drives results.

1. Associate your brand with the most important Category Entry Points

Category Entry Points are the situations, needs, or occasions that trigger people to think about your category. For a B2B design agency, these might include "we just raised a Series B and need to look credible," "our website isn't converting," or "we're entering a new market and need to reposition." Your brand needs to be mentally linked to these entry points so that when the trigger fires, your brand is one of the first that comes to mind. This requires understanding which entry points are most common and most valuable, and then consistently building associations between your brand and those specific situations through your marketing, content, and communications.

2. Make your brand easy to find

Mental availability (being thought of) must be matched by physical availability (being findable). When someone thinks of you or searches for what you offer, they need to be able to find you quickly. In B2B, this means showing up in the right places: search results, industry publications, recommendation networks, analyst reports, and buyer communities. It also means being findable in the ways modern buyers actually search — which increasingly includes AI-powered search engines and recommendation tools. If a potential buyer types your category into ChatGPT or Google and you don't appear, you have a findability problem regardless of how strong your brand awareness is.

3. Make your brand easy to navigate — for sales teams and buyers

Your brand architecture, product portfolio, and messaging should make it easy for people to understand what you offer and find the right solution for their need. This is as much an internal challenge as an external one. If your sales team can't easily explain the relationship between your different offerings, or if they struggle to match the right solution to a prospect's situation, you have a navigation problem. Externally, buyers should be able to quickly understand your offering from your website, your collateral, or a conversation — without needing a decoder ring. Complexity is the enemy of ease, and most brands are more complex than they need to be.

4. Make your brand easy to buy

The buying process itself should be as frictionless as possible. In B2B, this means looking at the entire procurement journey: how easy is it to get a proposal? How clear is your pricing? How painful is the contracting process? How many stakeholders need to be convinced, and are you giving them the tools to do internal selling? Every unnecessary step, unclear process, or missing piece of information in the buying journey is a point where potential buyers drop off. Map the buying process from the buyer's perspective, identify every friction point, and systematically eliminate them.

5. Make your brand easy to use

The post-purchase experience determines whether a buyer becomes a repeat customer and a recommender — or a detractor. Ease of use encompasses onboarding, day-to-day interaction, support, and the entire experience of being a customer. In a services context, this means the quality and clarity of your deliverables, the smoothness of your project management process, the responsiveness of your team, and how easy it is for clients to collaborate with you. Every moment of confusion, delay, or frustration erodes the brand you worked so hard to build. A brand that's easy to use doesn't just retain customers — it turns them into advocates who do your marketing for you.

6. Generate emotional response through long-term campaigns

Brand building works by creating and refreshing memory structures that make your brand come to mind in buying situations. The most effective way to do this is through campaigns that generate genuine emotional response — not just awareness, but feeling. This doesn't mean every ad needs to make people cry. Emotion in branding can come from humour, surprise, warmth, awe, or even the satisfaction of a beautifully articulated insight. What matters is that the emotional response is strong enough to be encoded in memory and associated with your brand. Purely rational, informational advertising is easily forgotten. Emotionally resonant work persists in memory and influences decisions long after the campaign runs.

7. Be easy to notice through Distinctive Brand Assets and creativity

In a world of infinite content and shrinking attention spans, being noticed is a prerequisite for everything else. Distinctive Brand Assets — the colours, shapes, logos, taglines, characters, sounds, and design elements that are uniquely associated with your brand — are the shortcut that allows people to identify and recall your brand instantly, even with peripheral attention. Invest in building a suite of these assets and use them consistently across every touchpoint. But distinctiveness alone isn't enough — you also need creativity. Work that's distinctive but dull will be ignored. Work that's creative but not distinctively branded will build awareness for your category, not your brand. You need both.

D — Difference: Give People a Reason to Choose You

In many categories, brands converge on the same messaging, the same visual language, and the same promises. Difference is what breaks through the sameness. It's not just about being unique for its own sake — it's about being meaningfully different in ways that create preference and command loyalty.

1. Understand competitors' brand strategies and what to avoid

You can't be different if you don't know what everyone else is doing. This means going beyond surface-level competitive analysis (their website looks like X, they use colour Y) to understanding their actual brand strategy — what they're trying to own in the minds of your shared audience, what Distinctive Brand Assets they've built, and where they're investing. The goal isn't to obsess over competitors, but to map the competitive landscape clearly enough to know which territories are crowded and which are open. If every competitor in your space positions around "innovation," that word is no longer a point of difference — it's table stakes. Look for the spaces competitors haven't claimed and build your brand there.

2. Ensure buyers and employees can articulate how you're different

The real test of differentiation isn't what your marketing materials say — it's what people say about you when you're not in the room. Can your buyers explain to a colleague what makes you different? Can your employees articulate it in a job interview? If the answer is no, your differentiation exists only in your own strategy documents. This means your difference needs to be simple enough to communicate, concrete enough to remember, and real enough to survive contact with actual experience. Vague differentiators like "we care more" or "we're more strategic" fail this test. Specific, demonstrable differences survive it.

3. Build a suite of Distinctive Brand Assets

Distinctive Brand Assets are the sensory elements that people associate with your brand — logos, colours, typefaces, sounds, patterns, characters, taglines, and more. The best brands don't rely on just one or two of these; they build a suite of assets that work together to make the brand instantly recognisable across contexts. Think about what elements someone would need to identify your brand even without seeing the logo. If the answer is "nothing," you haven't built strong enough Distinctive Brand Assets. This takes time and consistency — assets become distinctive through repeated association, not through a single campaign. Resist the temptation to refresh or change assets too frequently; every change resets the clock on building distinctiveness.

4. Know your relative strengths versus competition — and validate with buyers

Internal confidence about your competitive advantages is worth nothing if buyers don't agree. Most companies have an inflated or at least skewed view of their own strengths. The sales team believes the product is superior. The marketing team believes the brand is more trusted. But what do buyers actually think? Conduct honest competitive research that asks buyers to compare you against alternatives on the dimensions that matter to them. You might discover that the strength you've been leading with isn't actually perceived as a strength by the market. Or you might discover a genuine advantage you've been underselling. Either way, buyer-validated strengths are the only ones worth building your differentiation strategy around.

5. Challenge the status quo or lead the category

Brands that merely participate in their category are forgettable. Brands that challenge how the category works — or lead it in a new direction — become magnetic. This doesn't require being contrarian for its own sake. It means having a clear point of view about how your category should evolve and actively pushing it in that direction. It might mean challenging an industry assumption that everyone else takes for granted. It might mean pioneering a new way of delivering value. It might mean being vocal about a problem in your industry that others are afraid to address. Category challengers and leaders attract attention, earn media, and create the kind of energy that makes people want to be associated with the brand — as customers, employees, and partners.

6. Create an emotional association that belongs to your brand

The most powerful form of differentiation isn't rational — it's emotional. When buyers associate a specific feeling with your brand, that association becomes a competitive moat that's extraordinarily difficult for competitors to replicate. A competitor can match your features. They can undercut your price. They can mimic your messaging. But they can't easily replicate a genuine emotional connection. This emotion should be specific and ownable, not generic. "Trust" is too broad. "The confidence that comes from knowing your brand will make you look good to your board" is specific and actionable. Find the emotion that's both meaningful to your audience and authentic to your brand, and build every experience around reinforcing it.

Putting CRED Together

The real power of the CRED framework isn't in any single dimension — it's in the interplay between all four. A brand can score highly on Cohesion but poorly on Relevance, meaning it's consistently communicating a message nobody cares about. A brand can be highly Relevant but lack Ease, meaning buyers want it but can't figure out how to get it. A brand can be Different but not Cohesive, meaning its distinctiveness is undermined by inconsistent execution.

The honest assessment is that very few brands score green across all four dimensions. And that's fine — the point isn't perfection, it's clarity about where to focus. As the authors of Rebrand Right note, don't worry if you're looking at a lot of yellow and red. If you had green across the board, you wouldn't need a rebrand.

The CRED framework, from the book Rebrand Right, gives you a structured way to diagnose where your brand is strong, where it's weak, and where investment will have the greatest impact. Use it honestly, and it will tell you exactly where to focus.