In marketing and communicating your brand, digital and social are the norm. But how can you land your message and be heard, when so many other brands are shouting in the same place? How can you do something truly different – and credible? And how can you connect with those you’re really trying to reach?
Here are 6 principles we discussed at our recent event:
Being bold and brave in advertising and marketing grabs attention.
In 1997 French Connection launched its FCUK campaign to appeal to a younger audience. Stores changed their signage to FCUK and T-shirts with Hot as FCUK were the highest selling garments. Despite the Advertising Standards Authority receiving many complaints, the campaign increased sales from £156million to £241 million between 2000 and 2003.
B2B brands are inherently more conservative and risk averse, but there are other ways to stand out. Being bold and brave with a strong point of view helps cut-through. McKinsey keep top of mind with opinions that constantly challenge accepted thinking. From back in the 1970s when management guru Tom Peters was criticising the over-reliance on strategy and planning, to more recently being one of the first management consultancies to go against the grain and claim that automation will affect the knowledge economy as much as the manual labour force.
We applied this similar approach when helping management consultancy Baringa with their Economics of Kindness campaign. By exploring the value of kindness in business through bold and different perspectives we created a debate with C-suite leaders that helped raise brand awareness.
Brands and marketing that have a clear and simple message tend to cut-through.
Retail banking is fiercely competitive with digital brands challenging the established high-street names, albeit with a similar product. However, technology and regulatory changes have made finance overwhelming for many, which, according to the Financial Conduct Authority is driving some consumers to “avoid making decisions, delay planning, or ignore support, which can exacerbate debt”.
Monzo’s brand is built on this insight with a promise to empower customers to take control of their financial lives by making the traditional, opaque banking experience more transparent, clearer and simpler. Clarity and simplicity permeate everything from how they behave and write, to their approach to marketing communications, through to their book of money that gives simple tips and tricks on how to be a better saver and have more financial confidence.
Taking a complex subject and explaining it clearly and simply was how we helped Man Group market its Target Risk Fund. It’s a highly technical product and difficult to explain. By stripping it back to its essence of we see risk where others may not and telling a clear visual story, we created the cut-through they hoped for.
GE is an enormous, complicated company operating in many different sectors. They are connected by a belief to solve the impossible.
This is the idea behind their Unimpossible Missions campaign they ran back in 2017 that cut-through successfully by telling relevant and interesting stories to all their stakeholders.
Taking known idioms such as ‘you can’t un-ring a bell’ or ‘it’s like catching lightning in a bottle’ they attempted to dispel these using their scientists and engineers. They created a series of stunning films and teamed up with educational video presenter Adam Savage who explained more about the science they used, amplifying reach to his 7 million YouTube subscribers.
GE created a University Edition where students were offered the chance to try and dispel an idiom of their choice and in return win a scholarship or an internship at GE.
Good storytelling is about how you share your content. And that doesn’t need to cost the earth. It’s about finding the right message and sharing it in the right way that reaches your audience effectively. And that’s what we did with The Royal Society of Chemistry with their Join In campaign.
If we look at Revolut, there’s a much stronger tone to their messaging including ‘Get it done… we stopped listening to excuses a long time ago’ and ‘Never settle… for those who want to become the best… for those that would never settle for less’.
It’s about defining the tone that’s right for you and weaving it through both your brand and employer brand. Again, so it’s cohesive and credible.
In B2B, difference alone isn’t enough. It’s all about finding that sweet spot between standing out and still being credible. The brands that cut through aren’t just different for the sake of it. They’re distinctive in a way that feels authentic, and that’s much harder to achieve.
Look at First Direct. Launched in 1989, its typographic, black-and-white identity and straight-talking tone of voice were a radical departure from traditional banking. Nearly 40 years later their brand has hardly changed, and it still stands out. Their ethos of “Banking in black and white” still resonates today, as it remains core to their principles.
The same challenge plays out in the world of graduate recruitment, where many are verbally and visually similar. When we worked with global law firm HSF Kramer, we built their early careers campaign around combining the different attributes that define life and a career in the firm. The result was successful because they stood out in an authentic way.
In summary, you need to combine difference with credibility in B2B. Ensure you buck sector conventions while remaining authentic to who you are.
In a world where the average person encounters thousands of brand messages every day but registers fewer than 100, consistency isn’t just a creative principle — it’s a commercial one. The brands that cut through aren’t necessarily the loudest. They’re the most recognisable.
In the world of B2C, brands must be consistent to cut through the noise. Amazon’s rebrand simplified a fragmented brand architecture and united all their brands with a consistent but flexible toolkit. Kellogg’s logotype has barely changed in a century, allowing them to run distinctive campaigns even without their full logo. Heinz launched “Beanz meanz Heinz” in 1967, and today “It has to be Heinz” carries the same unmistakable conviction. Consistency becomes something priceless: instant recognition.
And this isn’t just for heritage brands. Freshfields’ recent rebrand — using bold typography, a distinctive colour palette and flexible graphic device — proves that even a new identity can feel memorable, provided it’s applied with discipline.
The lesson? Even if you’re growing tired of your brand, your audience isn’t — they’re only just starting to notice it. Consistency takes time to become memorable, but ensure you have enough flexibility to stand the test of time.
With B2B brands and marketing, the hunt for new channels or media formats is largely a distraction. Research consistently shows that the most familiar channels still deliver the strongest results. The opportunity isn’t in finding something new. It’s about using the channels you already have with more creativity.
Aldi proves the point. As COVID drove shoppers back to the big four supermarkets, they responded not by abandoning social media, but by reinventing how they used it. They became masters of the timely, culturally savvy post — for example, turning M&S’s legal action over a caterpillar cake into the “Free Cuthbert” campaign that reached 103 million people. Total impressions grew from 2.6 million in 2019 to almost 2 billion across three years, demonstrating that innovation can be effective.
Specsavers takes a similar approach. A single, enduring strapline — deployed across blurred billboards, environmental stunts, and perfectly timed social replies — has made their brand both unmistakable and endlessly surprising. Their “Welcome to Melbourne” stunt at Sydney Airport was disruptive, memorable and entirely on-brand.
The lesson for B2B marketers is clear: don’t chase silver bullets. Innovate within the channels your audiences already use. It’s rarely what you do — it’s the way that you do it.
Digital and social have proliferated communications, making it harder for brands to cut through noise and reach their audience. B2C brands are often more transactional and therefore market themselves to drive sales using different tactics that capture our attention. B2B brands build relationship, with marketing communications being more a conversation. B2B brands are also inherently more conservative and risk averse, so are less likely to employ some of the risker attention grabbing tactics of B2C brands. However, that doesn’t mean these B2B brands can’t, and shouldn’t, use the underlying principles to be successful in their communication and cut-through. After all, good communication, however formed, is one where the audience takes note.
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We created a new name, brand and employer brand to realise the firm’s independence and ability to move ‘As the world moves’.
In terms of creativity, B2C gets all the attention and yet B2B is making waves too.
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