A brand is often treated as a creative endeavour. Yet your brand is actually nothing more than the perception of your customers, built by how you company behaves at every single touchpoint.
Dave Heywood explains why your brand is whatever your customer says it is – where operational reality will always eat your marketing strategy for breakfast.
The lesson to learn from myHermes > Evri
When delivery giant MyHermes rebranded to Evri, they changed the logo on the vans, the jackets, and the website. Yet, the underlying operational model, which prioritised speed and rock-bottom costs over care and attention to detail remained identical.
You can’t rebrand your way out of operational bottlenecks. If your website promises agility, but your team takes a week to answer a simple query, that experience becomes a key component of your brand.
Trust: Hard to build, easy to lose
It takes months of pristine execution to build, and exactly one back-office screw-up to lose. And if those customer in-market don’t buy from you today, they might not for another two years.
Your future pipeline relies entirely on the memory structures you build in the audiences minds right now. It isn’t always about being liked; it’s about building a predictable, knowable track record.
How Hubspot built a strong track record as they scaled
Early HubSpot didn’t win the marketing automation space because their software was the best. They won because they built an operation designed to deliver immense value to people who weren’t even customers yet, and might not be for years.
Instead of hiding their insights behind paywalls, HubSpot built the infrastructure to prove their value for free. Tools like their Website Grader analysed SEO, speed, and security in seconds for millions of non-paying users.
Because their backend systems were engineered to handle this volume seamlessly, they built massive, pre-sales brand equity. By the time those marketers had budgets to spend, HubSpot was the only logical operating system to buy.
What’s your real brand story?
To find out what your brand actually is, step away from your marketing decks and spent some time getting under the skin of some high-value areas:
Key handover points: Does the client feel a sudden drop-off in care and urgency the second the contract is signed and they are passed from sales to implementation?
Friction points: Does your accounts receivable process treat long-term clients like adversaries?
Exit points: How difficult do you make it for a client to leave? A friction-filled offboarding process will turn a routine departure into a vocal critic who warns their peers away from you for years.
If the machinery of your operational model doesn’t align with the promise of your marketing, your brand is a house of cards. And the market always finds out.
Full episode transcript
Dave Heywood (00:00)
What is a brand? It’s whatever your customer thinks it is. This is Scale, an OX7 Partners podcast, and I’m Dave Heywood
If your customer thinks your business is an absolute nightmare to deal with, then congratulations. That’s your brand. It doesn’t matter what your top line messaging says, how much you’ve paid your creative agency for
your brand uplift, that’s what a customer’s left with.
A lot of firms ultimately hit a plateau. They might look at declining or stagnant market share, little growth compared to peers, and make the initial assumption that it’s a strategic messaging problem.
And that’s not always the case. It’s really easy to throw a large amount of money at workshops and rebrands. But if your underlying operating model is still fundamentally flawed or broken,
The underlying brand message will still always surface back to the top.
And there’s an example here, particularly in the UK, that a lot of us are familiar with. And it’s the whole rebrand of delivery firm My Hermes to Everi no MyHermes were pretty well known for shoddy service, drop kicking parcels over doors, and just being an all round pain to deal with.
They spent vast sums of money changing the logos and the vans and the jackets and the websites and messaging and new and shiny. but because the underlying operations still relied on a framework which ultimately prioritised speed and low cost over care of packages and delivery, nothing changed.
It’s a really good example of where you can change the logo, you can change the visual brand, but if the couriers are still behaving in the same way,
then the brand message you thought you got rid of will definitely live on. In the B2B world, it’s exactly the same.
when websites promise agility and expertise, but actually it takes six weeks to deal with an inquiry and that’s still riddled with errors.
That is what you become famous for.
I had a conversation once where Brand was described as the sum of a thousand small gestures. I I really liked that.
But how but how do these gestures actually function and compound?
In B2B, trust is really, really hard to build.
It can take months of careful relationship management, execution and delivery to to build.
and only one screw up to jeopardize all of that
And if you’re working in an area where your customer might not be back in market for two, maybe three years and you lose them, that’s really the danger zone here.
And so Your future growth really relies
on that mental picture that someone builds of your business in their head right now. And it isn’t about being liked. It’s about building a really predictable, knowable track record.
Think about every single touch point as a gear or a cock. So if your marketing tells the story that you’re a premium partner, but your accounts team chase any late payments or documentations like
aggressive loan sharks then there’s a real dichotomy there. Ultimately the market doesn’t really care about your mission statement. It cares about how you actually deliver service. Do you do what you say you will? Are you a safe bet?
And
your marketing approach and your operational reality need to be working hand in hand.
and if we wanna see what good looks like when a firm aligns its operations to build that really strong brand equity
The early years of HubSpot provide a great example of this. So back when they were scaling, they didn’t win in the market just because their software was pretty good and easy to use.
They also spun up an operation to deliver huge value to people who weren’t who weren’t anywhere near being customers yet.
They tapped into this whole idea that a lot of marketers were really starving for practical, actionable advice that they could take into meetings or conversations and feel really smart and informed. So instead of hiding a lot of their insights behind
behind paywalls or ⁓ or form fills, they built a whole operational machine that essentially produced and gave away these quite world class blueprints, grading tools, blogs completely free.
So what we ended up with was thousands of marketers using HubSpot’s free resources daily, not even paying a penny, but building that really, really strong reputation for utility.
And when those same marketers grew into senior roles, were handling budgets and needed to purchase software, who do you think they turned to?
And then having a really, really clear, quite slick onboarding process, tools that just worked and delivered value, both sides of the equation worked hand in hand together to reinforce this view of HubSpot being built for marketers by marketers.
So we get to this place where brand becomes everyone’s responsibility to a certain point.
So how do you then get a read on what’s really affecting your brand perception?
Dave Heywood (05:23)
There’s few key transition moments which we can look at which have the most impact on overall brand perception. There’s loads more as you go through the customer journey, but here’s a few picks from me. So number one, and perhaps one of the most obvious ones, is looking at that sales to delivery handover. What’s promised during the sales process and what’s actually delivered? Is your customer getting what they expected?
Or do they feel that drop in care and service the moment they’ve signed on the dotted line?
A second area perhaps to look at is the whole accounts receivable process. How does that work? When do we chase for late invoices? What kind of language do we use? Is there anything within that which really threatens to undermine or potentially damage long term relationships which have been built up?
And finally, how easy is it for someone to actually leave?
It’s perfectly possible for a customer or client to have an incredibly positive experience, come to the point where they’re ready to move on for whatever reason. And it’s just made really, really difficult to do so. And and leaves a sour taste in the mouth.
Dave Heywood (06:55)
I think what it really boils down to is a lot of the stuff that can make or break that overall picture of a brand in someone’s head, a lot of it’s quite boring, unglamorous, not very sexy. Yet it’s the stuff that really makes the difference.
if your operations don’t match the promise of your marketing, the whole thing is a house of cards. and your customers always find out.
Hope you found that useful, I’m Dave Haywood and this is Scale ,an OX7 Partners podcast. See you next time.
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