Branding practice · Brand studio
Ground your brand, establish your authority.
Positioning, visual identity, brand platform. We build a clear and credible brand, the kind that earns trust before you have said a word.
The challenge
Your brand speaks before you do.
Nobody buys from a company they do not understand. Long before the first meeting, your brand has already spoken for you. A vague positioning, a dated identity, a scattered message: doubt sets in, and the sale turns into a fight.
A clear brand works upstream. It qualifies, it reassures, it gives weight to your value. It moves your company out of the pile of possible suppliers and into the position of a reference.
Authority cannot be declared. It is built, piece by piece. That is precisely the work of the Branding practice.
Our approach
From strategy to activation.
Four steps that build on each other, from strategic perspective through to the tools that keep the brand alive day to day.
- 01
Immersion and positioning
We dig into your model, your market, your clients. Then we set out what genuinely sets you apart, and what holds up against the competition.
- 02
Brand platform
Mission, values, promise, tone of voice. The foundation that gets all your communication pulling in the same direction.
- 03
Visual identity
Logo, colours, typography, graphic system. An identity people recognise, that works everywhere, and that was designed for B2B.
- 04
Guidelines and activation
We equip your teams: guidelines, layouts, ready-to-use templates. The brand holds over time, with or without us.
What we do
The brand studio, in full.
Complementary areas of expertise, brought in according to your stakes. No fixed package: we define the right scope at the diagnostic stage.
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Positioning
Brand strategy, differentiation, competitive ground. What makes you distinctive, and why your clients should care.
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Brand platform
Mission, vision, values, promise. The frame that sets a direction and stops every message drifting off on its own.
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Visual identity
Logo, palette, typography, graphic system. A signature that is recognised at a glance.
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Guidelines and design system
Usage rules, layouts, components. Everything you need to roll the brand out anywhere without ever betraying it.
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Naming and verbal territory
Name, strapline, tone of voice, messaging. Words carry the brand as much as images do.
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Brand redesign
Audit of what exists, repositioning, modernisation. We move the brand forward without throwing away what you have already built.
Case study
Giving a brand to a B2B SaaS.
For a B2B SaaS company, we built the brand end to end: positioning in a highly technical market, brand platform, visual identity, guidelines. A clear and credible image that acts as the foundation for everything else, website and acquisition included.
- Positioning and brand platform
- Visual identity and logo
- Guidelines and design system
- 38 €
- cost per qualified lead
- 4.8 %
- conversion rate on the landing pages
What you can check
Five questions whose answer is in a public text.
On brand, the numbers the trade quotes most often come from vendor surveys, and several of them are contradicted by the international standard on brand evaluation or by the peer reviewed research. Here are five points you can check yourself.
Does presenting a brand consistently increase revenue by 23 per cent?
Nothing audited supports that number, and it circulates in two versions that cannot both be right. It comes from the State of Brand Consistency reports published by Lucidpress, now Marq, a self reported survey of marketers rather than a study of audited accounts, and it appears as 23 per cent in the 2016 edition and 33 per cent in the 2019 one. A claim that moves ten points between editions is not a measurement. What holds is the mechanism rather than the percentage: repeating the same signs over years is what builds recognition, and an identity changed too often destroys the memory it was meant to create. So consistency has real value, and it is not the value the slide claims. We do not quote that figure, and when a brand statistic is put to us we read the study behind it before we build an argument on it. We set it out in full in our piece on the hidden cost of multiple agencies.
If a trademark search comes back clean, is the name safe to use?
Not necessarily, because the legal test is not spelling. In the United States, the USPTO states that the most common reason for refusing registration is likelihood of confusion, and that marks need not be identical to be confusingly similar: they may be similar in sound, in appearance or in meaning, or create a similar commercial impression. A search on exact spellings detects none of those three. The other half of the test is relatedness of goods or services, which is why identical marks coexist across unrelated categories, the office citing the same word registered separately for soap and for ice cream bars. Owning the matching domain adds nothing, since the examination manual holds that a term used only as the address at which a website is found does not function as a mark. We settle the name and its clearance before any drawing is commissioned, and we name the jurisdiction each check was run in. Our guide to checking a name you can keep goes through the tests.
Is a simpler logo a better logo?
The peer reviewed evidence does not support that rule, and in places contradicts it. A 2016 article in the Journal of Marketing Communications, two experiments with 68 and then 164 participants, concluded that more exposure produced more positive attitudes in particular for complex logos, which implies short term benefits for simple marks and long term benefits for complex ones. A 2014 article in Psychology and Marketing, 505 participants rating 140 unfamiliar logos, found a double crossover: visual complexity helps on first sight and hurts with repetition, conceptual complexity does the reverse. On redesign, a 2010 field experiment with 632 respondents published in the Journal of Product and Brand Management found the penalty falls on the most committed customers rather than on strangers, and no peer reviewed study linking a logo change to sales has been located. We therefore treat simplicity as one option carrying a cost, never as the brief itself. The studies are set out in what the research shows on logo design.
Does a strong brand score mean buyers will choose you?
No, and the standard that governs those scores says so in its own text. ISO 20671-2:2023, the international standard on brand evaluation, states that brand strength should not necessarily imply the extent to which consumers will choose the brand in the marketplace, that consumers can be motivated favourably toward a brand and still select another product on other considerations, and that price and availability will typically affect choices. A note in the same standard adds that a strong brand can have a weak impact in a category where other purchase factors matter more. That is the body whose profession is quantifying brands, warning that the score it governs is not a purchase forecast. So a tracker reading is evidence about memory, not a pipeline number, and we say at the outset which brand indicators will be read as proof of anything and which will not. We examine the standard in does B2B branding drive revenue.
How long before brand work produces a measurable effect?
Nobody has measured it, and the six month figure everyone repeats is not what it is taken to be. It comes from a 2013 report by Les Binet and Peter Field for the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising, and it says that long term advertising effects on sales uplifts only start to dominate short term effects after six months. That is a crossover between two aggregated curves, not a latency: nothing becomes visible at month six that was invisible at month five. The cases behind it are entries to a paid awards competition, with the size of each effect graded by the entrants themselves. The one randomised body of evidence is harsher, 55 split cable experiments summarised in Marketing Science in 1995, where a weight increase producing no significant effect in year one produced none in years two and three either. We agree at the start what will be read at six months, and what will not, as we explain in how long brand building takes.
Frequently asked questions
What company leaders ask us.
In B2B, your brand speaks before you do. A clear brand reassures and qualifies from the very first contact, it sets your price level and it makes the sales job simpler. When it is vague, the opposite happens: every deal turns into an arm wrestle.
It depends on what we cover. A full repositioning, with brand platform, identity and guidelines, takes more than a visual refresh. We set the timeline at the diagnostic stage, based on your stakes and your deadline.
No. We always start by looking at what you have. If your brand equity is solid, we move it forward instead of starting from a blank page. What we are after is your authority, not change for the sake of change.
Through perceived consistency, recognition, clarity of message, and ultimately conversion. A good brand shows up as a shorter sales cycle and better qualified prospects from the very first contact.
All three. Branding is a practice in its own right, but it gives its best when it feeds a website that converts and acquisition that stays aligned. That is the whole point of the MAstratos single point of contact: from the brand to the click, one team.
It is the strategic foundation of your brand. The brand platform defines your positioning, your promise, your values and your territory of expression, before any visual translation. It is built ahead of the graphic guidelines: the logo, the colours and the typography come afterwards to dress that foundation. Without it, the visual identity moves without direction and every message risks heading off on its own.
Yes, indirectly. A brand that is known and recognised improves the perceived relevance of your ads and their click-through rate: people respond better to a name that is familiar to them. That better reception can bring the cost of your campaigns down, though not halve it as is sometimes claimed. Branding does not replace acquisition, it improves its yield.
Where to go next
Understand branding before you commit.
We publish sourced analysis on B2B brand and its real effect, without repeating the unverified promises that circulate. Enough to decide with your eyes open.
- The B2B brand platform, explained The groundwork that settles positioning, promise and messaging, before anyone opens a drawing tool.
- Guidelines, visual identity, platform: the real difference Three layers people use interchangeably, put back in order, so you can name the one you are actually missing.
- Does branding lower acquisition cost? Yes, but indirectly, and the figures most often quoted to prove it are the ones worth dropping.
- What brand storytelling can and cannot do The most repeated number in the field, traced until the chain breaks, and what storytelling still earns its place for.
- What you own when you pay for a brand book Why commissioning a logo does not transfer the copyright, and what to require in writing before you accept delivery.
- Measuring brand perception without fooling yourself What a brand survey has to disclose to mean anything, and what a company of ordinary size can honestly claim.
The logical next step
A strong brand deserves a relay.
A strong brand gives its full effect when a website that converts and acquisition that feeds it take over. Explore the other practices.
Ready to establish your authority?
A diagnostic, an outside view, a brand trajectory to map out. Let’s talk about where you want to take your company.