When does a brand need to change, and when does it need the conviction to keep building on what already works?
Chris Outlaw is joined by Christy Madden, Strategy Director at Ragged Edge, to explore how brands create lasting value through a clear idea, meaningful difference and consistent execution. Drawing on work with Wise, Monzo and Granola,
Christy explains how to recognise existing brand equity, make strategy simple enough for an entire organisation to use, and resist change driven by novelty alone.
In this episode, they discuss:
- How to decide what to preserve during a rebrand
- Why a brand idea needs time to build recognition
- How Granola found a distinctive position in a crowded AI category
- Why brand strategy should guide product, messaging and marketing decisions
- How to stand out even when your business has no unique product feature
For founders and marketing leaders weighing up a rebrand, this conversation offers a practical question to start with: what is already working, and what idea are you prepared to commit to?
Explore Ragged Edge’s work: raggededge.com
A strong brand strategy should make your business easier to understand, not harder. It should give you a clear idea to own, a meaningful point of difference and a simple reference point that people across the organisation can use to make better decisions.
If your strategy takes 50 slides to explain, there is a reasonable chance the thinking isn’t finished.
That was one of the strongest ideas to emerge from my conversation with Christy Madden, Strategy Director at Ragged Edge, on the Unified Brand Podcast.
Christy has worked across brand and communications strategy, from Ogilvy earlier in her career to Ragged Edge today, where she’s been involved with brands including Wise, Monzo and Granola. Her view of strategy is refreshingly straightforward:
“Strategy for me is just fundamentally, it’s about a brand owning an idea.”
Simple to say. Considerably harder to achieve.
As businesses grow, complexity accumulates. More products, services and markets appear, while more people, customer segments, campaigns and stakeholders bring different opinions about what the brand should become.
The temptation is to respond to that complexity with an equally complicated brand strategy. I think the opposite is usually required.
The complicated work has to happen. But the outcome of that work should create greater clarity.
Christy puts it particularly well:
“The value, the role of a brand strategist is to navigate that and come back with some simplicity.”
For growing businesses, that distinction matters enormously. Your business can be complicated, but your brand shouldn’t be confusing.
What makes a good brand strategy?
A good brand strategy creates clarity about what your brand stands for, why it matters, and how it should behave. It should be distinctive enough to separate you from competitors, but simple enough for people across the organisation to use.
That last part often gets overlooked.
I’ve seen strategies that are intellectually impressive but practically useless. They contain models, diagrams, purpose statements, pillars, propositions, values, and pages of supporting explanation.
But ask someone six months later what the central idea is, and you get silence. Or worse, five people give you five different answers.
That isn’t clarity.
At Elements, we believe a brand shouldn’t simply exist as a marketing asset. It should operate across the business, helping to shape communication, culture, customer experience, and decision-making.
That’s what we mean by a Unified Brand.
For that to happen, people need to understand it. They also need to know how to use it in their everyday decisions.
Christy made an important observation during our conversation:
“Complexity of brand strategy is a hiding place.”
I think there’s something uncomfortable but useful in that idea.
Complexity can sometimes create the appearance of rigour without forcing the difficult decisions that strategy actually requires. A strategy can look impressive on paper while still leaving people unsure about what really matters.
So, what do we stand for? What are we going to own? What aren’t we going to be? Why should somebody remember us instead of everyone else?
These questions force choices.
And choices are where strategy starts becoming useful.
Can you define your brand strategy in one word?
Christy and the team at Ragged Edge have been exploring an intentionally difficult exercise: reducing the central idea of a brand to a single word.
As she explained:
“We do include now, like what is the brand in a word? It gives you nowhere to hide.”
One word isn’t supposed to replace an entire brand strategy. There will still be positioning, audience understanding, messaging, behaviours, identity, and everything else required to build and manage a brand.
Instead, the exercise creates the discipline needed to decide what matters most.
As Christy says:
“Strategy is sacrifice.”
That’s the part that matters.
If your brand is innovative, trusted, human, progressive, premium, accessible, expert, disruptive, and friendly all at once, you haven’t necessarily created a strategy. Instead, you’ve created a list of things it would be nice to be.
Strategy requires prioritisation. It means deciding what matters most and what your brand should be known for.
Christy described the ambition as an “economy of language as a response to a lot of smart thinking”. That’s very different from making something simplistic.
Simplicity is not the absence of strategic thinking. Good simplicity is the result of doing enough strategic thinking to know what matters most.
For a growing organisation, that simplicity also makes the strategy easier to understand and apply. Everyone should be able to grasp the central idea, regardless of their role or level of seniority.
Christy made this point in practical terms: if an idea can’t move easily from the CMO to the CFO to a junior designer, how can we expect an organisation to align around it?
That’s an important test.
Could your leadership team explain your brand strategy without opening the strategy deck? Could your sales team explain it? What about a new employee or the people developing your next product?
If the answer is no, the problem may not be that your employees haven’t paid enough attention.
The strategy itself may simply not be clear enough.
Why should brands reject novelty and embrace commitment?
Finding the idea is only the beginning. Once you have it, you then have to resist the urge to keep changing it.
Christy describes this as the need to:
“Reject novelty and embrace commitment and embrace longevity.”
Her reasoning is straightforward: brand value compounds. Once you establish a distinctive idea, repeated expression helps strengthen the mental associations around your brand. Constantly abandoning that idea in pursuit of something new interrupts that process.
As Christy explained:
“We need to choose an idea and respect it.”
I think this is particularly relevant in businesses where change happens quickly. A new CEO arrives, a new CMO joins, the marketing team changes, a competitor launches something interesting, or a new visual trend appears. Then AI transforms another part of the category, and suddenly there is pressure to make the brand feel “fresh” again.
Sometimes change is absolutely necessary. Brands are living systems, so they have to evolve as businesses and markets evolve. However, evolution and novelty aren’t the same thing.
The question shouldn’t simply be:
What could we change?
Instead, it should be:
What has earned equity, what remains strategically relevant, and what genuinely needs to evolve?
Christy offered perhaps the simplest reminder of all:
“We might be bored, they are not.”
The people working with a brand every day see it hundreds of times more frequently than the average customer does. As a result, internal boredom can be a terrible reason to discard external recognition.
This connects closely with one of the principles behind our own Unified Brand Framework: consistency compounds.
The long-term value of a brand isn’t created through one launch, campaign, or identity project. Instead, it is built through repeated, aligned actions over time. When a strong idea remains consistent, each expression reinforces what came before it.
That doesn’t mean a brand should never change. It means change should have a strategic reason behind it, rather than simply being driven by the desire for something new.
If you’re currently questioning the strategic direction of your brand, our Strategic Shifts guide explores some of the wider changes affecting how ambitious organisations need to think about brand and growth.
How do you evolve a brand without throwing away its equity?
One of the most useful parts of my conversation with Christy concerned brands that already have valuable associations.
Because differentiation doesn’t necessarily mean throwing everything away and starting again.
Sometimes the most powerful move is to identify what’s already distinctive and turn up the volume.
Wise: finding differentiation in what already existed
Christy discussed Ragged Edge’s work with Wise.
The financial category contained a familiar convention: blue.
Trust matters in finance, so businesses gravitate towards the visual cues they believe communicate trust. The result can be a category where everyone starts looking increasingly similar.
But Wise already had assets with potential equity, including its flag symbol and a green card.
The opportunity wasn’t simply to invent a completely unrelated identity.
It was to recognise what could become more distinctive.
As Christy explained:
“Blue is the macro trend. Let’s react against that.”
Green subsequently became a much stronger part of Wise’s brand expression.
The wider lesson is important.
Differentiation doesn’t always require invention. Sometimes it requires recognising the distinctive assets you already have and committing to them more confidently.
Monzo: make it more Monzo
Christy described a similar principle in relation to Monzo.
The hot coral card had already created recognition, but over time the wider identity had become diluted.
The strategic response was wonderfully simple:
“Our whole ethos for that project was just make it more Monzo.”
Lean into coral.
Don’t run away from the thing people already associate with you.
There is a tendency in brand work to assume progress has to mean replacing the past.
Sometimes progress means becoming more confidently yourself.
Does your brand need to be better or different?
This question becomes even more important as functional advantages become easier for competitors to replicate.
It’s particularly obvious in technology.
A business launches a feature.
A competitor develops something similar.
Another integrates AI and goes further.
The advantage narrows.
Christy summarised the role brand can play with a line I think more leadership teams should hear:
“Your brand is not here to make you better, it’s here to make you different.”
That doesn’t mean product quality doesn’t matter. Of course it does.
It means functional superiority alone isn’t always a sustainable position.
In many categories, businesses offer comparable products, hire from the same talent pools, use similar technologies and make remarkably similar claims.
“Better service.”
“More innovative.”
“Customer-focused.”
“Trusted.”
“Leading.”
Take your logo off the website and put your competitor’s logo in its place.
Would the message still work?
If it would, you have a differentiation problem.
How do you find brand differentiation in a crowded market?
Businesses often believe differentiation has to begin with a unique product feature.
It doesn’t.
Christy talked about looking at a market in layers.
First, there are the things everybody has to do simply to compete.
Then there may be genuine differences in the way particular businesses operate.
And occasionally there is a genuine, screaming USP that nobody else can claim.
The problem is that the third category is relatively rare.
Most businesses don’t have a completely unique functional advantage.
And that’s OK.
The strategic opportunity is to understand the conventions of the category and decide where your brand has permission to challenge them.
At Ragged Edge, Christy described this through the phrase:
“Conflict, not convention.”
Rather than asking how to look slightly better than competitors, ask:
What does everybody in this category appear to believe?
Then:
What do we believe instead?
That shift can open far more interesting strategic territory.
Granola: what happens when a brand commits to one idea?
One of my favourite examples from our conversation was Granola, the AI notepad.
The category opportunity is interesting because AI productivity products can easily fall into a familiar language.
Efficiency.
Optimisation.
Productivity.
Do more.
Save time.
Granola could have competed on exactly the same territory.
Instead, the Ragged Edge team looked at the conventions surrounding the category and the character of the business itself.
As Christy explained:
“The value of Granola is not the notes that it’s creating for you, it’s what you get to keep doing.”
The idea they arrived at was presence.
Granola takes care of the notes so the person in the meeting can stay involved in the meeting.
That one idea subsequently influenced the identity, with a hand-drawn logo, typography based on the founder’s handwriting and crafted illustrations deliberately moving away from a sanitised corporate software aesthetic.
Then came an advertising line:
“Presence is a power move.”
Five words.
But behind those five words sits a much bigger piece of strategic thinking.
That’s what simplicity can look like when it works.
It also demonstrates why commitment matters.
When you’ve discovered an idea with that kind of potential, the temptation can be to find a new message for the next campaign and another one for the campaign after that.
Instead, Granola continued to build around presence.
As Christy put it when discussing repeated executions:
“We might be bored of it… but people are not bored of it.”
That is how an idea begins to compound.
Not by finding something new every few months, but by finding something strong enough to keep exploring.
How can brand strategy improve decisions beyond marketing?
This is where brand strategy becomes far more interesting to me.
A powerful brand idea shouldn’t only tell the creative team what an advert should look like.
It should help the organisation make decisions.
Christy talked about working with an insurer where the brand strategy began to be used as a metric against proposed product launches.
In other words, teams could ask whether a new product decision supported the central idea the business had committed to.
Suddenly brand wasn’t something sitting inside a PDF.
It became a filter.
Christy explained the benefit of the one-word idea:
“An engineer or a product developer has no excuse but to understand what that word is.”
This connects directly with how we think about a Unified Brand at Elements.
A Unified Brand is one where every part of the business moves in the same direction.
When brand is clear enough, it can help leadership, marketing, sales, product, customer experience and culture make more aligned decisions.
Rather than restricting people, that clarity can create greater autonomy.
People don’t need permission for every decision because they understand the strategic centreline they’re working from.
That’s when brand starts becoming an operating system rather than a marketing exercise.
If you’re unsure how effectively your current brand is creating that kind of alignment, the Brand Power Assessment can help you identify where your strongest foundations — and biggest gaps — currently sit.
How do you simplify your brand strategy?
If your existing strategy feels complicated, don’t start by deleting slides.
Start by finding the truth underneath them.
At Elements, our Unified Brand Framework™ moves through three stages:
1. Clarify
Get clear about who you are, who you serve, where you’re going and why you matter.
This is where you have to confront difficult questions rather than paper over them with generic language.
What do you genuinely believe?
Where is the business going?
What does your audience actually value?
What equity already exists?
Where are you meaningfully different?
And what are you prepared to sacrifice?
2. Unify
Once you’ve found the strategic idea, align the organisation around it.
Does leadership understand it?
Can employees articulate it?
Does your customer experience reinforce it?
Does your visual and verbal identity express it?
Can sales use it?
Can product teams make decisions against it?
This is where strategy stops being a presentation and starts becoming useful.
3. Amplify
Only then should you amplify the brand consistently through marketing, communication, campaigns and experiences.
Amplifying a confused idea simply creates louder confusion.
But when the business has clarity and alignment, amplification allows those associations to build over time.
Clarify. Unify. Amplify.
The sequence matters.
Simplicity isn’t the shortcut. It’s the work.
Towards the end of my conversation with Christy, I suggested that perhaps the problem with some complicated strategies is that the strategist has simply stopped too soon.
They’ve done the research, found the insights, and built the slides. However, they haven’t taken the final step of working out what it all means.
Christy’s response captured the central argument of our conversation:
“If you can’t say it in a word, chances are you haven’t quite finished thinking.”
I wouldn’t interpret that as a literal rule that every organisation must immediately reduce its entire brand to one word. Instead, I would treat it as a challenge: how simple can you make the strategic centre of your brand without losing what makes it meaningful?
Businesses will continue to become more complicated. There will be new products, new technology, new people, new markets, and new opportunities.
Your brand can either add another layer of complexity to that environment, or it can provide something everyone can return to: a centreline, a compass, and an idea worth owning.
Once you’ve found that idea, however, the next challenge may not be changing it. It may be having the conviction to commit to it long enough for it to become yours.
Frequently asked questions about simplifying brand strategy
What is a simple brand strategy?
A simple brand strategy reduces complex research and business thinking into a clear strategic direction people can understand, remember and use. Simple doesn’t mean superficial. The simplicity should be the result of rigorous thinking and deliberate choices about what the brand will — and won’t — stand for.
Why is simplicity important in brand strategy?
Simplicity makes a brand strategy easier to transfer across an organisation. Leadership, marketing, sales, product and customer-facing teams are more likely to make aligned decisions when the central strategic idea is clear and memorable.
Can a brand strategy really be one word?
A complete brand strategy contains more than one word. However, trying to define the central brand idea in a single word or short phrase is a useful strategic exercise because it forces prioritisation. As Christy Madden argues, “Strategy is sacrifice.”
How can a business differentiate its brand?
Start by understanding category conventions rather than immediately searching for a unique feature. Identify what competitors consistently say, look like and prioritise, then determine where your business has a credible opportunity to behave or communicate differently. Existing brand equity can also provide the foundation for differentiation.
How often should you change your brand strategy?
A brand strategy shouldn’t change simply because the people working with it have become bored. It should evolve when meaningful changes in the business, audience, market or strategic direction make that evolution necessary. Strong ideas create greater value when organisations commit to them consistently over time.
Build a brand your whole business can use
If your brand strategy has become increasingly complicated, fragmented or difficult for the wider organisation to understand, the answer may not be another layer of messaging.
You may need greater clarity.
At Elements, we use the Unified Brand Framework™ to help ambitious businesses Clarify, Unify and Amplify their brands — turning brand from something marketing manages into a strategic system the whole organisation can use.
Explore the Strategic Shifts guide to understand the changes shaping modern brand building, or take the Brand Power Assessment to see where your brand currently stands.
And if you’ve reached the point where the complexity inside your organisation is getting in the way of clarity outside it, book a Discovery Call with Elements. We’ll help you understand what’s really happening, what needs to change and how to build a more unified brand around the potential already inside your business.
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