3 key warning signs brand mismanagement is costing you money.

Your brand is many things. Logos, images, words, colours, and ideas. It's the way people think and feel about your organisation, and the mental space you occupy in their mind.

At a higher level, your brand is a promise to your customers. Every single touchpoint—from social posts to after-sales support—is an opportunity to reiterate, or equally, undermine, what you stand for, the value you provide, and why someone would choose to engage with you.

This is where consistency is key. Consistency breeds trust, and trust is increasingly decisive in commercial outcomes.

Edelman's 2025 Brand Trust Barometer report reveals that the importance of trust has skyrocketed in the minds of customers. Today, 88% of people say trust is as important as price and quality when it comes to purchasing decisions.

But how does brand intersect with trust and customer experience?

Imagine:

• A homewares brand that markets itself as sustainable and eco-conscious ships your product in multiple layers of bubble-wrap, plastic, and Styrofoam packaging. They even include a pamphlet in the packaging about a commitment to reducing waste.
• You buy a new car from a premium, luxury manufacturer, who promises a concierge-style customer support program. After purchase, you receive a series of poorly formatted emails addressed to the wrong person, with spelling mistakes.
• A non-profit organisation with a huge groundswell of community support and high levels of social media engagement has a clunky website that makes it difficult to donate, and doesn't thank or celebrate the supporters who do.

Each of these scenarios represents a broken promise. Or series of broken promises.

Something feels 'off', because marketing materials and customer touchpoints are off brand, and your customers' trust in your brand gradually erodes. Unsurprisingly, each of these scenarios also comes with a cost.

Accumulatively, brand mismanagement can cost you significantly, at multiple levels in your organisation: as opportunity cost through lost prospects, as wastage through inefficiencies in asset production, and more.

These are the key warning signs that brand mismanagement is costing you money.

1. Operational inefficiencies: you're stuck in constant cycles of review and rework.

When everyone's singing from a different song sheet, things get noisy. Sales teams are creating their own brochures and presentations from scratch; often when something similar already exists. Specialised marketers or creative staff are held up approving documentation that already exists in another format, preventing the team from focusing on higher value work.

Things are inefficient and ineffective, because brand conventions are unclear, difficult to find or implement, and time-consuming to check for QA.

What does this look like in practice?

• A high proportion of creative work and marketing materials being revised or re-made to meet brand standards.
• Multiple teams commissioning similar assets from scratch or going rogue and creating their own collateral—presentations, reports, proposals, brochures, and more.
• Ongoing delays at approval stages due to questions about brand application, redesign requirements, or approval bottlenecks.
• Frequent requests for ad-hoc materials, advice on brand guidelines, or the location of brand assets.

What is the impact?

• Extra labour hours for re-work or unnecessary generation of marketing materials (whether by an agency or in-house team members), multiplied by hour or day rates provides an insight into clear, quantifiable waste.
• Longer approval cycles mean delays in the production of assets, which delays revenue recognition for various initiatives.
• Duplication across teams and divisions inflates unnecessary production cost per brand asset.

Where's the proof it's an issue?

• Marq's (formerly Lucidpress) report on the State of Brand Consistency (which draws on a survey of over 400 organisations) highlights that inconsistent branding and poor brand management adds 18-20% to marketing costs.

2. Media inefficiencies: you pay more than competitors for the same (or lower) awareness and exposure.

A strong, consistent brand is easy to recognise and remember. Conversely, if the way your brand looks and feels is constantly unintentionally shifting, it can be harder for your customers and supporters to recognise, recall, and meaningfully connect with your organisation when they need to.

Of course, brands will naturally evolve, grow, and change. But if you don't have a cohesive approach—with foundational guidelines for, and consistent application of, personality, quality, and distinctive visuals assets—you're making your customers, and your media spend, work much harder than is necessary.

What does this look like in practice?

• Your brand recall and recognition scores are below your category peers, competitors, or comparators.
• Your return on investment for marketing is falling, while your cost per acquisition is growing.

What is the impact?

• Inconsistent or undistinctive assets reduce 'brand salience' (defined by the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for Marketing Science as 'the propensity of the brand to be noticed or come to mind in buying situations'). Lowered brand salience means customers are less likely to think of you when considering a purchase.
• A higher ongoing media spend to achieve the same reach and recognition.

Where's the proof it's an issue?

• The Ehrenberg-Bass Institute of Marketing Science reports that consistent, distinctive brand assets increase ad recognition up to 30% at equal spend.
• Les Binet, Group Head of Effectiveness at adamandeveDDB and a leading researcher on marketing effectiveness, reports that 'strong brands' make activation campaigns up to 2x more efficient.
• According to this Marq/Lucidpress research, brand consistency correlates with a 2.4x average growth rate. The correlation strengthens during economic downturn when brand trust becomes more critical.

3. Revenue leakage: you are losing customers and prospects you could—or should—convert.

Every organisation is different: with different acquisition strategies, conversion metrics, and key milestones throughout the customer experience. That said, losing revenue, whether committed or prospective, is a universal warning sign that something's not right.

It's easy to see business development as the sole remit of Sales (or an equivalent team or department), but in reality, a confusing, inconsistent, or poorly implemented brand will cost you customers.

What does this look like in practice?

The specifics will vary between organisations, but could include:

• A downturn in your corporate or major gifts and grants pipeline. Brand trust and clarity affect success rates with institutional funders and partners, with trust barometers consistently highlighting the importance of trust dynamics for NGOs.
• Increase in customer churn.
• Low repeat purchase rate.
• Signifiers of high intent with low conversion: for example, strong performance at middle-of-funnel indicators (like high website traffic, with high add-to-cart or demo-request rates), but low checkouts, form submissions, or demo acceptances. People are connecting with your offer, but friction, confusion, or lack of trust prevents them from taking the next step.

What is the impact?

Again, this is likely to depend on the nature of your organisation.

• Fewer customers (or reduced donation value) mean reduced revenue.
• Reduced lifetime value per customer.
• For non-profits, it could also extend to fewer volunteers, meaning increased reliance on an already stretched workforce.

What is the evidence?

• Studies from Kantar and Bain & Co report brand consistency and clarity correlate with higher likelihood of repeat purchase, growth and price premium.
• This research report from Envive AI outlines that companies with brand presentation consistency see 23 – 33% revenue increases.

Brand is many different things… and poor implementation can be costly in just as many ways.

While brand mismanagement can manifest in many ways, CFOs and CMOs will be most concerned with the three key types of compound leakage that occur throughout your business.

To recap, the most critical and harmful impacts of a mismanaged brand are:

1. Wasted OPEX: signified by duplication, rework, longer cycles in getting brand assets into market and delays in bringing revenue to fruition.
2. Reduced revenue efficiency in promotion and lowered brand salience: signified by lower conversion rates, falling return on investment in marketing and business development, growing cost per acquisition, poor brand recall or awareness, and dropping trust.
3. Weaker future cashflow prospects and lost customers: signified by reduced revenue from new business, reduced lifetime value of customer, and low rates of repeat purchase.

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