Branding Challenges: How to Tell Which One You Actually Have

Something is wrong with your branding, and you know it. Leadership agrees but can’t agree on what. So the conversation keeps circling around the logo, the website or the tagline. Those are usually symptoms of the real problem, rather than the cause. 

In this article, you’ll learn about the branding challenges companies run into most, how to tell a branding problem from a pricing or a product problem and where each fix actually belongs.  

Key Takeaways: Branding Challenges 

• Most branding problems turn out be problems in what a company means to people, rather than a problem in what it sells or what it charges. 

• The symptom and the cause of branding problems are usually in different places. 

• What separates a design problem from a strategy problem is the level of internal agreement and external consistency. 

• A rebrand is warranted when the strategy itself is wrong or the company has genuinely become something else. It’s the wrong tool for inconsistency, for a messaging problem or for a product that isn’t delivering. 

• An outside branding partner is important because they have distance from the internal history, they can benchmark data across categories and they have no stake in which answer wins. 

What Counts as a Branding Challenge 

A branding challenge is a problem in what a company means to people, rather than a problem in what it sells or what it charges.  

Often, though, a branding challenge can be misunderstood as a demand problem, a product problem or a pricing problem. A company can have all four at once, which is part of why they’re hard to separate.  

What makes branding problems slippery is that the symptom shows up somewhat measurably, usually in sales or in win rates, but the cause sits upstream in what the company decided it stands for.  

The Branding Challenges Companies Run Into Most 

The same handful of branding problems arise across industries, and it’s helpful to match a symptom to its cause. 

The following outlines the branding challenges companies run into most often and how to diagnose them. 

Symptom you’d notice: Buyers describe you the same way they describe your competitors

What’s usually behind it: No differentiated positioning

Where the fix lives: Brand strategy

Symptom you’d notice: Every team’s materials look and sound different

What’s usually behind it: No shared brand system or governance

Where the fix lives: Brand enablement

Symptom you’d notice: Leadership can’t agree on what the brand stands for

What’s usually behind it: Unresolved strategy, not a design problem

Where the fix lives: Brand strategy

Symptom you’d notice: Awareness is climbing but pipeline isn’t

What’s usually behind it: The brand promise doesn’t match what buyers need

Where the fix lives: Positioning and messaging

Symptom you’d notice: The brand still describes a business you’ve outgrown

What’s usually behind it: Strategy hasn’t caught up with the portfolio

Where the fix lives: Brand architecture

The “where the fix lives” section is the most useful because two companies can share a symptom yet need completely different work. One may benefit most from brand strategy services, while another may need a design and systems solution. 

What’s Different About Branding Now 

Branding is different now because the fundamentals haven’t changed, but the conditions have.  

In the second edition of Aaker on Branding eleven years after the first, David Aaker argued that brands still have to resonate, differentiate, stay relevant and inspire loyalty, and that three challenges have intensified: hyper-dynamic strategic environments, hostile communication contexts (media clutter, information overload and audiences that have stopped trusting brand claims) and short-termism.  

And, writing in the MIT Sloan Management Review in January 2025, Marcus Collins argued that a brand’s meaning is created jointly with the people who use it rather than issued by the marketer – which is why a company can control every asset it owns yet still lose control of what it means. That explains why focusing on consistency alone doesn’t fix a positioning problem. 

How to Tell Whether You Have a Branding Problem 

A company can tell whether or not it has a branding problem by performing four checks, which will separate a branding problem from the things that look like one. 

• Check whether a price change makes it go away. If a discount closes the deals you were losing, the problem was price or perceived value against a specific competitor, not what the brand means. 

• Ask whether the product delivers what the brand promises. When customers arrive with the right expectations and leave disappointed, that’s a product problem wearing branding symptoms, and new messaging makes it worse. 

• Look at where the confusion sits. External confusion can come from a crowded category. When your own teams describe the company differently to each other, the strategy is unresolved, and no amount of design work will settle it. 

• Separate what you’re seeing from what buyers are saying. Internal opinion about the brand is the least reliable input available, and it’s the one most decisions get made on. Brands can close the distance through brand measurement, by tracking perception over time against a defined set of competitors.  

Why Branding Problems Are Hard to Diagnose From the Inside 

It’s difficult to diagnose branding problems from within an organization because the four checks above are harder to run on your own company than on someone else’s. Internal teams carry the context that makes the symptoms invisible, because they already know why every decision was made. They have no comparison set outside their own category. And most of them argued for one of the answers during the last planning cycle, which makes neutrality difficult.  

That’s why engaging an outside team is important: they have distance from the internal history, they can benchmark data across categories and they have no stake in which answer wins.  

Diagnose Branding Challenges Before You Redesign Anything 

The cost of skipping the diagnosis of branding challenges is a rebrand that solves a problem the company didn’t have, all while the original problem continues on. 

Brands turn to Material to diagnose branding challenges because our team of branding experts understand how to get a clear picture of what the real problem is – and how to activate the right solution to set the brand back on track. 

Want to learn why Material is the right external partner to solve your branding challenges? Start the conversation today.