BRAND TO BUSINESS
There was a time when ‘brand’ felt like the right frame for our work.
Brand sat close enough to leadership to influence how a business was defined and close enough to marketing to shape how that definition carried into the world. For many organizations, brand became the place where questions of meaning, relevance and differentiation were addressed.
For Cohesion, brand work was never limited to messaging or communication. From the beginning, brand direction and development were used as strategic tools to help leaders clarify what the business was, where it was headed and what should guide decisions over time.
Brand thinking was used to inform priorities, tradeoffs and long-term direction. It became a way to help establish continuity across narratives, materials and decisions.
Work that consistently operated at the intersection of brand and business.
But over time, the limits of brand as a complete category label became harder to ignore.
Some see brand only as business decoration: logos, identity, written and visual expression. Some as the packaged idea of a customer solution.
To us, it has always been much more. A deeper platform for articulating, guiding and stewarding relevance.
For years, we’ve helped leaders not simply define positioning, but navigate complexity. Our work has been used to clarify what matters most, establish context for decision-making and maintain continuity as responsibility spread across teams, systems and partners.
But brand alone was not designed to govern how directional intent is carried across an entire business as it operates and evolves.
As the world around business has grown more complex, day-to-day work increasingly moves through systems built to execute quickly and independently. Decisions translate into processes. Assumptions embed into platforms.
Direction is now shaped not solely by what leaders express, but by what systems, and the people using those systems, are left to interpret.
Traditional brand work remains essential to our approach and our work. But today, the principles of brand hold the opportunity to extend beyond perceived boundaries, to help properly guide how direction is interpreted and reinforced at scale.
And so, Cohesion’s work has moved upstream.
From guiding brand direction on vertical efforts, to deeper work that helps leadership ensure business-wide direction remains clear, actionable and effective as the organization operates and evolves.
It’s a broad, emerging discipline we call Business Direction.