As a Brand Strategist, I have a bit of a love-hate relationship with the word strategy. Mostly hate. It’s overused, overcomplicated, and often stripped of all real meaning. At its core, strategy is simple: clarity in the face of complexity. And that’s exactly what branding should be too.

But somewhere along the way, we lost the plot.

Branding became a race to sound clever. We piled on Ps; Purpose, Promise, Proposition, Personality, Positioning, Philosophy, like we were trying to win a spelling bee. Every strategist started showing up with pyramids, onions, houses, locks and keys, turning Branding into theatre for the boardroom than tools for the real world.

And while clarity is critical for consumer brands, it’s absolutely vital in B2B. When your brand has to speak to distributors, dealers, internal teams, investors, and everyone in between, confusion isn’t just inefficient, it’s expensive. If your own people need a decoder ring to understand your brand, what hope do your customers have?

Explain it like I’m five 

One question I often ask clients during immersion sessions is: If you had to explain your business to a five-year-old, in one sentence, what would you say? That’s also how I like to look at Brand Assets. For example: Your Essence is your core. Your Vision is where you’re headed. Your Mission is what you’re doing to get there. And your Values? That’s how you behave along the way. Simple. Or at least, it should be.

Instead, we started writing these long, intellectual-sounding lines that exist mostly to fill space on the About Us page. 

And on the other end of the spectrum, they become our rose-coloured glasses; all-encompassing, vague enough to mean everything and nothing at once. I remember asking a client once: You’ve got 15 seconds with a potential customer, what does your brand stand for?
Silence. Then: “Our values.”
Which ones?
“All of them.”
How would a customer experience that?
“They just do. It’s how we act. How we work. How we communicate.”

This wasn’t just one person. I spoke to multiple team members, some new, some there for decades. But the answer remained the same. “Our values” or “We’re very values-led.”

That was the moment it clicked. They weren’t avoiding the question. They genuinely believed they had answered it.

It’s a really fine line. My point is, every asset is meant to guide the brand, not be something to hide behind. So keep it simple. Keep it clear. Know what it means to you. Know what it means to your stakeholders. That’s when it actually works. 

Once you clarify, now differentiate and resonate 

Once there’s clarity, the next step isn’t to be clever. It’s to be relevant. Differentiate in a way that actually matters, not just for the sake of standing out. You don’t need to be “cutting-edge,” “never-seen-before,” or “born on Mars.” You just need to be more relevant to your audience than the next brand. 

Let’s say you’re an end-to-end electrical products manufacturer. You might be tempted to say you’re a “one-stop shop.” But is that really your edge? What’s stopping competitors from adding the same products next quarter?

Maybe the real value you’re offering isn’t range, it’s convenience. That’s the actual problem you’re solving. And once that’s clear, the next question is: who needs to hear this? Are you speaking to architects and interior designers? Or is your real audience electricians and plumbers, the people actually making the day-to-day calls?

Because once you resonate with the right stakeholder, the rest becomes optional. And if your ‘brand personality matrix’ doesn’t help someone write better copy, or sell better to them, it belongs in the bin.

Find your purpose 

Every strategist will have a bone to pick if I bring up Positioning, Proposition, Purpose, or the latest, Purpose-led Positioning. So I won’t.

I’ll just ask: why do you do what you do? What’s the functional benefit of your brand, and what’s the emotional one? If you can answer that, you’re already halfway there.

Live the brand; your internal clarity is external strategy 

In B2B, your brand doesn’t just live on your website or in your sales pitch. It shows up in how your teams work, the decisions you make, and the experience you create, internally and externally.

We often treat branding like it’s just for the market: for customers, partners, investors. But the real pressure test? Your own people. If your team isn’t clear on what the brand stands for, how it guides their work, or why it even matters, then all the external messaging in the world won’t hold up.

Because in B2B, your team is the brand. Every conversation, every presentation, every follow-up email, it’s all part of the brand experience. And if what’s written on paper doesn’t translate into how people work, lead, and collaborate, then what’s the point? A solid brand should inform how you hire, how you prioritise, and how you behave, not just how you look.

If it only lives in the brand book, it’s not doing enough.

Final thought? Kill your darlings

A lot of what us strategists put in brand decks is more for us, than the client. We love a good framework. It shows we’ve “done the work” and fills the silence in a long meeting.

But clients don’t need 150-slide decks. They need one clear page that helps them speak with confidence, align their teams, and make better decisions. So if a brand strategy is buried under jargon, complexity, and linguistic acrobatics, we’re not helping. 

And for the B2B brand custodians; want a quick test? Ask five people in your company what the brand stands for. If you get five different versions of “our values,” you’ve still got work to do.

So strip away the jargon. Ditch the frameworks that look pretty but don’t do anything. Your brand doesn’t need to be clever, it needs to be clear. Internally and externally. For the five-year-old and the boardroom.

Originally Published : https://adtechtoday.com/purpose-positioning-promise-proposition-yada-yada-yada-why-b2b-brands-need-less-jargon-and-more-clarity/