After three decades of building brands for some of the world’s most recognisable businesses, here’s a few things we know about what makes a digital presence work.
Most brands in business today treat their digital presence as a mirror that reflects who they are, what they offer, and where they have been. The brands that grow consistently over time treat it as a window that shows where they are going, what they stand for, and why it should matter to the people they are trying to reach.
That distinction sounds simple. In thirty years of building brands for businesses of every size, in almost every sector, across every major shift in the digital landscape, we have watched it prove decisive again and again. The brands that get it right do not just look better, they perform better. They attract better clients, better talent, and better commercial outcomes. The ones that get it wrong, regardless of budget, regardless of intent, tend to produce digital presence that is busy, unclear, and ultimately forgettable.
So what separates them? Here’s what three decades of brand work has taught us.
Strategy comes before style
The most consistent mistake we see in new clients, in businesses that have been around for decades, and in brands that have spent significant money with ‘serious’ agencies, is starting a digital project with visual references rather than business questions.
What does the brand need to communicate? To whom? What should someone feel when they encounter it? What commercial outcomes does this work need to produce, and how will we know if it has? These questions should precede every conversation about colour palettes, typography, and layout. When they do not, the result is almost always a brand that looks nice but doesn’t truly resonate.
When we worked with the global team at McDonald’s, the brief was not about external marketing at all. It was about culture. McDonald’s wanted to build a new internal brand that would inspire curiosity across the organisation, giving employees a home for forward-facing content and a network through which to explore the future together.
We developed Curiosity Club: a full visual identity, a content platform, and an event programme that brought external experts inside the business to link future thinking to actionable insight today.
The strategic case for investing in this kind of internal brand work is well supported by the evidence: businesses that cultivate a culture of curiosity and learning are 17% more profitable than those that don’t, and 92% more likely to develop novel products and processes. The result was a programme that boosted employee engagement and increased responsible resourcing across a global workforce, proof that the commercial case for brand investment does not always show up in a sales figure.
Sometimes it shows up in the quality, alignment, and ambition of the people inside the business, which is, in the end, one of the most important commercial metrics of all.
We are not arguing against craft or aesthetics, both matter enormously and we take them both seriously. We are arguing that craft in the service of an unclear strategy produces expensive decoration. Craft in the service of a clear strategic brief produces results.
The landscape changes. Brand foundations do not.
Over thirty years, we have watched the digital landscape transform beyond recognition. We navigated the shift from print-led communication to early web presence. From desktop to mobile. From static brand sites to immersive experience platforms. From owned media to social channels. And now, the rise of AI-mediated discovery, where a brand’s digital presence is increasingly summarised, interpreted, and filtered by algorithms before it reaches a human eye.
Every one of these transitions has worked against brands that relied on the channel to do the work the brand was supposed to do. Businesses that had a clear identity, a distinctive voice, and a genuine point of difference navigated each shift with relative confidence. They adapted their expression without losing their essence. The ones that did not have those foundations had to start from scratch every time the landscape changed.
The practical implication is this: investing in brand fundamentals is not a one-time project. It is the infrastructure that makes every channel investment more durable and every market shift less costly to navigate. The businesses that have grown with us over decades are the ones that understood this early.
Digital is the medium. Brand is the message. Confusing the two is still, despite everything, the most common strategic error in the market.
Commercial accountability is not optional
For most of the time we have been in business, brand investment was treated as a marketing cost, and often that cost was regarded as a luxury. Boards approved budgets for it in the same spirit they approved budgets for office decoration: necessary, hard to quantify, vaguely important. It’s good to see in most sectors that has now changed, and the change has been good for everyone.
The most significant shift we have observed in the past decade is the brand moving from a line in the marketing budget to a conversation at the board level. Investors, acquirers, and growth-oriented leadership teams now want to understand what a brand is worth, how it is performing, and what the return looks like on the investment made in it. They want the same rigour from brand strategy that they expect from any other commercial decision.
That pressure has made us better at our work. It has forced our creatives to be more commercial and our strategists to deliver success.
When we began working with GPE, one of London’s leading real estate businesses, the brief was not ‘we need a new brand’. It was more specific and more demanding than that: GPE needed its brand to reflect its position as a market leader and to actively drive commercial performance. That clarity of purpose shaped everything. The resulting brand and digital presence contributed to 89% Rental Growth and a 76% customer retention rate in 2025. The numbers did not come from the design. They came from the strategic thinking that the design expressed.
If a brand partner cannot tell you what success looks like in commercial terms before the work begins, that is a problem worth solving before anything else.
The brands that endure are the ones that keep evolving
Perhaps the most counterintuitive lesson of all: the brands we have watched remain most consistent over time are the ones that have been most willing to change and build agility into their very DNA. Not their values, not their point of difference, not the essence of what makes them distinctive. But a willingness to be flexible with their expression, their channels, their understanding of their audience, and a willingness to question whether the way they are showing up in the world still reflects who they actually are.
There is a common trap in brand management that treats the brand as a fixed asset to be protected rather than a living thing to be tended. Businesses in this trap spend enormous time and energy defending guidelines, policing applications, and resisting adaptation. The result is a brand that feels increasingly dated and disconnected from the market it is trying to serve.
The businesses that get this right treat brand as a practice, not a project. They audit regularly. They listen carefully to how their audience is changing. They are willing to make considered, strategic adjustments when the evidence calls for it. And occasionally, when the market has moved far enough, or the business has grown into something genuinely different, they are willing to reinvent key business divisions or sometimes entirely.
That discipline is harder than it sounds and is never an easy sell from our side. It requires confidence in what you stand for and humility about how you express it, which, in our experience, is the single most reliable predictor of how brands outlast their competitors.
The question that still matters most
After everything we have seen, every shift in technology, every change in consumer behaviour, every new channel that was going to change everything and some that genuinely did, the question we ask every client remains the same.
Does your digital presence reflect who you are today, or who you intend to be?
It sounds straightforward. It rarely is. Brands that can answer it clearly, and that build everything else from that answer, are the ones that grow.
Consistently. Commercially. Over time. That is what thirty years has taught us. And we are still learning.
If you’re reviewing your brand’s digital presence and want a strategic perspective on where to focus, we’d be glad to talk.
Get in touch at hello@underscore.co.uk or uncover our world at underscore.co.uk.