There’s a comforting myth in branding that if people like your brand, everything else will take care of itself. Likes, follows, compliments on the logo, a warm reaction to the colour palette. It feels like progress. It feels validating. It feels safe. And in commercial terms, it often means absolutely nothing.

Because brands don’t grow by being liked. They grow by being chosen.

Chosen over competitors. Chosen under pressure. Chosen when budgets are tight, options are plentiful and nobody has time to admire your tone of voice. In those moments, the question isn’t “do I like this brand?” It’s “do I trust it, do I understand it, and does it feel right for me, right now?”

This is where a lot of branding quietly fails. Not because it’s badly executed, but because it’s solving the wrong problem. Too much brand work is optimised for approval instead of decision-making. It aims to offend no one, reassure everyone, and smooth off anything that might cause friction. The result is something that looks professional, sounds reasonable, and disappears the moment it’s placed next to a competitor doing exactly the same thing.

When we talk about branding as a commercial tool, what we’re really talking about is clarity. Clarity of offer. Clarity of audience. Clarity of position. The brands that perform best are rarely the most liked. They are the most understood. They know who they’re for, who they’re not for, and why choosing them makes sense.

That kind of clarity requires decisions. And decisions always create discomfort.

You can see this play out most clearly in rebrands. The brief often starts with aesthetics. The brand wants to feel fresher, more modern, more confident, more premium. These are understandable ambitions, but they’re not strategies. Without a clear commercial intent, they become surface-level aspirations that lead to safe, familiar outcomes. A new logo that doesn’t upset anyone. A website that looks like it belongs to the category. Messaging that could be lifted and dropped onto half a dozen competitors without anyone noticing.

What’s missing is intent. What should this brand do differently as a result of this work? What decision should it influence? What hesitation should it remove? What confidence should it give the buyer?

Real branding work doesn’t start with taste. It starts with tension. It asks where the business is struggling to be chosen and why. It looks at pricing conversations, stalled sales cycles, confused enquiries, misaligned perceptions. It gets uncomfortable with the gap between how the brand sees itself and how it’s actually experienced.

This is also why the question of return on investment makes so many branding agencies uneasy. Not because brand doesn’t deliver ROI, but because measuring it forces you to confront whether the work was actually doing its job. It’s far easier to talk about aesthetics, engagement and sentiment than it is to talk about pipeline quality, conversion confidence or sales velocity.

But branding that isn’t linked to commercial reality is just decoration.

The strongest brands understand that being chosen often means being less popular in the short term. It means saying no more often. Narrowing the audience. Sharpening the language. Taking a stance that might alienate some people while deeply resonating with others. That isn’t recklessness. It’s discipline.

This is especially important in crowded markets, where differentiation is more about conviction than novelty. You don’t need to invent a new category. You need to occupy a clear one. The brands that win aren’t louder or more colourful. They’re more certain. They reduce the mental load on the buyer. They make the decision feel obvious.

There’s also a psychological comfort in being liked that’s hard to let go of. Approval feels like progress because it’s immediate. You can see it in the feedback, the comments, the compliments. But commercial impact is slower and less visible. It shows up in better conversations, not louder ones. In clients who arrive already aligned. In fewer objections. In confidence around pricing. In the sense that the brand is pulling its weight instead of needing to be explained.

If your brand is working, you shouldn’t have to apologise for it. You shouldn’t have to over-explain it. You shouldn’t have to convince people that it’s right. It should do that work for you.

This is where bravery in branding actually lives. Not in bold colours or provocative headlines, but in the willingness to make clear choices and stand behind them. To accept that not everyone will like what you do, and that this is not only acceptable but necessary.

Being liked is passive. Being chosen is active.

If your brand is currently optimised for approval, it will always struggle to convert interest into commitment. But if it’s built around clarity, confidence and intent, it earns its place in the decision-making process. And that’s where brands stop being decorative and start being valuable.

If your brand looks good but isn’t helping you win work, it isn’t finished.At Bravedog, we build brands that earn their place in the decision-making process – grounded in research, strategy and commercial reality.Start with a conversation →