Inkbot Design
type: channel
description: Strategic Branding Agency
date: 2026-05-17T16:41:28Z
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update frequency: 1
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items: Financial Services Branding: 7 Examples of Great Brands
items: Brand Resilience: The Professional Services B2B Guide
items: How to Pick Stunning Colour Palettes for B2B Branding
items: Employee Advocacy: What It Is and Does It Really Work?
items: Sales Enablement Branding for Professional Services Firms

Financial Services Branding: 7 Examples of Great Brands
type: item
creator: Stuart Crawford
date: 2026-05-17T16:40:02Z
subject: Specialist Branding
description: Most financial services firms treat their brand as a compliance exercise. The ones that don't - Monzo, Vanguard, Wise, Rothschild, Starling - demonstrate exactly what happens when brand strategy is built around commercial outcomes rather than category convention. This piece examines seven examples and identifies the principles behind each. The post Financial Services Branding: 7 Examples of Great Brands is by Stuart Crawford and appeared first on Inkbot Design. 💡 Need Design Help? Transform your brand with professional design services from Inkbot Design. Get Started Today 📬 Stay in the Loop Get weekly design tips, case studies, and industry insights delivered to your inbox. Subscribe Free Share this article: 🐦 Twitter 💼 LinkedIn 📘 Facebook
encoded: Financial Services Branding: 7 Examples of Great Brands Most financial services firms don't have a branding problem. They have a brand courage problem. The relentless pursuit of “safe” – navy blue, conservative serif typefaces, handshake iconography, vague language about “partnering with clients to achieve their goals” – produces brands so similar to competitors that the only remaining differentiator is price. Price competition in professional financial services is slow-burning commercial suicide. The evidence is uncomfortable. Research from Brandspeak found that 37% of consumers place a provider's reputation above product features and price when selecting a financial services firm. Reputation is built on perception. Perception starts with brand. If your brand cannot be distinguished from three competitors within thirty seconds, you have already lost a share of every new business conversation before a word is spoken. This is not an argument for gimmicks. It is an argument for intentional brand identity design -the kind that builds commercial credibility rather than simply mimics the category. The seven firms examined here each solved a different version of that problem. Their approaches are instructive precisely because they are not interchangeable. What Is Financial Services Branding? Financial services branding is the strategic use of visual identity, messaging, and market positioning to build client trust, support premium fee positioning, and differentiate a firm in a sector where most competitors are near identical. <img fetchpriority="high" decoding="async" width="1024" height="630" src="https://inkbotdesign.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/bank-advertising-example-lloyds-1024x630.webp" alt="Bank Branding Bank Advertising Example Lloyds" class="wp-image-300691" srcset="https://inkbotdesign.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/bank-advertising-example-lloyds-1024x630.webp 1024w, https://inkbotdesign.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/bank-advertising-example-lloyds-300x185.…

Brand Resilience: The Professional Services B2B Guide
type: item
creator: Stuart Crawford
date: 2026-05-14T12:13:58Z
subject: Brand Strategy
description: Brand resilience is not about surviving crises. It is the commercial infrastructure that determines whether a professional services firm commands fee premiums, retains clients through downturns, and wins mandates before competitors are invited. Firms that treat this as a proactive discipline consistently outperform those that treat it as a recovery strategy. The post Brand Resilience: The Professional Services B2B Guide is by Stuart Crawford and appeared first on Inkbot Design. 💡 Need Design Help? Transform your brand with professional design services from Inkbot Design. Get Started Today 📬 Stay in the Loop Get weekly design tips, case studies, and industry insights delivered to your inbox. Subscribe Free Share this article: 🐦 Twitter 💼 LinkedIn 📘 Facebook
encoded: Brand Resilience: The Professional Services B2B Guide Brand resilience isn't a crisis management tool. It's the commercial infrastructure that determines whether your professional services firm wins mandates before a prospect ever picks up the phone. Most managing partners only start thinking about it when the pipeline dries up – which is precisely the wrong moment. By then, the damage is structural. A fragile brand doesn't fail dramatically; it bleeds slowly. A competitor enters your territory. A key partner leaves and takes their relationships with them. A prospect spends 30 minutes on digital due diligence and crosses you off the list without explanation. These aren't random events – they're the predictable consequences of neglecting brand resilience as a commercial discipline. The stakes are not abstract. Recent consumer research shows that 81% of global buyers require trust before they will consider a purchase. Separately, 2025 research found that affluent consumers are 6× more likely to remain loyal to trusted brands under economic pressure, tolerating up to a 7% price premium before switching. In a sector where fee pressure is constant and differentiation is genuinely difficult, that loyalty premium isn't a soft outcome. It's a revenue line. Everything here centres on how a brand is built, structured, and maintained as a commercial asset – precisely what The Brand Equity System™ was designed to address. Not a cosmetic exercise. A commercial one. What Is Brand Resilience? Brand resilience is the capacity of a business to maintain client trust, commercial performance, and market position through economic shocks, competitive pressure, and internal change. <img decoding="async" width="1024" height="768" src="https://inkbotdesign.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/pepsi-coke-brand-association.jpg" alt="Brand Association Pepsi Coke Brand Association" class="wp-image-253623" srcset="https://inkbotdesign.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/pepsi-coke-brand-association.jpg 102…

How to Pick Stunning Colour Palettes for B2B Branding
type: item
creator: Stuart Crawford
date: 2026-05-13T20:54:29Z
subject: Brand Identity & Design
description: Most professional services firms pick a colour palette that feels safe and looks identical to every competitor in their sector. The result is a brand that prospects simply can't recall, distinguish, or recommend. This guide covers how to select, test, and deploy stunning colour palettes that do measurable commercial work. The post How to Pick Stunning Colour Palettes for B2B Branding is by Stuart Crawford and appeared first on Inkbot Design. 💡 Need Design Help? Transform your brand with professional design services from Inkbot Design. Get Started Today 📬 Stay in the Loop Get weekly design tips, case studies, and industry insights delivered to your inbox. Subscribe Free Share this article: 🐦 Twitter 💼 LinkedIn 📘 Facebook
encoded: How to Pick Stunning Colour Palettes for B2B Branding The biggest colour mistake professional services firms make isn't choosing the wrong shade – it's choosing the same shade as every competitor and calling it a strategy. A palette that looks safe is usually the most commercially dangerous choice you can make. Walk down any professional services high street – digital or physical – and count the blues. Navy here, slate there, cobalt on the homepage of a firm that paid a designer £15,000 for brand differentiation. Consistent brand presentation, anchored by colour, can boost revenue by 23%. But that figure assumes your colours are actually doing something distinctive. When you're indistinguishable from three direct competitors before a prospect has read your headline, colour isn't building your brand. It's burying it. Understanding how colour functions in B2B identity starts with the logo design process – where palette decisions sit within the wider system of marks, typography, and spatial logic that together determine whether a brand communicates authority or disappears into the background. Colour is not a standalone decision. It's the most visible component of a system. Up to 90% of snap judgements about a product or service within the first 90 seconds are based on colour alone. That means a prospect who visits your website, opens your pitch deck, or spots your business card has already formed an opinion before they've registered your firm's name. Whether that opinion is “credible, distinctive, worth reading” or “looks like every other firm” depends almost entirely on your palette. What Are Colour Palettes? A colour palette for B2B branding is a defined set of colours – typically three to five – chosen for their strategic effect within a specific competitive category, not their aesthetic appeal in isolation. <img decoding="async" width="1024" height="553" src="https://inkbotdesign.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/Northbrook-Brand-Colour-Palette-1024x553.png" alt="Nort…

Employee Advocacy: What It Is and Does It Really Work?
type: item
creator: Stuart Crawford
date: 2026-05-12T14:14:48Z
subject: Specialist Branding
description: Employee advocacy is the practice of employees sharing branded content through personal networks. When the underlying brand has genuine authority, it multiplies reach and credibility at a fraction of the cost of paid media. When it doesn't, it scales the wrong message to a bigger audience. The difference is strategic. The post Employee Advocacy: What It Is and Does It Really Work? is by Stuart Crawford and appeared first on Inkbot Design. 💡 Need Design Help? Transform your brand with professional design services from Inkbot Design. Get Started Today 📬 Stay in the Loop Get weekly design tips, case studies, and industry insights delivered to your inbox. Subscribe Free Share this article: 🐦 Twitter 💼 LinkedIn 📘 Facebook
encoded: Employee Advocacy: What It Is and Does It Really Work? Employee advocacy programmes don't build brands – they amplify what already exists. Which means if your firm's positioning is weak, your messaging is generic, and your partners can't articulate why clients should choose you over the firm two floors down, rolling out a sharing programme doesn't fix any of that. It just broadcasts the problem to a larger audience. That is the piece most guides in this space skip entirely. They treat employee advocacy as a standalone tactic when, in practice, it is an amplification layer. The firms that get results from it have done the harder work first: they have a coherent brand identity, clear messaging, and a strong internal branding that makes employees actually believe in what they're being asked to share. For UK professional services firms – law firms, accountants, consultants, financial advisers – this distinction matters more than almost anywhere else. Your people are your product. How they show up publicly is indistinguishable from your brand. The commercial cost of ignoring this is measurable. According to Sociabble, companies with active, well-run advocacy programmes see 20% higher revenue growth and 400% higher social selling success rates compared to firms without them. The gap between doing this well and doing it badly is not marginal. What Is Employee Advocacy? Employee advocacy is the practice of employees sharing company-related content, perspectives, or endorsements through their own personal networks and channels on behalf of their employer. <img decoding="async" width="1024" height="572" src="https://inkbotdesign.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/what-is-employee-advocacy-starbucks-example-1024x572.webp" alt="What Is Employee Advocacy Starbucks Example - Brand Strategy" class="wp-image-337628" srcset="https://inkbotdesign.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/what-is-employee-advocacy-starbucks-example-1024x572.webp 1024w, https://inkbotdesign.com/wp-content/uploads/202…

Sales Enablement Branding for Professional Services Firms
type: item
creator: Stuart Crawford
date: 2026-05-11T17:13:54Z
subject: Specialist Branding
description: Sales enablement branding aligns your firm's visual identity, messaging, and sales tools so every prospect interaction reinforces the brand you've built. Most professional services firms treat sales and branding as separate functions. That separation costs them deals. This guide identifies exactly where the gap opens and how to permanently close it. The post Sales Enablement Branding for Professional Services Firms is by Stuart Crawford and appeared first on Inkbot Design. 💡 Need Design Help? Transform your brand with professional design services from Inkbot Design. Get Started Today 📬 Stay in the Loop Get weekly design tips, case studies, and industry insights delivered to your inbox. Subscribe Free Share this article: 🐦 Twitter 💼 LinkedIn 📘 Facebook
encoded: Sales Enablement Branding for Professional Services Firms Sales enablement branding is not a marketing problem your creative team will fix with better templates. It is a commercial failure point where years of brand investment – your positioning, your reputation, your premium pricing – gets quietly dismantled by the people who are supposed to be monetising it. Every professional services firm loses this fight in the same way. The firm builds a credible, differentiated brand identity design. Marketing produces polished collateral. Then a partner sends an unbranded proposal from a personal Word template. A sales director uses a three-year-old pitch deck with the wrong logo. A junior associate emails a prospect in a tone that doesn't align with the firm's documented brand voice. The prospect, evaluating five firms simultaneously across multiple touchpoints, unconsciously perceives that this firm is inconsistent. Inconsistent firms cannot be trusted with complex problems. That perception does not get articulated in a post-pitch debrief. It shows up in the silence after a proposal is submitted and the shortlist goes to someone else. Firms with dedicated sales enablement functions achieve 49% higher win rates on forecasted deals, according to G2's sales enablement research. That number is not generated by buying a platform. It is generated by ensuring that the brand that earns trust in the market is the same brand that shows up in the sales cycle. This guide is written for partners and managing directors of professional services firms who already know their brand and their sales results are not telling the same story. It identifies where the break happens, why it costs more than most firms calculate, and what to fix first. What Is Sales Enablement Branding? Sales enablement branding is the deliberate alignment of a firm's brand identity – its visual standards, positioning, tone of voice, and value framework – with every tool, asset, and interaction used by the sales funct…