It shouldn’t sit with your management or leadership team either.
It sounds harsh and won’t make me popular with everyone. Before you decide which side of the fence you’re on, let me be clear:
Boards and senior stakeholders have a vital role in brand decisions.
It’s just not the role they’re usually given. Right now, most brand approval processes ask them to pick a logo or decide which colour they like. I think they should be approving something else entirely, and the final call should belong to the people the brand is built for.
Why you need to know
I’m not a brand designer. But brand forms the foundation of visual design decisions I need to make on any given project, so when a brand is problematic, it quickly becomes my problem to solve.
I can think of at least 2 recent projects where brand decisions have either derailed the work or stopped it reaching its potential.
The first involved bringing 5 distinct brands under one umbrella. A new brand architecture and overarching identity needed to feed into the sub-brands, and those brands had to work in print and physical locations as well as online. There was plenty of discussion about brand architecture early on, but the decision was made that the primary brand couldn’t change. This had a knock-on effect, creating a constraint that we tried to work within.
We started to look at how we might tweak the sub-brands to accommodate this. We tried to retain some of the existing brand equity. We tried to map out how 5 different visual identities could map across a single interface.
As the project progressed, the same underlying issues kept surfacing.
To be clear, I’m not saying multi-brand websites can’t work. I’m saying the decision needs serious thought at a strategic level before anyone commits to it. And the people who make the call need to be given the right information before they make it.
On this particular project, we went a long way down the wrong path before a rebrand was agreed. By then, hundreds of hours had been spent. A third party was brought in ‘to fix it’ and delivered a logo suite with brand colours that weren’t accessible. (I’ve written about why your brand guidelines aren’t suitable for digital separately.)
The project ran many months late and grew into something far bigger and more expensive than it ever needed to be. The rationale for a different approach had been raised early. It just wasn’t heard by the people in a position to make a fully informed decision.
The second project was a spin-off brand that needed to stand on its own while running on an existing platform. The identity was designed in-house and approved by stakeholders before anyone considered how it would work online, and before a proper brief existed. So once again, I was left working around a brand decision that creates problems it didn’t need to. I lost the case, before I even had chance to make it, your honour.
In both cases, the people with final approval were out of reach of the people who’d have to make the brand work. This isn’t an isolated scenario. It’s on repeat in organisations everywhere and I know that I speak for designers everywhere who grapple with similar ‘can’t win’ scenarios.
Why logo approval in the boardroom doesn’t work
Show anyone a logo out of context and they only have one thing to judge it by: personal preference. They’ll pick the one they like, and they usually pick the obvious one. That isn’t a failing on their part, but without the right context and without an already agreed brief, it’s all anyone can do.
A few things make this worse in a boardroom:
- New feels wrong at first. People tend to prefer what’s familiar. A new identity will almost always get a cooler first reaction than the one everyone’s used to, regardless of whether it’s better.
- The most senior opinion wins. Once the most senior person in the room says what they like, the discussion tends to end there. That’s not a decision process. It’s a hierarchy.
- You are not your audience. A board of experienced executives is rarely the audience the brand needs to attract. Your taste is your taste and you’re entitled to it, but it’s not necessarily aligned with that of your customers.
- You weren’t part of the process. All you get is the final take, with no understanding of the rationale. You’re not a brand strategist, you take the question on face value. Fair call.
The cost of getting it wrong is real. A couple of examples often cited are Tropicana’s 2009 packaging redesign and Gap’s 2010 logo. Both signed off internally, and both were rejected by the people they were meant for. They’re textbook examples of good intentions without evidence behind them.
Gap reverted within a week. Tropicana went back to its old packaging within 2 months, after a sharp drop in sales.
Board members and senior stakeholders are generally not designers, and we shouldn’t expect them to be. What they need is context, delivered by someone who can respond to the conversation that follows.
Your designer needs a seat at the table. A logo forwarded as a PDF, or presented by someone who wasn’t part of the process, arrives without its rationale. A ‘brand’ presented by a print or digital-only designer isn’t likely to hold up across all the touch-points you’ll need it to. Questions go unanswered, and preference fills the gap. It happens over and over.
Digital is the brand’s harshest test
A logo can look great on a presentation slide and fall apart the moment it meets a website. Digital asks things of a brand that a boardroom slide never will:
- Does it still read as a 16-pixel favicon in a browser tab?
- Does it fit a mobile header without crowding out navigation?
- Does it work on dark backgrounds and in dark mode?
- Do the colours meet WCAG contrast requirements for text, buttons, and icons?
- If there are several brands, can users tell where they are and how the pieces relate?
The same goes for print and signage. A brand has to work everywhere it exists, not just in the middle of a white artboard.
Then there’s accessibility. For government and nonprofit organisations, accessibility isn’t a matter of taste. Inaccessible brand colours create compliance risk and exclude the people you’re there to serve. If the designers who create digital experiences aren’t in the room when the brand is decided, you’ll find these problems too late, when fixing them is expensive and time-consuming.
The solution? A better brand approval process: the board approves the brief, not the logo
Here’s the caveat I promised. Boards and stakeholders should absolutely have a say in the brand. But having a say isn’t the same as having final approval of the visuals.
Their job is to approve the positioning brief, because that’s where their knowledge of strategy, market, and risk is most valuable. That’s what they know and know better than the designer.
A strong positioning brief sets out:
- how you got here, and why the brand needs to change
- who the target audience is
- what that audience values most
- the business objectives the brand needs to support
- how you need to be seen in the market, and against whom
- the guiding principles the identity must meet, how it should look, sound, behave.
- where it has to work: digital, print, physical spaces, and accessibility standards
Ideally, a brand or business strategist writes the positioning brief, with input from the designer, the board and anyone who’ll have to deliver it.
Once the brief is agreed, the conversation changes. For the better.
Design is presented against criteria everyone has already signed off on. Decisions are made around the options that best meet the brief, with a clear rationale behind every choice. The complex becomes simple, the risk gets reduced.
This process also supports the people doing the work. Without a brief, every review becomes a debate about taste. With one, designers, project managers, and decision-makers are all measuring against the same thing. Every decision has a reference point, and the process has checks and balances built in.
Everything that follows depends on this step, and the order matters as much as the steps themselves:
- Agree the brief
- Design against it
- Test it with your audience
- Approve it with evidence
Both projects I described above ran the brand approval process in the wrong order.
Let your audience have the final say
Even when the board is convinced, testing should be the next step. One clarification matters here: I’m not suggesting you swap a board vote for a customer vote. Asking users “do you like it?” just moves the preference problem somewhere else.
What you’re testing is whether the brand communicates what the brief says it should, to the people it’s designed for.
We all make assumptions about our customers. In 15 years of doing this work, users have surprised me at every turn.
Testing a logo is quick and cheap, which makes skipping it hard to justify.
When I rebranded to No Jiggery, I ran a 5-second test on a platform called Lyssna. It cost around $500 plus my time. I deliberately gave participants no context, showed them the logo for 5 seconds then asked:
- What do you remember about the name or logo?
- What kind of business do you think it is?
- What words would you use to describe the feeling or personality of this brand?
- What approach or working style would you expect from this company?
- Does anything about the name or logo feel confusing or unclear?
One finding stood out. Participants in the US thought No Jiggery was a soft drink. As it happens, that didn’t matter much, because I don’t actively target US clients due to the time difference. But if I’d planned to launch there, I’d have been presenting myself as something I’m not in their eyes.
The testing gave me clarity, I made some tweaks based on the general feedback I got and I moved forward with confidence.
Put that next to the first project in this article: around $500 and a few days, against hundreds of hours and months of delay.
This quick test suits early checks on recognition and first impressions. Another option is keyword matching. Take the keywords from your positioning brief, mix them with related words that could be misread as your brand, and ask participants to pick the 3 that best match what they see. If they pick your keywords, the identity is doing its job. If they don’t, you know you’re not quite there yet.
The right method depends on what you need to learn. Testing gets more complex once you move into interfaces, but one thing’s for sure: a mismatch compounds. If the visual identity doesn’t match the brief, the problem gets bigger every time you create a new asset.
How to make this work in your organisation
If you’re a designer or project manager:
- Get the positioning brief signed off before any design work starts. If there’s no brief, raising that is your first job.
- Get digital in the room early (and sit them next to the print designer). Whoever designs and builds the website should review the brief and early concepts, not just receive the final files.
- Present against the brief, not as a reveal. Show how each option meets each criterion, so the discussion stays on evidence.
- Show the brand in context. A website header, a favicon, an email signature, a sign on a building. Context makes problems obvious.
- Budget for testing. A few hundred dollars is small next to the cost of a rebrand or a stalled project.
- Report findings back in plain language. “Most participants thought we were a bank” lands with decision-makers far better than “I don’t think it’s working”.
If you’re a board member or senior stakeholder, swap “Do I like it?” for better questions:
- Does it meet the brief we approved?
- What did our audience take from it when they saw it?
- Does it work everywhere it needs to, including for people with disabilities?
- What evidence do we have, and what’s still an assumption?
What if the board still disagrees?
Sometimes they will, and that’s fine. Disagreement is useful when it’s about the brief. If a board member feels the logo doesn’t reflect the business, explore which part of the brief it misses, where it falls short. If there’s a genuine gap, update the brief and let the design follow. If it comes down to preference, the test results are your answer.
And if someone says there’s no time or budget to test? A 5-second test can be set up in an afternoon, with results back within a day or two. It usually costs less than a single round of design revisions.
The board’s say still matters
None of this sidelines leadership. It puts their input where it does the most good: setting direction, agreeing objectives, and holding the work to account. The brief is where their opinion belongs, and where it’s most valuable. The logo is where your audience’s response belongs.
Get that order right and you avoid wasted months, blown budgets, and brands that only work in the boardroom. Get it wrong and you’ll probably be paying someone like me to untangle it later!
