An exporter signs an importer in Germany, an agent in the Gulf, a distributor in France. The product is now in three markets it could not have reached alone, which is the entire point and a real achievement. What happens next is rarely planned for: over the following two or three years, the company slowly stops being the same company in each of those markets, and nobody inside the business sees it happen, because nobody is standing in the aisle.

The mechanism is mundane. A distributor needs a label in the local language, so a translation is produced locally by a printer's studio. The retailer requires a different pack format, so a new artwork is created — by whoever the distributor uses, at whatever price the distributor is willing to pay. A promotional flyer is needed for a seasonal event; the logo is pulled from a website at low resolution and stretched. The agent in the third market builds a small brochure with a colour that was close enough. Each of these is a reasonable local decision made under time pressure. Together, after eight or ten of them, the company has four visual identities and no idea which one a buyer saw last.

The cost is not aesthetic. It is that recognition never compounds. A buyer who encounters the product in two channels does not connect them. A retailer's category team cannot form a picture of a company they have seen four versions of. Volume grows and standing does not, so the company arrives at three or four times its original size still negotiating like a new supplier.

There is a second effect that goes deeper. A distributor's incentive is to sell the category, not to build any one supplier's position within it. They will happily take the brand, and they will just as happily reposition it — pricing it where the gap in their own portfolio sits, promoting it when they need volume, listing the two SKUs that move and dropping the ones that were carrying the range's meaning. None of this is bad faith. It is a portfolio being managed by the person who owns the portfolio. But it means that if the company has not defined its own position clearly enough to be inherited, the position will be assigned by whoever is closer to the shelf.

The companies that avoid this do a small number of unglamorous things.

They decide what travels and what is local. Usually a very short list: the mark, the colour, the type, the structure of the pack front, the way the name is written. Everything else — language, claims, formats, promotional material — is allowed to vary. A long list of rules gets ignored under deadline. A list of five things survives, because it is short enough to be honoured by a printer's studio in a market nobody is visiting.

They make the correct option the fastest one. Most drift happens because the right asset was not available at the moment it was needed. A distributor who has to wait four days for a logo file will use the one from the website. A folder with production-ready files, the label templates already built to the retailer's specification, and pre-approved layouts for the situations that recur costs very little to prepare and removes the reason for improvisation.

They put the relationship in writing at the point where it costs nothing to do so. Which assets may be adapted, who approves the adaptation, and what happens to the artwork if the relationship ends. That last clause matters more than it seems: companies have changed distributors and discovered the local artwork, the photography and sometimes the registered mark sat with someone who was no longer aligned with them.

And they look. Once a year, someone gets the actual packs from every market onto one table, next to the export catalogue and the trade show stand. It is the cheapest audit in the business and it is almost never done, because each market reports its own results and no report shows the four packs side by side.

Distribution is not the enemy of a brand. It is how a brand reaches scale. But distribution transmits whatever it is given, and it fills any gap it finds with a local decision made in a hurry. A company that has not decided what it is will be defined, market by market, by people whose job it is to move volume this quarter — and it will only discover the result when it tries to raise a price.