There is a version of the argument for brand investment that claims it works everywhere. It does not, and companies that have been sold that version once tend to be unreachable for a decade afterwards. It is more useful to be precise about the conditions under which identity work returns money, because the conditions are knowable in advance and take about an hour to assess.

Brand work pays where three things are true at once.

There is a choice being made by someone who has alternatives. Not a specification being filled, but a preference being exercised — by a consumer at a shelf, a buyer with a shortlist, a distributor deciding what to push.

Where the alternatives are genuinely interchangeable on paper, the decision has to land somewhere, and that somewhere is either preference or price.

The decision is made partly on perception. If the purchase is made on a tender scored by a formula, perception has a small role. If it is made by a person who will have to justify the choice to a colleague, perception carries most of the weight, because the justification requires language and language comes from positioning.

And the company can capture the value. This is the condition most often missed. Preference is only worth paying for if the company controls something — a price, a listing, a repeat purchase, a direct relationship. A supplier whose entire volume goes to one buyer at a price fixed by that buyer's cost model can build enormous preference and see very little of it, because the mechanism for converting preference into money is not in their hands.

Where all three hold, identity work is one of the highest-return investments available, and its return compounds in a way that a promotion or a trade show does not: it does not have to be repurchased each year to keep working.

Where they do not hold, the honest answers vary.

In bulk commodity trade — undifferentiated volume sold on specification, price and availability — the return on consumer-facing brand work is close to zero, and the money is better spent on cost, reliability and commercial coverage. What does return in this environment is credibility material: a company that looks substantial and organised gets access, gets taken seriously by larger counterparties, and gets fewer questions about whether it can perform. That is a real outcome, achieved with far less than a brand programme, and it should be scoped as what it is.

In pure private label manufacturing, the same applies with a twist. The customer is a professional buyer evaluating capability, and the material that matters is evidence of capability presented clearly. A company that presents itself well wins tenders it might otherwise lose to an equal on paper. Beyond that, consumer branding is investment in an asset the business model does not use.

In categories where the retailer sets the price and the supplier holds no direct relationship with the end customer, the return depends entirely on whether the company intends to change that. If yes, brand investment is the beginning of a route out and should be planned over years. If no, it is decoration financed as strategy.

And in a company with an unresolved product or distribution problem, brand work does not pay at any level, because it is being asked to compensate for something it does not touch.

There is one more case that deserves its own note: the company for whom the return is real but arrives later than the budget cycle allows. Identity work pays through repetition. A system deployed for one season, then changed because a new director arrived or the results were assessed in month six, produces almost nothing — not because it was wrong, but because it was never given the only mechanism by which it works. A company unable to commit to holding a direction for three years is better off not starting, and the honest advice in that situation is to fix the governance problem first.

What this all comes down to is that brand investment is not a general good. It is a specific instrument that works on a specific problem: being interchangeable in a market where someone has a choice and you have a way to profit from being chosen.

Companies that fit that description are usually under-investing, often dramatically. Companies that do not fit it are frequently sold the same programme, and their scepticism afterwards is entirely earned.