Growth without brand foundations is just noise
Brandcode Collective x Farage
There’s a pattern I see more often than I’d like.
A founder calls. A beautiful product, real momentum, a retailer who’s just made the call to stock them. The energy is good. The instinct is right. And somewhere in that first ten minutes, the conversation turns to speed. More spend. More reach. A bigger influencer. Another platform. I understand it completely. When things are moving, you want to fuel the flame!
But here’s what I’ve learned to notice in those conversations: beneath all that momentum, the brand’s foundation hasn’t yet been crystallised. It’s there. Founders feel it, build around it, make decisions from it, often without being able to fully name it. But it hasn’t been tested against the market, nor sharpened into a position distinct enough to travel. To hold weight in a new room, a new country, a new shelf. You need to give a stranger, who knows nothing about you yet, an immediate, instinctive reason to care.
What they have is real. What’s missing is the work to make it distinctive. And accelerating before that work is done is one of the most expensive mistakes a scaling brand can make.
Here’s the thing about growth
After two decades working inside some of the world’s most carefully built luxury houses — Chanel, Dior, Coty, and eventually Paspaley — I’ve watched the pattern play out enough times to know it by heart. Growth without brand foundations doesn’t compound.
It leaks.
The faster you pour into a vessel that isn’t sealed, the more you lose. You can scale awareness without building meaning. You can drive traffic without earning loyalty. You can spend a significant amount of money introducing yourself to an audience, who forget you the moment the ad disappears.
And the most painful part? You often don’t feel it until it’s expensive to fix.
What brand narrative actually is (and what it isn’t)
Let’s be precise about something, because this word gets used loosely, and when words get used loosely, decisions get made badly.
Brand narrative is not your tagline. It’s not the values document that took three months to write and now lives in a folder nobody opens. It’s not the aesthetic brief your creative director presented, or the “About” page paragraph that sounds beautiful but says nothing specific. Those things can express a narrative. But the narrative itself is something deeper.
It’s the coherent, human story that makes someone understand instinctively, almost without thinking who you are, why you exist, and why they should choose you over the very good alternative sitting right next to you.
Byron Sharp’s work in “How Brands Grow” is useful here. Growth, as Sharp argues, comes primarily from mental availability — being the brand that surfaces in someone’s mind when a category need arises. Not because you’ve shouted the loudest. But rather, you’ve built memory structures, consistently, over time. The brands that achieve this aren’t just visually distinctive. They’re distinctively positioned. They occupy a specific place in the mind.
Take a brand like Emma Lewisham — a New Zealand skincare label with serious scientific credentials and a circular beauty philosophy that was genuinely ahead of its time. The foundation is there. The conviction is there. What the narrative work unlocked was a position distinct enough to travel and be translated throughout the consumer journey: beauty backed by science, rigour and luxury in the same breath. Once that was crystallised, every decision from partnerships, to market entry, packaging, and press, was built from it.
Mark Ritson, whose thinking I find myself returning to constantly, puts a sharper edge on the broader problem. Most brands, he argues, don’t have a growth problem. They have a targeting problem disguised as a growth problem. They narrow their focus before they’ve built broad salience. They go deep before they’ve gone wide. The result is a loyal niche that will never, on its own, compound into a market.
Narrative is what makes you legible to people who don’t yet know you. It’s the story that travels ahead of your media spend. That gives a retailer a reason to take the meeting before you’ve even walked in the door. That makes a journalist’s piece write itself.
Without it, you’re spending money to introduce yourself over and over again. And people keep forgetting.
The moment that matters — and why most brands miss it
Here’s what founders often don’t hear until it’s expensive to fix. The moment to crystallise your brand position is before you scale. Not after. Not when you’re bigger. Not when you have more resources to think about it. Before the growth arrives. I know this feels counterintuitive. It feels like a luxury. Like something you earn the right to invest in once the revenue justifies it.
Ritson’s 60/40 principle (roughly 60% of marketing investment in long-term brand building, 40% in short-term activation) isn’t a rule for established companies with generous budgets. It’s a discipline for any business that wants to still be standing in ten years. Brands that defer brand investment until they’re “big enough” almost always find they’ve built a performance marketing engine that works beautifully; until it doesn’t. And when it stops, there’s nothing underneath. No equity. No story people feel attached to. No reason to stay.
The scaling moment is when your narrative does the most work. Because you’re meeting the most people. Because every touchpoint, from a new stockist’s shelf, a journalist’s first encounter, a stranger’s scroll is forming an impression, whether you’ve shaped it or not.
You’re not deciding whether your brand tells a story. You’re deciding whether the story being told is yours.
What happens when you skip this
I’ve seen the other version too. Brands that scaled fast, on performance, on a hero product, on a moment of cultural attention and then found themselves exposed when the conditions shifted. The performance channel got more expensive. The hero product got a competitor. The cultural moment moved on. Their marketing calendar in year 2 just can’t deliver. And without a brand foundation underneath, there is nothing to fall back on. No equity. No loyalty that couldn’t be easily bought away by the next brand willing to discount more aggressively.
This is where narrative decisions compound quietly in the background. The choice to pursue an endorsement that reinforces what you stand for rather than simply who you’re seen with. The choice to expand into a market where your story lands naturally rather than where the numbers look easiest. These aren’t just strategic calls, they’re brand calls. And brands that have done the foundational work make them more instinctively, and more consistently, than those that haven’t.
Repositioning after the fact is possible. I’ve done it. But it is significantly harder, more expensive, and more disorienting, for the team, for customers, for trade partners rather than building your brand strategically for the first time.
Ritson puts it plainly: “A brand without a strategy isn’t a brand. It’s a product with a logo. Products with logos compete on price. Brands compete on meaning.” And meaning, once built, is the most durable competitive advantage you have.
What I actually believe
If you’re building something right now, if you’re in that scaling moment, feeling the pull to just move faster, spend more, do more, I would like to share with you directly my point of view. The instinct to accelerate is right. The desire to grow is right. But acceleration without direction is just speed. And speed, without a story to anchor it, is the most expensive thing you can buy.
I’ve spent my career at the intersection of craft and commerce. And the thing I keep coming back to, regardless of category or price point or market, is this: the brands that endure are the ones that knew what they stood for before they decided where to go. Not in a vague, values poster way. In a rigorous, practical, “every decision runs through this” way.
I believe, genuinely, that brands speak to people, not markets. That desire, aspiration, and the stories we tell ourselves about the things we choose are not soft considerations. They are the commercial reality. They are what separates the brands people love from the brands people simply use.
Growth without that foundation isn’t growth. It’s volume.
And volume without meaning is the most expensive noise there is.
About the author
Renae Ferraro is a Fractional Brand Director specialising in luxury, jewellery, beauty and wellness. She embeds with emerging and scaling brands as their most senior brand mind — at the moment when getting the story right changes everything. She writes about brand thinking, category observations, and what two decades inside the world’s great luxury houses actually teaches you.