It’s time for manufacturing businesses to think about brand
Updated: Oct 14
Manufacturing businesses are facing a range of headwinds that are set to make brand a more important asset than ever before.
It's time for manufacturing businesses to think about brand
When people can no longer agree on what's true, they fall back on who they trust.
In manufacturing, the people customers trust most are usually the people they deal with directly.
A company's identity therefore matters most in how consistently its own people can describe it.
Misalignment between leadership, marketing, sales and delivery looks to customers awfully like unreliability - even when the work itself is excellent.
AI tools that summarise your business repeat whatever your people and content say, so inconsistency now travels further than it used to.
Image: Richard Moran
The information environment has splintered
Propellant has many years of experience in the communications space. We’ve been on the journey as comms has changed, but it is now more challenging than ever.
The Reuters Institute's 2026 Digital News Report tell us:
Trust in news fell significantly in 29 of the 48 markets surveyed, and overall trust is now at its lowest since the Institute began tracking it.
Social media and video networks have overtaken TV and publishers' own websites as the most widely used news sources globally.
AI chatbots are becoming part of how people find news, with weekly use rising from 7% in 2025 to 10% in 2026.
The result is an audience that encounters more information than ever, from sources it trusts less, and has every reason to treat what it reads with suspicion.
Why fragmented information matters for manufacturers
PwC’s 2026 sector outlook found that by 2030, manufacturers expect 44% of revenue will come from outside traditional industrial and consumer products. This accentuates the importance of a clear brand strategy that’s understood and embodied by everyone in the organisation. A business moving beyond its core will find it harder for its own people to describe it consistently, unless someone deliberately redefines the identity.
B2B buying has always been relational, and the current climate amplifies that. A buyer weighing up a supplier hears from a sales lead, a technical specialist, an account manager, the website and a founder posting on LinkedIn, and now from an AI-generated summary as well. Each of those is a version of your brand.
When those versions agree, the buyer builds confidence with every touchpoint. When they diverge, the buyer has to work out which one to believe, and in a low-trust environment people rarely extend the benefit of the doubt. They discount all of it, or they choose a supplier whose story is easier to follow.
Image: Richard Moran
What misalignment looks like from the inside
As a consultancy we help solve a wide array of brand and communications challenges. They almost never look the same - because every business is different - but there are patterns of misalignment you can recognise:
Leadership and sales describe different companies. The board talks about where the business is heading, while the sales team sells the version that wins the business in front of them.
Reputation lives in people's heads. In businesses with long histories, each department holds its own account of what makes the company good, shaped by length of service and the customers they deal with. If these are not consistent, you have the danger of being whatever someone’s personal preference of memory says you are.
Materials drift apart. Website copy and sales decks get written years apart by different people. Something that sticks in one instance gets reused in one part of the business, but isn’t recognised elsewhere.
None of this comes from a lack of effort. In fact most of it comes from capable people describing the business as they experience it, in the way they think will create the best outcomes. The danger here however is a win here and a good outcome there just deepen this fragmented picture. That’s fine at the micro level but it makes scaling and evolving much harder.
Make your brand work hard for your business
We still meet organisations who see brand as something consumer businesses worry about, and is little more than a distraction to the ‘serious’ space in which they operate. However when we reframe the brand as a codification of what’s unique and valuable about the business - with a visual and verbal system that helps add ‘quality control’ to business communications - the reaction changes.
These kinds of productive conversations have allowed us to deliver compelling programmes for our clients. Where organisations we've worked with have closed these gaps, the change showed up internally first. Teams found it easier to explain what they do and why it matters, and sales conversations started from firmer ground because customers had already heard a consistent story.
The Propellant team recently received a ‘thank you note’ from a client, explaining how positive their pipeline was, and how valued our work had been in contributing to that.
These are difficult times for many manufacturing firms - but in the face of uncertainty, it’s worth getting your brand to work hard for your business.
Image: Richard Moran
