This article was based on the interview with Sköna CEO Jenny Sagström on design consistency in high-growth brands by Greg Kihlström, AI and MarTech keynote speaker for The Agile Brand with Greg Kihlström podcast. Listen to the original episode here:
In the relentless pursuit of enterprise growth, speed is often crowned king. We prioritize agility, rapid iteration, and market penetration above all else. But in this race, brand consistency frequently becomes the first, and most significant, casualty. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, the brand begins to resemble a collection of spare parts, cobbled together by disparate teams with urgent, but unaligned, objectives. One product launch looks vaguely different from the last, the sales deck from the EMEA team has a slightly different tone than the one from North America, and the website feels like it was built by a committee that never actually met. We tell ourselves this is the acceptable cost of moving fast. But is it?
The paradox, as many seasoned leaders know, is that true, sustainable agility requires a robust foundational framework. It’s this very consistency that empowers teams to move quickly and independently without sacrificing coherence. It ensures every touchpoint, from a LinkedIn ad to a renewal conversation, feels like it originates from a single, unified entity. We recently had the opportunity to explore this very topic with Jenny Sagström, CEO of the B2B creative agency Sköna. With two decades of experience guiding over 150 enterprise tech brands through the turbulence of growth, Sagström offers a clear-eyed perspective on why maintaining brand integrity isn’t a “nice-to-have” but a direct line to building trust, reducing friction in the sales cycle, and creating long-term enterprise value.
The Domino Effect: How Inconsistency Kills More Than Just Deals
When we think about the negative impacts of an inconsistent brand, our minds often jump to the end of the funnel—a confused prospect, a lost deal. While that is certainly a final destination, Sagström argues the damage begins much earlier, setting off a chain reaction that corrodes the business from the outside in, and then from the inside out. It’s a sequence of events that should be familiar to any leader who has watched a once-tight brand begin to fray at the edges.
“I would say that where you start to see it first is in that diluted market position. Things are not looking the same, messages are different…which in turn, I think leads to that employee confusion, where, you know, they don’t even know what the answers to the questions are. And in turn, when they’re dealing with the customers and the clients, that’s where you get those lost deals.”
This framework provides a valuable diagnostic tool. The first sign of trouble isn’t a dip in MQLs; it’s a subtle blurring in the market. Your brand’s voice becomes less distinct, its visual presence less recognizable. This external confusion inevitably seeps inward, creating employee confusion. When your own team lacks a clear, consistent understanding of what the brand stands for, how can they be expected to articulate it to customers? The sales team starts improvising messaging, the customer success team offers conflicting value propositions, and the marketing team itself begins to operate in silos. The final domino to fall is the deal itself. By the time a prospect is lost to “brand confusion,” the root cause has been festering for months, if not years. The real killer isn’t the final moment of indecision; it’s the slow, steady erosion of clarity that preceded it.
Brand as Hard Currency: An Insurance Policy for Your Margin
For far too long, design and brand have been relegated to the “soft” disciplines within the B2B world—a line item on the budget that’s often the first to be questioned and the hardest to defend with “hard” metrics. This is a perspective that Sagström passionately refutes, arguing that in the high-stakes world of enterprise technology, a strong brand is not a luxury but a fundamental business asset. The calculus is entirely different from the B2C world.
“In the B2B world, if you are an accountant working in a large organization and you’re responsible for implementing a new accounting system, if you pick the wrong system…that’s basically career suicide…the risks are so much higher in B2B, which is then why brand, IE design, becomes so much more important. And I think that’s to me where the idea of nobody ever got fired for buying IBM came from. You tend to in those situations you herd towards what’s safe and secure.”
This is the crux of the argument. A B2B purchase is not a transaction; it’s a long-term commitment that puts the buyer’s professional reputation on the line. In this context, a consistent, trustworthy brand acts as a powerful risk-reduction tool. It signals stability, reliability, and security. It’s the reason buyers gravitate toward established names, even when a newer, perhaps more innovative, solution exists. This trust, built through countless consistent interactions, translates directly into financial performance. Sagström puts it even more bluntly: “To me, the brand, the design, that’s almost an insurance policy that allows you to be able to charge a higher margin on your product.” This reframes the conversation entirely. Brand investment is no longer about aesthetics; it’s about building an intangible asset that creates pricing power, shortens sales cycles by reducing buyer anxiety, and ultimately drives shareholder value. That’s a language every member of the C-suite understands.
The Canary in the Coal Mine: Diagnosing Brand Drift Before It’s a Crisis
The rogue sales flyer, created in a moment of desperation with unapproved fonts and off-brand imagery, is the classic symptom of brand inconsistency. But it’s just that—a symptom. The underlying disease is often more subtle and rooted in internal process and culture. By the time you’re playing a game of brand “whack-a-mole” with non-compliant assets, the problem is already well-established. To truly get ahead of what Sagström calls “brand drift,” leaders need to look for earlier, more insidious warning signs.
“I’ve noticed that when things are breaking down, usually the approval chains take forever…something that you think would be approved and ready to go in, you know, a day or two or so, ends up being a big old drag and I think that is because there’s that insecurity internally in the organization because no one really knows what the brand’s supposed to be anymore.”
This is a brilliant and often-overlooked diagnostic. When your own internal processes for creating and approving marketing materials grind to a halt, it’s a clear signal that the organization has lost its shared definition of “on-brand.” The friction isn’t just bureaucratic red tape; it’s a manifestation of a crisis of confidence. No one wants to make the final call because no one is sure what the right call is. This internal paralysis is a far more telling indicator of brand health than any external audit. It points to a breakdown in the systems—the design systems, the training, the leadership reinforcement—that are meant to provide clarity and empower action. It’s a sign that the brand guidelines are no longer a living document that enables speed but a dusty relic that creates bottlenecks.
The challenge for marketing leaders in high-growth environments is to reframe brand consistency not as a rigid constraint that stifles speed, but as the very chassis that allows the organization to move fast without falling apart. As Jenny Sagström’s insights reveal, this is not merely a creative endeavor but a strategic imperative with profound operational and financial implications. A consistent brand builds the external trust necessary to close high-stakes deals and command premium pricing, while providing the internal clarity required for teams to execute with confidence and autonomy. Letting this asset erode in the name of short-term velocity is a trade-off that no growing enterprise can afford to make.
Ultimately, the conversation must evolve. In an age of increasing automation, AI-generated content, and a general erosion of trust, a coherent and authentic brand becomes one of the few truly defensible moats a business can build. The brand is the repository of your credibility, the visual and verbal shorthand for your promise to the market. The work of a leader, then, is not simply to launch a beautiful and compelling brand, but to architect the systems, champion the culture, and maintain the discipline required to protect that asset through the inevitable chaos of growth. It is this stewardship that separates fleeting success from enduring market leadership.
