Why Brand Matters in B2B, and Why Your Replatform Shouldn’t Skip It
Imagine you've got a house built in 1910 and you finally take it down to the studs, because the foundation is crumbling and the plumbing is shot and the HVAC unit has been coughing since sometime in the Carter administration. You rebuild the whole thing and it comes out pristine. And then, before the housewarming party, you hang the same peeling wallpaper back up, screw the rusted fixtures onto the bathroom wall, and lay the moldy carpet down over the brand new subfloor.
That's more or less what happens on a lot of B2B replatforming projects, and most of the people running them have no idea that's what they're doing. Or they know it, but they can’t get their leadership to buy into the importance of brand.
What the brief usually says
A B2B company comes to us because the platform has become the problem: the catalog has outgrown it, the integrations are held together with Scotch tape, and somebody has finally gotten budget approved to move onto Shopify Plus or Shopware or Adobe Commerce. The requirements are usually thoroughly written with data migration and pricing logic and account structures all spelled out.
But what about the brand?
The pattern is consistent enough that it doesn’t surprise me anymore. There's a “fine for now” logo from fifteen years ago that somebody's cousin put together from ClipArt, there are no brand guidelines (or there's a two-page PDF from 2014 with a single hex code in it and a font nobody has a license for anymore), and the site technically “works” while saying almost nothing about who this company actually is.
None of this is deliberate. Brand didn't get excluded – it just never came up because we don’t know what we don’t know.
Function might get you the order, but it won’t get you loyalty
The consequence of glossing over brand is that function becomes the north star by default rather than by decision, and every design question ends up settled by asking whether it works. That's a valid standard and I'd defend it to a point (I value user experience above looks alone), but when it's the only standard you have, you can feel what’s missing even if you can’t put your finger on it.
Function is what makes a purchase possible. Brand is what makes somebody come back a second time, mention you to a colleague, and stop comparison shopping every quarter. It's representing your company across every single touchpoint, which is exactly why leaving it unaddressed is not a neutral choice.
Your buyer is putting their name on this
What makes this resonate even more poignantly in B2B is that the stakes are surprisingly personal. A wholesale buyer placing a five-figure order is spending someone else's money and staking their own professional judgment on whether you come through, and if the shipment is late or the spec is wrong, they're the one who has to account for it.
So they aren't only evaluating your product. They're looking for signals about whether you're a company that has its act together, and a brand that looks like it operates out of a garage is asking them to take that risk largely on faith. What you want them to see instead is a company that reads as established, experienced, and staffed by people who have done this a thousand times.
So what actually signals trust?
“Trust signals” is a phrase that I use a lot, and I promise that it’s not just a buzzword. It’s shorthand to refer to the many small, implicit things that convince a user to convert. There’s a multitude of these trust signals integrated into a good web experience, but let’s talk about what some of those key signals are specifically in the context of brand.
A logo that's clean and modern, of course, but that also expresses something: not just legibility at small sizes (though yes, that too), but some point of view about what the company sells and how you should feel about it.
A color palette that supports the interface rather than fighting it, that carries a mood, and that takes ADA requirements into consideration, which I'd argue sometimes matters even more in B2B. If your web experience is inaccessible and exhausting, you’re going to get users who would rather call you on the phone than use your site, and that places unnecessary burdens on your salespeople and help desks.
The typefaces you use also have a huge impact. Clear readability, well-considered H styles and pairings, and some inkling of personality are the bare minimum. Sure, Inter is great for usability – but does it say anything about your brand? Even the icon library you choose reflects on your brand, so choose it wisely.
Let’s talk about stock
A lot of brands seem to believe they’re stuck with bad stock photography, because the page needs something visual in that space and that’s what's available and in budget. But whatever ends up in that space is representing your brand, which means it deserves the same consideration as everything else on the page.
Stock can be a perfectly good solution and I've used it happily on plenty of B2B brands. What I'm against is bad stock as a default, and bad stock is usually easy to identify by feel: it's generic, it's a little cheesy, and it's false in a way that everyone including your buyer can detect. When people say they hate stock photography, that’s what they’re reacting to. If you're going to use stock, be intentional about it and put guidelines around it the same way you would with anything else, covering tone, composition, light, crop, mood, and ideally a short list of what you'll never use.
And if you still can’t find stock that feels right for your brand, you have other options, which is the part most people don't realize is available to them. Illustration is often more distinctive and more economical than photography, and a considered graphic treatment will frequently say more about a company than another photograph of a warehouse ever could. Whether or not there's a photography budget, there's always a way to make the site visually engaging.
If you can fund a shoot even once, it pays out for years. I had a law firm client who gave us two days and a tight budget, and we came out of it with thousands of usable images that carried their website and their marketing well beyond the life of the project.
In my experience clients already feel all this instinctively, and they wince at the generic stuff as much as I do. They just don’t know what the alternatives are, which is perfectly reasonable. That’s where our expertise comes in.
Nobody is going to compliment your typography
Good design is largely invisible, which is something I've made peace with over the years.
No customer has ever finished placing an order and thought about the type. What they notice is the feeling: that it was clean, that it was easy, that they weren't fighting anything, and that they have a good sense of what this company is and that they can trust them. They can't pinpoint exactly why, but they can absolutely feel it.
That’s why I've never really thought of good user experience and good brand as two separate projects. They're the same project described from two different angles.
Atlas RFID is the example I point to most often. They came into the engagement already understanding that brand belonged in the scope, which is rarer than it should be and makes the work considerably better on both sides. What's worth noticing there is that a real brand shift often has a larger impact in B2B than it does in consumer work, precisely because expectations are so low to begin with. When a B2B experience turns out to be well-designed as well as functional, it’s a pleasant surprise. Customers remember that.
Making the case up the ladder
The honest objection here is ROI, and I'm not going to pretend it’s not an issue.
You can't cleanly isolate brand in a conversion report, because brand touches everything. If your leadership is looking for data, it’s hard to provide.
What I'd offer instead is that the outside evidence is better than most people assume. Research from BCG and Google found that brand marketing can be as effective in B2B as it is in consumer markets, and that companies further along in brand marketing maturity see a higher return on marketing investment overall, including on the performance marketing they're already comfortable funding.
Aysnd always tries to build brand and UX work into replatforming scopes because it's a much easier conversation to have before the statement of work is signed than after. If you're heading into a migration and this question has been nagging at you, we'd be glad to have that conversation.
And then I'd go back to the house metaphor, because that’s something tangible that everyone can understand. You rebuilt the foundation and replaced the plumbing and did every bit of it correctly and completely up to code. Not one guest who walks through your front door is ever going to know that, which is fine, because you didn't do it for the compliment. What you want is for them to walk in, look around and see a home that feels refreshing, comfortable, and 100% “you” – and know that it’s been well cared-for.
Most B2B companies still won't bother, which is exactly why the ones that do are going to win every time.