Perception is a slippery thing.

You don’t get to decide whether people form one. You only get to decide whether you shape it. If you don’t, they’ll do it for you, and the version they create might not be the one you want to live with.

Imagine inviting friends to a party in a completely empty house. No furniture, no pictures, no music. Just bare walls and echoing rooms. Before you’ve even said a word, your guests will start making assumptions. Some will think you’ve just moved in, others might assume you’re a minimalist. A few might quietly decide you can’t afford furniture. In reality, you might have been planning a warm, bohemian living room with art on every wall, but without giving them any cues, their version becomes the truth.

Brands without definition are just like the empty room. When you don’t set the scene, people fill in the gaps themselves. And they’ll use whatever scraps of information they’ve picked up along the way. This could be a good strategy, but it will most likely be damaging. A passing comment about poor quality or service, a website that hasn’t been updated in years, a logo that doesn’t match the tone of your service. The result is rarely consistent, and it’s almost never the full picture. You risk being seen as a ‘jack of all trades and master of none’, lost somewhere between what you offer and what people think you offer.

It happens more than you’d think, and it doesn’t only affect small or new businesses. In the early 2000s, Burberry, once the epitome of British luxury, found its signature check plastered across counterfeit caps, knock-off scarves and over-licensed products. It had slipped into the wrong kind of mainstream and become tied to an image it had never intended. The brand fought its way back by stripping away the noise, pulling back from overexposure, and telling a clearer story about who it was and who it wasn’t.

The Co-op went through a different kind of identity drift. For years it was everywhere, including the likes of food stores, banking, funerals, travel, but without a single, unifying idea behind it. People knew the name, but struggled to describe what it stood for. It wasn’t until the company went back to its roots, reviving its iconic clover-leaf logo and re-centring its messaging around ethics and community, that it found its footing again. The clarity transformed it from a muddled presence into a brand people could trust and understand.

Both of these stories showcase what happens when the market starts defining you instead of the other way around. Sometimes it’s a slow erosion, other times it’s a sharp left turn, but the outcome is the same; you lose control of your narrative.

Defining your brand isn’t a one-off exercise. It’s not just for the day you launch or the moment you hit a growth spurt. It’s an ongoing act of setting the scene for how you want to be understood, especially when the business changes, when markets shift, or when you step into new territory. If you don’t, you leave the door wide open for others to decide for you.

And the thing about perception is, once it’s out there, it’s much harder to change than it is to set in the first place. In branding, as in life, silence is never neutral. It’s simply an invitation for someone else to speak on your behalf.

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