Turn on, Tune in, Get Out

Posted on 30th June 20267th July 2026 by Sam

When the sun shines and the longest days keep the evenings bright the Designhouse team go foraging for brain food. Fave hunting grounds include galleries, festivals and the occasional darkened cinema. We asked the studio team for their creative summer recommendations. Here is a veritable menu of must-dos, a smorgasbord for your brain, and restoratives for your imagination.

Here is what we are loving right now…

TeamLab Borderless, Tokyo

“A digital interactive art exhibition across a series of rooms with no start or end point. Artworks move out of rooms, relate to other works, influence each other and are influenced by you walking through the rooms and touching the artwork itself. I loved how they fused digital technology, sounds, smells and lighting to create a truly magical few hours of exploration.”

Jonti Davies, Client Services Director

Wes Anderson at the Design Museum

“Vivid, highly saturated and bright, this is the colour world behind some of Anderson’s most iconic films, which is to say most of them. A fascinating window into a brilliantly creative mind.”

Sam Steele, Marketing Director

Inside Aardman at the Young V&A

“Loads of models, storyboards and insight from the Aardman team. It’s a joy. On until mid November, so plenty of time to go. I’m not biased, but it is in Bethnal Green, so it’s easy to go to my local after.”

Natalie House, Studio Production Manager

It was Just An Accident

“The subject is heavy and sad but there is a bit of comedy in it and it’s very well made. Plus we all love to look cool watching subbed movies”

Cristina Taje, Senior Account Manager

Escher at Somerset House

“I loved Escher as a kid. Graphically powerful and geometric, it plays with perception and negative space. Brilliant draughtsmanship and imagination.”

Richard Debenham, Creative Director

Oceanographic Museum, Monaco

“An immersive, interactive space and time journey to 2050. It encourages the 650,000 annual visitors to the Oceanographic Museum to become involved in the protection of the Mediterranean.”

Al Connolly, Senior Designer

Marilyn Monroe: A Portrait, National Portrait Gallery

“The exhibition explores her iconic image and the personal brand that was created around her, with brilliant photographers featured.”

Sam Mayhew, Designer

David Hockney, “A Year in Normandie” at the Serpentine

Hockney’s sweeping frieze follows the slow turn of the seasons across the Normandy countryside, painted with the freshness of an artist still chasing the light in his ninth decade.

Matt Gillman, Creative Director

That is the studio’s summer in one list. Curiosity goes where it likes, and it always comes back with something worth sharing. Enjoy the summer!

Designhouse has partnered with FTSE 250 companies and global enterprises for over 50 years. We also work with start ups and scale ups to create brand identities that can grow with their business. If you’d like to discuss your brand challenges, we’re ready to talk.

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Britain’s brands return to growth

Posted on 24th June 20262nd July 2026 by Sam

UK brand value returned to growth in 2026, with the country’s leading brands adding £45.4 billion over the past year, according to new figures from Brand Finance. At the report launch, Mark Ritson asked the room to look harder at what really drives it.

The UK’s 250 most valuable brands grew by 12% to reach £448.9 billion in 2026, the first year-on-year growth since 2023. This is according to Brand Finance’s annual UK report published this month. Britain’s biggest brands added £45.4 billion in collective value over twelve months.

Growth was broad based, spread across the economy. Banking is now the UK’s most valuable sector, lifted in part by Revolut, the fastest-growing brand of the year at 246% to £5 billion, and a 24% rise in banking sector value overall. Aerospace and defence recorded its strongest gains since 2012, and consumer brands now account for eight of the UK’s ten strongest.

One finding drew particular attention. Brand Finance’s analysis shows the UK’s most trusted brands increased in value by 15% over the year, while the least trusted brands saw their value fall by 4%. Emotional responses to brands are difficult to quantify financially. This report shows that trust is directly associated with performance.

Can we trust trust?

Speaking at the launch, the marketing expert and Mini MBA founder Mark Ritson put a deceptively simple question to the room. Can we trust trust?

Drawing on examples ranging from Johnnie Walker to Betty Crocker, he examined how strong brands build emotional connections, and he questioned the assumption that trust alone drives growth. His argument placed salience, being the brand that comes to mind first, among the most powerful levers available to marketers. He left the audience with this question. Should brands focus on being trusted, or on being remembered?

Consistent and coherent

The answer is, of course, both. Trust and salience accumulate through the same discipline: consistent and coherent brand investment sustained over years. The brands climbing this year’s ranking are remembered because they are visible and distinctive. They are trusted because they behave consistently over time.

Shell, a brand Designhouse is proud to count among its clients, marks a decade as Britain’s most valuable brand. Its value rose 16% to £39.5 billion. Other clients, Vodafone, and British Gas both saw their brand value rise, Centrica held its position in the ranking.

The cumulative value of the UK’s top 100 brands has grown 33% since 2016, through repeated periods of economic disruption. Automotive showed the reverse, with total sector brand value down 22% as Jaguar, Range Rover, Defender and Discovery all declined.

The JLR brands demonstrate the trust and salience point precisely. In 2025 Jaguar interrupted its own identity with a controversial rebrand, and at the same time a cyberattack interrupted JLR’s ability to supply, so the brand was neither reliably recognisable nor reliably present.

Brand value is a financial asset. Brand strength accounts for 30% of a company’s stock market value according to the Economist. And like any investment, Brand when managed well compounds value.

Designhouse has spent 55 years helping clients build brands that endure through exactly these cycles. Whether the goal is to be trusted, remembered, or both, the route is the same. Strategy, applied consistently, takes shape as value.

written by Sam Steele, Marketing and Communications Director, FCIM

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The brand story behind a trillion-dollar IPO

Posted on 17th June 202617th June 2026 by Sam

What is the brand story behind the largest IPO in history, and what is stopping your organisation from getting there? Maybe less than you think…

In June 2026, SpaceX went public at a valuation near $1.8 trillion. This is a company that posted a net loss the year before. So what was driving the valuation? Investors were pricing in the strategy. And this is how it works…

The value add

SpaceX is the headline act in a wider portfolio that could hardly be more disparate. Moon rockets and inter-planetary spacecraft; satellite internet through Starlink; social media platform X; the Grok AI engine; and even facilities management.

A single stated worldview holds them all together. And that is a future that is multiplanetary, sustainable and AI-powered, framed throughout as work for the good of humanity. Starlink funds the rockets. The rockets carry the mission. Each venture earns its place by advancing the same idea, so the parts compound rather than compete. Whatever you think of Elon Musk, the clarity is the asset, and the market has put a price on that clarity.

Clarity is the gold standard. The more common business reality looks much more brassy.

The complexity cost, or when 1+1=0.25

We are often brought into complex organisations where nobody can articulate the business strategy, and thus nobody can articulate a brand strategy. When the commercial direction is unspoken, the brand has nothing to give shape to, and every decision after that is amorphous and disparate.

Brand gets treated as a cosmetic wrapper. The assumption is that audience understanding will assemble itself through repeated tactical exposure. Brand equity built like that is vapour thin. And it evaporates the moment the activation stops.

The most insidious erosion happens when an organisation sees itself as a federation of sub-brands. Each sub-brand with its own audience, culture and budget. The assumption being that a single-mission-led voice is beyond reach. Well, not according to SpaceX.

In a fragmented business, 1+1 makes something closer to 0.25. Each sub-brand spends to build its own corner, none of it accrues to the parent. Audiences see a scatter of unrelated signals where there should be one organisation worth considerably more than the sum of its parts (hello again SpaceX).

The market has started to price that cost in the open. The 2025 and 2026 wave of corporate breakups, from Kraft Heinz to Honeywell, is a public admission that brand complexity without coherence erodes value. Brand focus is what releases it.

Business first, brand second

The route through is sequential, and the sequencing is crucial.

Business strategy first, so the organisation knows what it is trying to achieve.

Brand strategy next, so that intent takes a form audiences recognise.

Then an architecture that lets each sub-brand borrow equity from the parent and give it back, so the parts strengthen the whole and the whole lifts the parts.

Scale comes from coherence, from every pound and every message pulling in the same direction.

Discipline pays

SpaceX shows what a clearly held mission allows. It can absorb disparate acquisitions because every deal is narrated back to the same idea: compute feeding models feeding applications feeding the multiplanetary, AI-powered future. That is brand discipline. And the IPO shows how it has been used to create record-breaking value.

Brand investment is a business decision, and we treat it like one. At Designhouse we can help you define your strategy, then make that strategy take shape, so you have a brand strategy and a brand that drives ROI across your entire business landscape.

The trillion-dollar insight is business clarity, not rocket science!

written by Sam Steele, Marketing and Communications Director, FCIM

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Brand architecture in the age of AI

Posted on 10th June 202630th June 2026 by Matthew Gillman

AI tools shape how prospects discover and shortlist brands. The organisations that appear accurately in those answers are the ones with clear, well-structured brand architecture. This article examines why brand architecture has become critical infrastructure for visibility and ROI, drawing on research and our work rebuilding EMCOR UK’s brand into four propositions that every stakeholder, human or AI, can understand.

The way people discover brands has fundamentally shifted. Your prospects are no longer clicking through pages of search results to compare options. Instead, they’re asking ChatGPT, Gemini or Perplexity for answers, and AI is making the choice for them.

And this is vitally import to you because

54% of users now start their searches with AI tools rather than traditional search engines,
47% of consumers have used AI to help make purchase decisions

For B2B marketers, the implications are profound. When a potential client or customer asks an AI assistant to “find me XXX companies in London,” your brand needs to appear in that response and be accurately represented.

Organisations with clear brand architecture achieve 3.5 times more visibility than those without it. (Harvard Business School)

And different large language models rely on different data sources and retrieval methods. Without a structured approach to how your brand and its offerings are organised and communicated, AI systems struggle to understand and accurately represent your value proposition.

Make your brand work harder to deliver ROI

Companies with well-defined brand architectures deliver superior stock returns, according to research.

Brand architecture delivers even greater advantages in B2B contexts. This is because

20% uplift in EBIT margin which illustrates how brand equity translates into greater profitability. (Mckinsey)
30% of a company’s market value comes from brand and reputation, underscoring the investor relevance of cohesive architecture. (PWC)
97% of B2B decision-makers say branding influences awareness and 95% say it drives differentiation, which is critical in long, multi-stakeholder buying cycles. (LinkedIn)
92% of buyers start with a shortlist and 41% already have a preferred vendor. To succeed, vendors must focus on building brand recognition and trust early to ensure they are on the initial shortlist. (Forrester)

Clarity over complexity

Brand architecture typically follows one of five models.

The branded house approach, used by companies like Apple, unifies all offerings under a single master brand identity.
The sub-brand system references the master brand and adds a unique product or service name, like car manufacturers do eg: the Toyota portfolio includes the Toyota Prius, Toyota Corolla etc…
The house of brands model keeps each brand entirely separate, as Unilever does with Dove and Persil.
The endorsed brand model allows sub-brands independence whilst maintaining a connection to the parent company.
The hybrid model blends these approaches based on specific business needs.

David Aaker, vice chairman of brand consulting firm Prophet, puts it simply: “The goal should be to have the fewest relevant brands needed to meet the business goals”. (Brand Portfolio Strategy, p.16) For most B2B service firms, it’s clarity over complexity every time.

Traditional SEO gave marketers clear metrics: rankings, impressions, click-through rates. AI-driven discovery operates differently. There’s no SERP position to track, no obvious signal that tells you whether ChatGPT is recommending your agency over competitors. Marketing teams are essentially blind to a channel that’s rapidly becoming dominant for discovery.

You can’t tell where your brand is being mentioned or how it’s being described across different AI platforms. You have very little insight into whether AI is reinforcing your intended positioning or subtly reshaping it.

The shift requires a fundamental rethink of brand visibility. Your brand needs to be understood by AI systems as a coherent entity with clear relationships between services, methodologies and client outcomes.

The EMCOR case study

Brand architecture is critical infrastructure. When your brand structure is clear, consistent and well-documented across all digital properties, AI models have the signal clarity they need to accurately represent you. When it’s muddled, AI fills the gaps with assumptions, or simply omits you from recommendations altogether.

We worked with EMCOR UK, a £240 million facilities services business employing 4,000 people across 14 service lines, to address exactly this challenge. Their existing brand architecture had become too complex to communicate clearly to employees, customers or AI systems.

We created coherent brand architecture by delivering a new strategic brand proposition and refining their model of 14 different services into four relatable, memorable propositions: Experience, Create, Enhance and Transform. The result: a brand structure that every stakeholder, human or AI, can understand and represent accurately.

Business impact

Following the 2020 rebrand, EMCOR UK entered a period of accelerated growth in specialist facility services culminating in the sale of the business to OCS Group for £190 million in December 2025. The 2016–2020 period had been characterised by steady, operational performance; the post-rebrand years delivered the focused strategic growth that made the business an attractive acquisition at significant value.

Read the full case study

Get AI brand ready

Start by auditing your current brand architecture. Ask yourself

Are the relationships between your parent brand, service lines and methodologies clear?
Is this clarity reflected consistently across your website, LinkedIn presence and case studies?
Most importantly, is it structured in ways that both humans and AI systems can parse and understand?

When every part of your brand portfolio has a clearly defined role and this structure is reflected consistently across all touchpoints, you create the conditions for both human understanding and AI comprehension.

For marketing leaders managing significant budgets and influencing major branding decisions, the calculus is straightforward. The brands that will maintain visibility in an AI-driven discovery landscape are those investing in clear, consistent brand architecture now.

How quickly can you audit, clarify and implement a structure that works for the AI systems rapidly becoming the primary interface between your brand and potential clients?

Audit your brand architecture – before AI does it for you

written by Sam Steele, Marketing and Communications Director, FCIM

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