When you approach an agency, one of the first questions you’re likely to ask is, “Have you worked in our industry before?” It’s a reasonable question — but if you’re hiring a branding agency, it’s the wrong one.
If you’re working with a marketing agency, by all means ask. Marketing thrives on pattern recognition. It depends on understanding the existing systems, audience behaviours, and performance benchmarks within your sector. Familiarity helps a marketing team move faster, test more efficiently, and deliver optimised outcomes within established frameworks.
Branding, however, is a different discipline entirely.
Branding Doesn’t Optimise — It Redefines
Marketing works within existing patterns. Branding exists to question them.
Branding asks:
- What assumptions is everyone in your industry operating on?
- Which of those assumptions are holding your business back?
- What is genuinely essential about your brand — the truth that differentiates you and actually matters?
These aren’t questions answered by familiarity. They demand distance — the ability to look at your industry without the blinders of “how it’s always been done.”
A branding agency that knows your industry too well may unconsciously accept its conventions. They’ll give you a refined execution of the same strategy everyone else is using — sharper, perhaps, but not original. What they won’t give you is a new lens, a new story, or a redefinition of how your brand should exist.
At Wanted.Berlin, we believe great branding is born from curiosity, not comfort. The goal isn’t to fit in faster — it’s to stand out more clearly.
Picasso’s Bull: The Art of Defining the Idea
There’s a lesson in Pablo Picasso’s 1945–46 series The Bull.
Across a sequence of eleven sketches, Picasso begins with a lifelike depiction of a bull and gradually strips away everything non-essential. Line by line, stroke by stroke, the creature becomes simpler — yet somehow more powerful. By the final sketch, what remains isn’t a literal bull, but the idea of one — distilled, essential, and unmistakable.
That, in essence, is the difference between branding and marketing.
- Branding defines the bull — the central idea, the truth of what your business stands for.
- Marketing iterates on how that idea is communicated — refining, simplifying, optimising, but never inventing it.
Marketing may make the bull clearer. Branding decides why the bull exists at all.
Why Wanted.Berlin Takes a Different Approach
We work with B2B and technology-driven brands, but we don’t approach them as industry insiders chasing the same benchmarks. Instead, we approach them as strategic outsiders — partners who challenge the assumptions shaping your category.
Our process doesn’t start with what’s typical for your market. It starts with what’s true about your brand — the values, capabilities, and ambitions that deserve sharper definition and stronger creative expression.
Once that foundation is set, we build the marketing systems to carry it forward — performance, content, automation, and revenue operations — ensuring your brand is both distinctive and scalable.
Final Thought
So, next time you’re choosing a branding partner, resist the urge to ask, “Have you worked in our industry before?” Instead, ask: “Can you help us see our industry differently?”
Because the agency that challenges your assumptions is the one most likely to help you grow beyond them.
Explore how we approach strategic differentiation and brand definition with our Wanted.Berlin Diagnostic Tool.