Designhouse

🤯 54% of buyers now begin their search with AI, not Google. This shift is rewriting the rules of brand visibility, and it is only one of the stories in this month's Designhouse newsletter. June gave us plenty to think about. Here is what made the cut: 🛠️ Brand architecture in the age of AI. Why clear structure has become the infrastructure behind visibility and ROI, drawn from our work rebuilding EMCOR UK into four propositions any stakeholder, human or AI, can understand. 📈 UK brands return to growth. UK brand value added £45.4 billion this year. We unpack Mark Ritson's salience question and why trust and salience compound through the same discipline. 🚀 The brand story behind a trillion-dollar IPO. SpaceX listed near $1.8 trillion a year on from a net loss. A look at what coherence is worth, and the sequence that releases it. 😎 Turn on, Tune in, Get Out. The studio's summer picks, from TeamLab in Tokyo to Hockney at the Serpentine. Subscribe to read this month's edition and get the next one direct to your feed. Link below. Designhouse. Where strategy takes shape. #BrandStrategy #BrandArchitecture #B2BMarketing #BrandValue #MarketingLeadership

Some good business news! 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. There was a strong correlation between consumer trust and financial growth. The most trusted brands in the UK increased in value by 15% in 2026, while the least trusted names saw an overall decline of 4%. Read the full story here: https://lnkd.in/e_4PpgAc #growth #brand #branddesign #UkBrandValue

⬇️ This is what strong brand identity, clarity of position and coherent brand architecture does for you ⬇️ 🥂Congratulations Evara (formerly Inbound FinTech) Marie H. And Sheila Mitham #womenFounders “WomenInTech

In 2020, EMCOR UK ran 14 service lines under a brand architecture too complex for its own people to explain. In December 2025, the business sold to OCS Group for £190 million. So what changed? EMCOR UK is a £240 million facilities services business employing 4,000 people. Its portfolio of 14 services had become hard to communicate clearly to staff, to customers and, increasingly, to the AI tools that now sit between a brand and its buyers. We rebuilt the architecture around a single strategic proposition and four memorable ones: Experience, Create, Enhance and Transform. Every stakeholder gained a structure they could understand and repeat accurately. The commercial story followed. The years before the rebrand Emcor delivered steady operational performance. The years after delivered the focused strategic growth that made EMCOR UK an attractive acquisition at significant value. 30% of your company's value is in your brand according to The Economist 54% of buyers now begin their search with AI rather than Google, and organisations with clear brand architecture achieve 3.5 times more visibility than those without it according to Harvard Business School. When your structure is clear, AI represents you accurately. When it is muddled, AI fills the gaps with assumptions or omits you altogether. Clarity is commercial infrastructure. Read the full story of the EMCOR UK rebrand here: https://lnkd.in/eRhyDGyq #BrandArchitecture #BrandStrategy #B2BMarketing #AISearch #BrandVisibility

SpaceX listed at $1.8 trillion in June 2026, the year after posting a net loss. Investors were pricing in one thing. Clarity. One worldview holds the whole portfolio together. STARLINK funds the rockets. The rockets carry the mission. Every venture advances the same idea: a future that is multiplanetary, sustainable and AI-powered, framed throughout as work for the good of humanity. Most organisations run the opposite way. Direction goes unspoken, sub-brands each build their own corner, and 1+1 quietly becomes 0.25. The fix is a sequence. Business strategy first, brand strategy second, then an architecture where every part lifts the whole. The trillion-dollar insight is business clarity. Our latest piece shows how to get there. https://lnkd.in/eBYQfUM8 #BrandStrategy #SpaceX #IPO #BrandArchitecture #BusinessStrategy Richard Clark Julian Ingram

One month on, and Evara is already winning. When we partnered with Evara (formerly Inbound FinTech) on their rebrand, we had to carry nine years of equity from their previous brand identity into a new identity built for the next chapter as the Growth Systems Consultancy for Financial Services. Weeks after launch, the new brand stepped onto a North American stage and came home with two awards. At the Fin.Tech Marketing Community North American Awards 2026 in New York, Evara won Best Use of Innovative Technology or Digital Platform and Best Agency of the Year. Two wins at the brand's first major outing shows the power of brand. Trust is required in the rebrand process that strategy, naming, visual system, and the story will hold up in the market. An acclaim this early in Evara’s tenure speaks volumes about the strength of the outcome of our work with them. Congratulations to the whole Evara (formerly Inbound FinTech) team. We are proud to have shaped this identity with you, and prouder still to watch it perform. Loving seeing you guys knocking it out the park Marie H. Sheila Mitham Fran Sánchez Read the full case study to see how we built the Evara brand from the ground up: https://lnkd.in/eUrFH_8d #Branding #RebrandSuccess #FinTech #BrandIdentity #Designhouse

AI is reshaping the branding landscape, and the brands that will compete are the ones with strong, well-codified architecture and distinctive, ownable assets already in place. This month's newsletter covers two projects that put that thinking into practice, plus Design Director Matt Gillman's review of the D&AD festival and what the industry is actually debating behind closed doors. #BrandStrategy #BrandDesign #AI #Rebrand #FinTech

Competent and entirely forgettable. That is the standard AI has set, and it is one of the reasons clarity now pays dividends. The other reason is that, in an increasingly complex world, simplicity of design is the antidote. That was the thread running through the annual D&AD Festival. Design Director Matt Gillman observed that the strongest work on show was built on ideas that felt obvious in hindsight. Other ideas that surfaced include 💡 The real creative skill is taking an obvious idea, making it singular, and embedding it across every touchpoint until product, service and experience become inseparable from the brand. 🦁 The commercial challenge is bravery. In a volatile environment, standing out from the crowd is a difficult sell. 🎯 The goal is making complexity feel effortless, which means strategic and operational depth inside an architecture that feels intuitive to use. 🤝 Human connection is under-rated Read Matt's D&AD reflections on clarity, AI and measurable brand value here: https://lnkd.in/ernAEbmz #BrandStrategy #BrandArchitecture #DesignLeadership

Proud to have played a part in bringing the Evara (formerly Inbound FinTech) brand to life. A Sunday Times Best Places to Work recognition months into a new identity confirms what we saw from the start: exceptional people, doing the work properly. 👏 Congratulations to the whole team.