The state of most partner brands
Cover the logos on ten Microsoft partner websites and you'd struggle to tell them apart.
Same blue and grey. Same stock photo of a smiling team round a laptop. Same words - trusted, experienced, end-to-end, customer-first. Same claim to be a "true partner, not just a supplier".
None of it's bad work. It's just interchangeable, and interchangeable is expensive. It means every deal comes down to price and relationship, because you've given the buyer nothing else to choose on.
What we mean by branding (and what we don't)
Let's be clear up front, because "branding" gets used to mean two very different things.
We're not just talking about a logo refresh. A new colour palette on the same undifferentiated business changes nothing.
Branding here means the whole package: what you stand for, who you're for, what you say, and how you look and sound while you say it. The visual identity is the last part, not the first. It sits on top of proper value proposition development and audience-led messaging.
Do it in that order and the design decisions get easy, because you're expressing something rather than guessing.
Who this is for
Microsoft partners at one of these three moments.
You've outgrown the brand you started with
It was fine at ten people. At sixty, with a specialist practice and a real sales team, it looks small.
You've merged or acquired
Two brands, two customer bases, two sets of language, and nobody's decided what the combined business actually is.
You look like everyone else and you know it
Nothing's broken. It's just doing no work for you, and you're feeling it in competitive deals.
What we do
Six pieces, in the order that makes the later ones easy.
Brand strategy and positioning
Who you're for, what you fix, what you stand against, and the reason someone should choose you over the partner down the road. This is where the honest conversations happen - usually about the customers you'd rather stop serving and the sectors where you're genuinely brilliant.
Messaging and tone of voice
Your core story, your proposition, how you describe each service, and the difference between how you sound on a landing page and how you sound in a proposal. Plus a tone of voice guide your team can actually use, with real before-and-after examples rather than abstract adjectives.
Visual identity
Logo, colour, typography, imagery, templates. Built to work across a website, a slide deck, a proposal, an event stand and a LinkedIn banner - because that's where it lives in reality.
Brand guidelines that get used
Most guidelines documents get opened twice and then ignored, usually because they're 80 pages of theory. Ours are short, practical, and written for the person who has to build a slide at 4pm on a Thursday.
Rollout support
The unglamorous part. Website, templates, social profiles, proposal documents, email signatures, partner-facing material, and how you announce it without making a meal of it.
Microsoft co-branding
How your identity sits alongside Microsoft's without disappearing into it. Using your designations and specialisations as proof points rather than wallpaper, staying inside the brand rules, and making sure "Microsoft partner" reads as a credential rather than your entire personality.
How we work
Five stages, and you keep everything at the end of them.
Discovery
We talk to you, your team, and - importantly - your customers. The best positioning is usually already sitting in your customer base, unused.
Strategy workshop
Half a day or a full day with your decision-makers in one room. This is where it gets pinned down.
Messaging
The story and the language, drafted, reviewed and sharpened.
Identity
Visual design, developed against the strategy rather than against taste.
Rollout
Assets, templates, guidelines, and a sensible order to do it in. You keep everything - the frameworks, the research, the reasoning, not just the finished files.
Branding support packages
Three ways in, depending on how much of the brand needs rebuilding. We'll scope properly before anything's agreed.
Brand sharpener
For partners whose identity is fine but whose story isn't landing. Positioning and target profile, core messaging and proposition, service-level messaging, a short tone of voice guide with before-and-after examples, and a homepage and sales-deck rewrite. No new visual identity.
Brand rebuild
The full job for a partner who's outgrown what they started with. Everything in the sharpener, plus customer and team discovery interviews, a full-day strategy workshop, new visual identity (logo, palette, typography, imagery), short practical brand guidelines, and core templates for decks, proposals, social and email.
Merged-business brand
For partners bringing two businesses together. Everything in the rebuild, plus a combined-entity positioning decision, portfolio and naming architecture, migration messaging for both customer bases, Microsoft co-branding treatment, and a phased rollout plan across website, templates and partner-facing material.
What shapes the scope
Scope moves on three things: how many customer and stakeholder interviews are worth doing, how many services or sub-brands need their own messaging, and how much rollout you want us to do rather than hand to your team.
Rollout beyond the core templates - full website build, event stands, video, campaign creative - is scoped separately alongside our design work.
Where the output feeds an approved Microsoft campaign, some of it can often be funded. The Microsoft Co-op Funds Hub covers what qualifies and what doesn't.
Why a Microsoft partner specialist
Because we're not learning your world on your budget.
We know what a Solutions Partner designation is and why it's hard to explain to a buyer. We know what Microsoft's sellers and account teams need to see before they'll bring you into a deal. We know why "we do everything Microsoft" is a positioning problem rather than a strength.
A generalist agency can make you look nice. Fewer can make you look like the obvious choice to a customer who's already talking to three other Microsoft partners.
A word on niching
We'll almost certainly push you to narrow down. Most partners resist it, and the fear is always the same - that saying "we're brilliant at manufacturing" turns away everyone else.
In practice it does the opposite. Specific is memorable, memorable gets referred, and buyers recognise themselves in it. There are thousands of Microsoft partners in the UK; being one of eleven that a manufacturer would shortlist beats being one of thousands that anybody might.
We take our own advice on this, incidentally. We only work with Microsoft partners. Yes, it puts off everyone else, and that's fine.
What good looks like afterwards
Your team gives the same answer to "what do you do".
Your homepage would fail the logo-swap test in your favour.
Sales stop rewriting the same slides from scratch.
Microsoft's account teams can repeat your story accurately without you in the room.
You're being shortlisted for the deals you actually want.