How To Lead a Rebrand With Reduced Budgets During An Economic Downturn
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How do you lead a full rebrand, restructure a global marketing team, and compete with better-funded rivals, in the middle of an economic downturn?
In this episode of Spotlight on B2B Marketing, host Karen Lloyd welcomes Angela Brown, Chief Marketing Officer at NCC Group, to share her truly inspirational journey. Angela joined the business in January 2023, just as the macroeconomic turndown started, but since then has delivered a complete brand transformation while working with challenging budgets.
From navigating profit warnings to restructuring a global team across multiple disciplines, Angela offers unfiltered insights that marketing leaders can implement when facing their toughest challenges. This is real experience from a CMO who actually did it.
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KAREN & ANGELA
What You’ll Learn in This Episode:
✔️ How to execute a complete rebrand during a profit warning and budget cuts
✔️ The critical framework for brand development beyond just creating a logo
✔️ Why decision-making by committee kills rebrand projects and what to do instead
✔️ How to restructure a global marketing team from regional silos to a unified function
✔️ The secret to competing against better-funded competitors without matching their budgets
✔️ Why getting stakeholder sponsorship right is non-negotiable for brand success
✔️ How to balance internal and external communications during massive organisational change
✔️ The mindset shift required to move from digital-heavy to relationship-driven marketing
EPISODE OUTLINE AND HIGHLIGHTS
[01:13] What drew Angela to take on the CMO challenge at the start of an economic downturn
[03:09] Why the rebrand was a strategic imperative beyond the market conditions
[04:01] Three-pronged approach: team restructure, activity effectiveness review, and rebrand execution
[08:37] The importance of strong sponsorship and avoiding decision by committee
[11:52] Brand framework fundamentals: archetypes, heritage, and making every element work hard
[13:50] Critical practicalities: legal, trademark, translation, and domain considerations
[18:26] Restructuring from regional silos to a global marketing organisation
[21:06] Creating the marketing "engine" with junior talent to free up experienced strategists
[23:39] The website consolidation journey from 24+ sites down to 4-5
[29:36] Why having the right team makes everything easier
[32:33] Managing the three camps of people during change: believers, fence-sitters, and resisters
THE REBRAND EXECUTION FRAMEWORK
Angela's approach to rebranding demonstrates that successful brand transformation is far more than designing a new logo. It requires a systematic framework that addresses multiple dimensions simultaneously.
The Agency Partnership Approach
Rather than hiring a large agency, Angela worked with a small, agile agency partner—someone she'd worked with before who could understand NCC Group's heritage while thinking at pace. This relationship-based approach proved critical during budget constraints, as the agency was invested in the outcome rather than just billing hours.
The agency brought professional structure to the brand development process, taking stakeholders on a journey through brand archetypes, foundational frameworks, and strategic positioning. This technical rigor helped overcome the natural resistance that comes when "everyone has a view" about branding decisions.
Stakeholder Engagement Without Decision by Committee
Angela established a clear governance model early: she and the Managing Director of the business unit were the decision-makers. They would keep people informed and take them on the journey, but wouldn't act on every piece of feedback or make changes by committee.
This represented a cultural shift for NCC Group, where historically "almost everybody had a say." However, by engaging stakeholders appropriately throughout the process, including internal and external interviews conducted without leadership in the room to encourage honest feedback, they secured buy-in without sacrificing pace or vision.
The Unveiling Strategy
The initial logo reveal to the executive leadership team resulted in "tumbleweeds". Complete silence that Angela describes as a potentially career-defining moment. However, they'd prepared for exactly this scenario by creating a reel showing how the brand would work "in situ", mocked up LinkedIn posts, stage presentations, and website designs.
Once stakeholders could see the brand in context rather than just as an abstract logo, they fell in love with it. This taught a crucial lesson: don't overestimate people's ability to connect vision to creative to finished product to real-world application. You must join those dots throughout the process.
Practical Implementation Considerations
Angela emphasises the unglamorous but critical preparation work:
Legal and trademark searches across all global territories
Translation and cultural meaning checks for different regions
Domain name availability and acquisition
Consolidation strategy for existing web properties
She equates it to decorating: "It's 90% in the prep, but that's the boring bit because we all just want to splash the paint on the wall." This foundational work enables successful execution when the exciting creative work begins.
COMPETING WITHOUT DEEP POCKETS
How do you compete in a highly competitive cybersecurity market against private equity-backed rivals who can "splash the cash" when your own budgets are constrained by a profit warning?
Angela's approach combines ruthless prioritization, channel diversification, and leveraging the unique strengths of a services business.
Being Brave About What Doesn't Work
Angela advocates for being "data-informed" rather than "data-driven" as a marketing leader. She trusts her gut when something isn't working rather than spending excessive time trying to validate what she already knows.
Early in her tenure, she identified activities that weren't delivering impact and simply stopped them: "I'm not going to put this amount of money on a slide and go into the CEO and say, I think this is a good idea because I don't. So we're going to stop doing that right now."
This freed up budget immediately and bought breathing room for longer-term strategic changes.
Overcoming Resistance to Events
When Angela proposed increasing investment in events and getting people into the market, she met considerable resistance: "We don't do events."
Her response: "You do now, and this is what we're going to do."
As a services business, once prospects meet NCC Group's people, "it's a very easy sell because you've got fantastic people." Enabling those people to be present in the market became a strategic priority, even when it required Angela to become a "player manager" and get her hands dirty to lead the change by example.
The Partnership with Sales
Angela emphasises that the partnership between marketing and sales is critical, especially during resource constraints and organisational change. Having worked in combined business development and marketing roles at PwC, she sees them as "two sides of the same coin."
The buyer journey has "lots of blurry parts" and the way marketing and sales work together should reflect that reality. Finger-pointing between functions isn't helpful, collaboration that mirrors the messy, non-linear customer journey is what drives results.
Restructuring for Global Effectiveness
When Angela joined NCC Group, marketing, communications, and government affairs were separate functions, and the business operated as distinct regional entities. With the CEO's strategy to globalise the business, Angela restructured the entire function while facing budget constraints.
She rebalanced internal vs. external communications (from many internal comms people and one external person to a more externally focused team), created a marketing "engine" by bringing in junior talent to free up experienced strategists from day-to-day execution, established an in-house design function in Manila for brand consistency and agility, and consolidated from 24+ websites down to 4-5 for dramatically improved efficiency.
Angela describes this as "all hands on deck" with the team at one point down to half or two-thirds capacity. She credits success to having the right people who believed in the vision and were willing to pull through together.
Quick Wins and Long-term Transformation
Angela counsels leaders not to underestimate how long change takes, but to identify quick wins that "buy you breathing space for the stuff that's a bit harder in terms of return to demonstrate."
This combination of immediate impact and patient long-term building allows leaders to maintain credibility with the C-suite while executing the deeper transformation required.
KEY ADVICE FOR CEOS AND MARKETING LEADERS
For CEOs:
Empower Data-Informed Decision-Making Over Analysis Paralysis - Explains how to support marketing leaders in making brave decisions quickly without requiring exhaustive validation
Prioritise Team Quality Over Speed, Even When It's Uncomfortable - Addresses the pressure to fill seats quickly and why operating with reduced capacity short-term is better than rushing hires
Establish Clear Brand Governance and Protect Decision-Making Authority - Covers how CEOs must actively support decisive leadership, protect against decision-by-committee, and set realistic transformation timelines
For CMOs & Marketing Leaders:
Be Data-Informed, Not Data-Driven—Trust Your Gut - Elaborates on the distinction between using data to inform decisions vs. letting it dictate every move, with Angela's examples of making decisive cuts to free up budget
Build for the Right Team, Not the Fast Team - Deep dive into why rushing hiring is costly, the importance of values/mindset fit, and how to manage the three camps of people during change
Master Brand Governance: Sponsorship and Decision-Making Authority - Comprehensive guidance on establishing clear decision-making, the "tumbleweeds moment," and the importance of unglamorous preparation work
TODAY’S GUEST
Connect with Angela on LinkedIn
Angela Brown is the Chief Marketing Officer at NCC Group, a global leader in cyber security and software resilience.
Since joining in 2023, Angela has delivered a complete rebrand (launching Escode the software resilience business), refreshed the NCC Group brand, and transformed the marketing function from regional silos into a unified global team.
With over 25 years of B2B marketing experience, Angela is known for transforming underperforming marketing functions into strategic enablers. She champions data-informed decision-making, relationship-driven marketing over digital-only approaches, and building high-performing teams that deliver commercial results even in resource-constrained environments.
OUR HOST
Karen Lloyd is a passionate marketing head-hunter and recruitment expert specialising in marketing and C-suite in B2B industries. With over 25 years of experience in the recruitment industry, Karen brings a unique depth of expertise that sets her apart from most recruiters.
Over her career, Karen has accumulated a wealth of experience that includes serving as a Board Director and being actively involved in growing a business for 13 years. Karen has been a part of five start-ups, giving her first-hand knowledge of the critical importance of hiring the right people.
Currently, Karen is the founder and Director of Armstrong Lloyd. She leads a very special team that partners with businesses and empowers them to build industry-leading marketing and sales teams for some of the most exciting B2B brands - from small, agile and disruptive start-ups to global giants providing a wealth of product and service offerings.
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