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I was reading a recent AdAge feature by FundamentalCo's Jonny Bauer about what a SpaceX IPO might represent, and one of his insights was super sticky for me.
He argues that an IPO isn't simply a financing event. It's a narrative event. Before a company goes public, most of the conversation revolves around what it has built. Once it enters the public markets, the conversation inevitably shifts toward what it might become.
Investors aren't buying a snapshot of the business as it exists today. They're buying into a future they believe is possible. The future becomes narrative. I agree without hesitation.
But what interested me wasn't the take on the IPO itself or brand species for public companies. It was the problem sitting underneath it, because companies don't have to go public to encounter that shift. They simply have to grow.
There’s no escaping it: every successful company eventually reaches a point where the business evolves faster than the market's understanding of it. In some cases, it even evolves faster than the organization's own understanding of itself.
In the beginning, companies are naturally easy to understand. There are fewer people, fewer capabilities, fewer decisions to make, and a relatively simple explanation for why the business exists.
Customers, employees, partners, and recruits tend to carry roughly the same mental model because there isn't much complexity to interpret.
Growth changes that relationship.
New capabilities emerge because of demand for them. Markets expand. Leadership evolves. Acquisitions bring in expertise that didn't exist before. None of those decisions are unusual. In fact, they're usually signs that the company is healthy and growing in the right direction.
The business becomes stronger. It also becomes more difficult to explain through the same story that once described it.
Nothing has to go wrong for this to happen. In fact, it tends to happen because things have gone right.
Every new capability, office, acquisition, or customer segment creates value. At the same time, each one introduces another layer of complexity that people outside the business have to make sense of.
Over time, those additions stop feeling like expressions of the same company and begin to feel like separate pieces moving in different directions.
The business still knows why each decision was made. The market often doesn't.
My thinking around this is that it’s the hidden cost of growth. Not the complexity itself. Which is the result.
Complexity is inevitable. It's what happens when that complexity is left to accumulate without anything continually reorganizing it into a coherent whole. A commercial laundry company deciding to branch out into infrastructure contracting presents an entirely new layer of complexity that’s not solved through messaging, advertising or a brand alone.
In fact, the more I've thought about it, the more it resembles a kind of organizational entropy. Not entropy in the scientific sense, but in the way successful systems naturally drift toward fragmentation as they become more complex.
Success created the complexity. Entropy is what happens next.
How do you solve for this? Most organizations respond in a fairly predictable way. They assume they have a communication problem.
So they build another service page. Another capabilities presentation. Another campaign explaining everything the company now does. That instinct is understandable, but I think it mistakes the symptom for the cause.
People rarely struggle because they know too little about a business. More often, they struggle because they can't see how the pieces fit together. A longer list of services doesn't necessarily create clarity. Sometimes it simply creates a longer list with the throughline lost somewhere in the mix.
Understanding isn't built by adding information. It's built by organizing it and actively fighting against the fragmentation.
I think about this in terms of legibility. Awareness answers a fairly simple question: Do people know you exist? Legibility asks something that is more interesting: Can people still follow the logic of your business as it evolves?
A company is legible when its future feels like a natural extension of its past. New capabilities feel earned. Acquisitions make sense before they're fully explained. Expansion looks intentional because people understand the organizing logic behind it.
When that legibility begins to erode, every new move has to justify itself independently. The business hasn't necessarily become less focused. The framework people once used to understand it has simply become too small for the business it has become.
This is where my thinking tends to diverge from the current brand think. We often describe brand in terms of expression: the logo, the messaging, the website, the campaign. Those things matter, but they all sit downstream of something more fundamental.
The deeper role of brand is to preserve coherence as complexity accumulates. It provides the organizing logic that allows customers, employees, recruits, partners, and investors to continually update their understanding of the business as it changes.
It doesn't reduce complexity or pretend it isn't there. Instead, it gives people a way to interpret that complexity without losing sight of the whole.
In that sense, brand isn't simply about making a company more visible. It's about keeping an increasingly complex company understandable.
The strongest companies aren't necessarily the ones with the broadest capabilities. They're often the ones whose capabilities continue to make sense together.
People don't need to know everything a company does. They need to understand the logic that connects what it does. Once that logic is clear, the business gains something more valuable than awareness. It gains the freedom to evolve without every new direction feeling like a departure from what came before.
Growth naturally creates complexity.
Complexity, left to accumulate on its own, creates fragmentation. Perhaps the role of brand isn't simply to tell the company's story. Perhaps it's to continually reorganize a growing business into something the people around it can still understand.
Jeff Skatzka is Co-founder and Creative Director of Measure Creative Group, where he helps growing companies build brands that stay coherent as they evolve.
