What Small Businesses Should Steal From Big Brands (and What to Ignore)
By Chris Willman · July 2026 · Strategy
The short answer
John Stuart, who ran Quaker Oats, once said that if you split his company in two, he would hand you every factory and every acre, keep the brands and the trademarks for himself, and come out the better off for it. He knew which half of a big business actually holds the value, and it is the half you cannot see. Small businesses instinctively do the reverse. They copy the bricks, the visible expensive trappings of a big brand, and leave the invisible engine untouched. Steal what Stuart would have kept. Leave the bricks.
That line of Stuart’s deserves sitting with, because it is stranger than it first sounds. Here was a man whose company owned mills, machinery and property across the world, and he looked at the lot and decided the most valuable thing he owned was the one thing he could not point to. Not the factories. The name on the box. He was not being poetic. He was making a hard commercial judgement about where the worth of the business really lived, and a century of brand valuation has proved him right over and over.
This is exactly where a smaller business tends to go wrong when it looks to the big players to learn from. The part of a big brand that carries the value is, almost by definition, the part you cannot see, which means it is not the part on show. What you get to see is the finished surface. The confident campaign, the glossy launch, the logo that looks as though it was always going to exist. So that is what gets copied, because that is what is visible, and the smaller business quietly sets about buying its own bricks and mortar, a smarter logo, a slicker site, a launch to announce itself, while the thing Stuart would have kept goes untouched. You end up with the costume and none of the person underneath.
You can watch the trap spring in a very particular way. A capable founder becomes convinced that the reason a rival is pulling ahead is the thing on the surface, the better branding, the bigger presence, so the response is to spend hard on matching that surface. What cannot be seen, because nobody puts it in the advertising, is the years of consistency sitting behind it, the work that rival turned down because it did not fit, the single clear promise held steady while everyone else chased the trend of the month. The surface was the last thing to arrive, not the first. Copy it on its own and nothing much happens, because you have taken the result and left the cause.
I have spent a good deal of my career close to brands of that size, in the rooms where those decisions actually get made, and the thing that struck me hardest was how ordinary and how patient the real work was. Almost none of what made those brands formidable would have looked like anything in a photograph. It was rarely the campaign everyone remembered. It was the long unglamorous stretch of pointing in one direction that made the campaign land at all.
What to steal
- 1
The discipline of the edge
Strong brands are unusually clear about who they are for, which makes them equally clear about who they are content to watch walk past. Smaller businesses tend to flinch at that, chasing every enquiry for fear of leaving money on the table, so the message widens until it fits everyone and moves no one. A position built to include the whole world excludes the only thing that makes a particular person choose you, the sense that you were built for them. Deciding who you are not for is not throwing business away. It is what makes the right person stop and pay attention.
- 2
Patience with your own message
Big brands find a true thing to say then repeat it long past the point where their own team is thoroughly sick of it, because recognition is built by repetition rather than novelty. The moment you can no longer stand your own message tends to be the moment the market is only just beginning to remember it. Smaller businesses do the opposite, refreshing everything each quarter because it feels stale from the inside, which resets the clock to nothing every time. Stuart’s brands were worth what they were worth precisely because they had been allowed to mean the same thing for decades.
- 3
The instinct to be recognisable
The big players invest early in being unmistakably themselves, a look, a phrase, a handful of assets a customer can place before reading a single word, and this costs discipline far more than it costs money. It sits within reach of a business of any size. The error smaller firms make is treating distinctiveness as a reward for getting big, rather than one of the tools you use to get there in the first place.
- 4
How big companies think about time
Inside them the brand sits on the books as an asset, something expected to hold and grow its value over years, and that framing changes every decision made about it. You stop asking only what a piece of work returns this month and start asking what it is quietly building. Under real pressure a smaller business judges every pound by its immediate return, which is understandable and which also rules out almost everything that compounds slowly. Some of your most valuable work will be invisible on this quarter’s numbers. That was rather Stuart’s whole point.
What to leave
Then there are the bricks, the parts of the big-brand playbook that only function because the company is already vast, and these are the ones that will do you real harm if you lift them wholesale. Take the kind of advertising that asks for nothing in return. A large brand can afford to keep its name gently in the air, because at its scale even a faint lift pays back across millions of people who already know it. You do not have that scale, so marketing that invites no clear next step is, for you, nearer to a donation to the platform carrying it than an investment. Keep the consistency of the big brands by all means, but hang it on something that asks the reader to act.
The staged rebrand is another borrowed habit best left where you found it. Big companies turn them into events, with a launch and a budget to tell the world it has happened, whereas a dramatic overhaul in a smaller business usually destroys more than it makes, throwing away the modest recognition you have slowly built for something that feels fresh to you and merely looks unfamiliar to everyone else. You want customers to feel you becoming more yourself, not to wonder whether they have wandered into the wrong shop.
Be wary too of the caution that arrives bundled with size. Scale brings process, sign-offs and a slowness that big brands absorb because their weight shields them from the cost of moving late. Your advantage is the exact opposite. You can decide a thing today and run it tomorrow, speak plainly without three departments in the way, change course the instant the evidence turns. Copy the machinery of a large organisation and you take on its tax without its protection. And treat the vanity numbers with real suspicion, because reach and impressions mean something to a business large enough that a sliver of all that attention eventually becomes a sale. Lifted into a small business they mostly offer a way to look busy while very little moves. Attention that never becomes a customer is not a smaller kind of success. It is a more expensive way of standing still.
The thread running through all of it is the one Stuart pulled on. What is worth taking from big brands is nearly always the invisible half, the clarity, the patience, the discipline of being one recognisable thing to one particular audience. What will sink you is nearly always the visible half, the reach, the polish for its own sake, the machinery that only earns its keep at scale. And the part worth holding onto is that the advantages you already have, the speed, the focus, the genuine closeness to the people you serve, are the very things those big brands spend fortunes trying to imitate. So borrow Stuart’s test. If your business were split in two tomorrow and you had to give half away, work out what you would fight to keep. It will not be the logo or the campaign or the bricks. It will be the thing your customers carry in their heads about you, the reason they choose you before they have consciously decided to. Build that. Let the big brands teach you how. Just do not hand them your own name on the box in the bargain, because that is the half they would take every time.
