Positioning is the part that changes revenue
A brand is the answer to three questions: who is this for, what does it replace, and why should someone believe it. Everything visual is downstream of those answers.
Businesses that skip this end up with an identity that looks fine and communicates nothing, which is why the rebrand does not move sales and everyone concludes branding does not work.
The most useful output of this work is usually subtraction. Deciding who you are not for is what lets the messaging get specific, and specific messaging is what makes ads cheaper, because relevance is priced into every auction you enter.
It also settles arguments that otherwise recur monthly. When the positioning is written down, questions like whether to discount, whether to take a particular client, and what to say in an ad stop being matters of opinion.
An identity is a system, not a file
The deliverable that fails is a logo in three formats and nothing else. Two months later nobody knows which blue is the blue, the presentations use a different font, and the ads look like a different company.
What holds up is a system someone can apply without asking: the type, the palette with the accessible contrast pairs already worked out, spacing, how photography is treated, and rules for the situations that actually recur.
It should include the awkward cases, because those are where systems break. What the logo does on a dark background, on a photograph, at the size of a social avatar, and when someone needs it in a single colour for a supplier.
And it should be usable by the people who will actually use it, which is often a receptionist making a flyer rather than a designer. A system only a designer can execute quietly stops being applied.
When branding is premature
This is the section most agencies leave out, because branding is profitable to sell and easy to justify.
If you do not yet know who your best customer is, positioning work is guessing. Sell to more people first; the pattern that emerges is the input this work needs.
If the problem is that nobody knows you exist, a new identity does not fix it. Distribution does. A beautiful brand nobody sees performs identically to an ugly one nobody sees.
If enquiries arrive and do not close, the issue is usually the offer, the price or the follow-up. Rebranding is an expensive way to avoid looking at those.
If cash is tight, this is the wrong first purchase. Something that generates enquiries pays for the branding later; branding does not pay for itself first.