Here’s a fact about hedgehogs that I find genuinely unsettling.

They’re one of Britain’s most vulnerable mammals. And one of the leading causes of hedgehog death alongside habitat loss and predators, are roads.

Not because hedgehogs are slow, (they can run at six miles per hour and cover several miles in a night). Not because they’re reckless. But because their primary defence mechanism, rolling into a tight, spiny ball, is perfectly designed for the world they evolved in and catastrophically wrong for the world they actually live in now.

When a hedgehog senses danger, it curls up. Every instinct says: make yourself small, protect your soft parts, wait for the threat to pass. Against a badger, this is genius. Against a Ford Transit doing 60mph, it’s a death sentence!

The behaviour that kept generations of hedgehogs safe has become, in a changed world, one of the things that’s killing them.

There’s a metaphor in there for small and medium sized business owners.

The economic climate is tough. It has been for a while. And the perfectly reasonable, deeply human instinct is to curl up. Cut the marketing budget. Go quiet on social media. Hold off on the rebrand until things settle down. Play it safe. Wait for the threat to pass.

But here’s the problem: the road is busy. The businesses that curl up in the middle of it don’t survive the traffic, and the crows (your competitors), are waiting to pick at your bones!

The research on this is pretty clear. Byron Sharp’s work at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute (the most rigorous examination of how brands actually grow) shows consistently that brands which maintain visibility during downturns recover faster and emerge stronger than those that go quiet. Cutting marketing spend doesn’t protect a business from hard times. It just means the business is invisible precisely when its competitors are also quiet, and the customers who might have found you, didn’t.

Distinctiveness (being genuinely recognisable, genuinely memorable, genuinely different from the alternatives) is not a luxury. It’s a survival mechanism. The right survival mechanism. The one that works on modern roads.

The hedgehog that stays curled up doesn't eat, doesn’t explore, doesn’t thrive.

Neither does the business that goes quiet.

The answer isn’t to ignore the danger. It’s to unfurl, to show up fully, with all your character and distinctiveness visible, precisely because the road is busy.

That's when staying visible matters most.