Brand as Business

Estimated reading time 4 minutes.

I get to work directly with the executive leadership of some incredible companies, helping them to define, evangelise and operationalise their brands across their organisations.

What I see are stark differences in how brand is regarded within different companies and - as a consequence - the degree to which brand is leveraged or under-leveraged as a business-driving asset. On the one hand, there are businesses who still regard brand as the outward expression of their business and who devolve sole responsibility for it to the marketing department. On the other hand, there are businesses who see brand as everything they do, and who believe it is everyone’s responsibility across the organisation to uphold and activate the brand.

What is common among this latter group is that the brand has been internalised by the whole senior leadership team. They have assumed joint responsibility for delivering on the core promise that they are making to their customers – what every brand essentially boils down to. Brand has moved from a trust mark to an imperative to earn trust, and now acts as a North Star to help guide decisions across the whole C Suite, on behalf of the customer.

This ‘missionary work’ on behalf of brand and customer is being done very often by the Chief Marketing Officer who recognises the critical importance of embedding brand and the customer at the heart of more boardroom conversations. In fact, we are seeing how CMOs are increasing in their ability to influence, as the insight and hard data they are sitting on grows in scale and scope.

There is clearly a way to go, however, as evidenced by the findings of the most recent edition (March 2023) of the CMO Survey (an annual survey of marketing leaders sponsored by Deloitte, Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business and the American Marketing Association).

US marketing leaders were asked how well their marketing function works with other functions to build the brand. While Marketing and Sales were considered to work well together (5.43 on a 7 point scale), the picture was more modest for both Marketing and Finance (3.59) and Marketing and HR (3.54).

Yet, these are two critical partnerships to ensure that brand is operationalised within the business.

When it comes to Finance, the CFO who cultivates a passion for the brand and for alignment with the brand strategy can make a difference at the highest levels of their organisation, according to Peter Shimer, Interim CEO of Deloitte. He talks about the finance leaders he admires who exhibit a strong desire to align with their brand, to be focused on customers, and to connect that to corporate strategy, and how this contributes to strong business performance.

There is potential for more CFOs and CMOs to work together on casting aside traditional demarcations around who owns different types of data, whether it is customer data or financial data. When leadership takes collective responsibility for delivering on the brand promise to customers it can provide a powerful external-facing lens through which to evaluate the potential implications of investment or cost-cutting decisions. ?

The other working relationship the survey highlights is between Marketing and the People or HR function.

I have seen the monumental impact that comes from aligning internal culture and brand, particularly in service-driven organisations, where employees directly deliver on the brand’s promise to customers. A recent project involved the development of the Employee Value Proposition for a large organisation.?The project’s lead sponsor was the Chief People Officer, who worked in partnership with the CMO, and who maintained the full engagement of the whole executive team along the way. The value proposition to employees necessarily had a direct and mutually reinforcing relationship with the customer promise. Everything had to flow from that: the benefits (soft and hard) for employees, the new behaviours expected of them, and the complete overhaul of performance KPIs. Where these had been solely built around business performance metrics, they now incorporated new measures such as those relating to drivers of customer satisfaction.

This everything view of brand is about full and total commitment to delivering on the promises businesses are making - to their customers, employees and to broader society. It is about senior leadership taking shared responsibility for doing so, and working in collaboration to align brand with business strategy. It is about every leader making brand their business.