Brand Leadership & CMO

The role of the CMO is shifting from communication to accountability for growth. What defines a CMO in 2026 and how you can tell.

CMO or CBO: the two roles sit side by side on the org chart and still mean different things. Where responsibility really divides.

Agency management is leadership, not administration. Why the brief is the key instrument, where steering fails in practice and what it means for a brand.

Brand positioning is the decision about what a brand stands for and what it does not. Why sharpening means leaving out and why fashion makes it harder.

Brand refresh or rebrand: a refresh renews the expression, a rebrand changes the core. Why the decision starts with diagnosis and why fashion makes it harder.

Brand health tracking measures what people know, associate and expect from a brand over time. Why consistency matters and why fashion makes it harder.

Leading a brand across multiple markets means deciding what stays the same everywhere and what may adapt. Why this is harder in fashion and what helps.

The collaboration between CMO and CEO often decides more about the impact of marketing than any campaign. Where it fails and what builds trust.

Moving from creative director to marketing director changes the question your work is measured by. What changes, what you bring from creative work and what you have to learn.

Planning a marketing budget is rarely a pure arithmetic exercise. In the end the numbers are the result of assumptions, priorities and trust. Anyone who wants to plan and defend a marketing budget therefore needs less a perfect spreadsheet than a clear explanation of why this money achieves the most exactly here. The question matters…

When people set out to build a marketing organisation, they usually start with the org chart. Boxes, lines, roles. I think that is the wrong order. A marketing organisation should be designed from the decisions it has to make, and from the question of who can make those decisions best, with which knowledge. This matters…

A martech stack rarely grows to plan. It grows because every year one more tool arrives that solves a real problem, and because almost nobody asks what gets switched off in return. After a few years you are looking at a landscape no single person can describe in full, and at contracts that quietly keep…

Marketing mix modeling has moved back from a niche into the boardroom discussion, and the reason is less methodological than political. Since the attribution of single clicks became unreliable, every marketing lead is looking for a number that survives a conversation with the management board. The model delivers such a number. It just does not…

First party data has moved from a topic for the IT department to a question of brand leadership in only a few years. The reason is unglamorous. The borrowed routes to the customer are getting more expensive and less reliable, while the owned ones stay. A brand that knows who buys from it negotiates differently,…

Brand valuation is one of the few exercises in marketing that ends with a single number. That is exactly what makes it so attractive and so dangerous. Attractive, because a number works in rooms where arguments about meaning do not. Dangerous, because a number creates the impression that the matter is now understood. What brand…

Brand equity is the slide most boards turn past fastest. The figures are there, the curves point upward, and not a single question comes back. That is rarely the fault of the data. It is that nobody established beforehand which decision these numbers were supposed to support. Why brand equity fails in board reporting Whether…

Anybody planning an in-house agency starts with the same sum: what the agency costs, what an internal team costs, where the difference sits. The sum usually works out and still points the wrong way, because it does not describe the actual problem. The reason companies go in-house is rarely price. It is the speed at…

Brand leadership is regularly mistaken for campaign work. Campaigns are visible, they have a deadline and a budget. Brand leadership has none of that. It is the sum of many small decisions that look unremarkable one by one and together determine whether a brand is still a brand in five years. In a lot of…

Marketing metrics are plentiful. The four numbers leadership actually needs, and how to measure brand quality through category entry points.

Brand and sales do not clash out of character. They are measured on different timelines. How to make the friction productive.