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 organisations it therefore drifts to the place where nobody misses it, until a decision comes up and the ground it should stand on is missing.
- Brand leadership is a decision discipline, not a communications discipline.
- Four questions carry the work: stance, decision rights, constancy and effect.
- Without a timeline it breaks apart into decisions that are each correct in the short run.
- Across markets the simple rule is to translate rather than copy.
Why brand leadership is not a communications job
Placing brand leadership inside communications turns it into a question of imagery, tone and appearance. That is the visible part, and it is the smaller one. The larger part sits in decisions that are never recognisable as brand work from the outside: which product gets developed, which retail partner gets floor space, which price is held and which discount is granted, which collaboration happens and which does not.
Those decisions are rarely made in marketing. They are made in buying, in sales, in controlling. Brand leadership therefore consists to a large degree of having influence in rooms where the stated subject is something else. Anyone who owns only the communication administers the outcome of other people’s decisions, and then wonders why the brand feels different on the shelf than it did in the campaign.
Four questions that decide brand leadership
What does the brand stand for when nobody is watching
Every brand has a position that sounds good in a presentation. It only becomes interesting at the point where it costs something. A stance that rules out no option is not a stance. The useful test is always the question of refusal: which business would we turn down even though the numbers work? Without an answer to that, there is no brand leadership, only demand servicing with a logo on it.
Who decides, and on what grounds
The second question is less comfortable because it touches on power. In most companies it is not settled who decides when brand and revenue pull in different directions. As long as that stays open, urgency decides, and urgency almost always sits on the short-term side. How to make that friction productive is something I described in the piece on brand and sales. The same principle applies to judging creative work, which I set out under evaluating creative work.
What stays the same when the market turns
Brands are not damaged by change, they are damaged by arbitrary change. So you need a small, explicitly named set of things that are not up for discussion, and alongside it a large set of things that may and should change. If that line is never drawn, one of two things happens. Either the brand freezes because everything counts as sacred, or it frays because nothing does. Brand leadership means drawing that line deliberately and then living with it.
How would anyone notice the difference
The fourth question brings the work back down to earth. If a year of brand leadership works, what exactly would be different? Higher prompted awareness, more product sold at full price, less dependence on promotions, better quality of applicants. Which of those numbers actually hold up in a leadership meeting is something I covered under marketing metrics. Without such an answer, brand work stays a matter of taste, and matters of taste lose budget rounds.
Brand leadership needs a timeline
The most common mistake is not the wrong decision. It is the right decision on the wrong timeline. Any single discount can be justified. Twenty of them in a row train the market to wait for the next one. The evidence here is unusually good: in The Long and the Short of It, Les Binet and Peter Field drew on close to a thousand case studies to show that short-term activation and long-term brand building work differently and cannot be traded off against each other.
In practice that means every reporting cycle needs at least one number that moves slowly. Otherwise the organisation optimises exclusively for what moves fast, and what moves fast is always activation. It also helps to separate the two timelines physically in the report. One side shows what happened this week, the other what has shifted since last year. Mix them into a single view and the discussion reliably lands on the fast number, because it is more tangible and because somebody in the room can influence it.
Across markets, translate instead of copy
As soon as a brand serves several regions, a fifth difficulty appears. Centrally run brand leadership tends to confuse consistency with sameness. A campaign image that feels self-evident in Europe can fail in Southeast Asia on a detail nobody at headquarters had in view. Full local freedom produces the opposite problem: after three years nobody can say what the brand actually is any more.
The path in between is unspectacular. The stance is set centrally and is not negotiable, the expression is decided locally and is explicitly negotiable. That assumes headquarters phrases the stance in a way that can be translated at all. What this means for market entry in practice I wrote up using the example of fashion brands in Southeast Asia.
What I took away from it
In hindsight, brand leadership always looks like a series of clever decisions. In the present it feels different. It feels like repeatedly holding a position nobody wants to hear right now. The four questions above help me settle that position in advance, so I do not have to invent it in the middle of a conflict.
What I underestimated is how much of it is internal translation work. A large share of brand leadership consists of explaining to colleagues in other functions why a decision that is a detail to them is not a detail for the brand. Those conversations appear in no plan and make the difference. More on this in the Brand Leadership & CMO section.