A brand vision often sounds beautiful and changes nothing. It sits in a presentation, gets quoted once a year and has little to do with everyday decisions. Yet it is the most powerful tool a marketing leader has, if it is built properly. A good brand vision does not only describe where a brand wants to go. It also explains why the road there brings revenue.
At a department store I led three divisions with 37 people in total, with full accountability for budget and results and regular reporting to the leadership team. Today I lead a team of 22 people across 21 markets. In both roles I learned that a vision only gains backing when it convinces in the language of numbers as much as in the language of images.
- A brand vision only works when it guides concrete decisions.
- It needs a bridge to revenue, margin and customer value, otherwise it remains a wish.
- A few metrics shared with finance make it verifiable.
- The budget is the most honest expression of a vision.
Table of contents
What a brand vision has to achieve
A brand vision is a picture of the role a brand should play in its customers’ lives a few years from now. That picture is only useful if it helps to choose between alternatives. Which category do we expand, which do we leave? Which audience do we win, which do we only keep? A vision that gives no answer to such questions is too general.
That is why I test every brand vision against a simple standard: would a team decide differently if it knew it? If the answer is no, the vision describes a mood rather than a direction. How to hold a brand together with a few clear questions, I described in the article on brand leadership.
The bridge between image and revenue
The hardest task lies in translation. A vision speaks of meaning and desirability, the leadership team speaks of revenue, margin and planning. Both belong together. A strong brand lowers the cost of winning new customers, supports higher prices and keeps people longer. That effect has to be named, otherwise the vision looks like a luxury you afford in good years.
McKinsey describes that marketing should be seen as an investment in growth, and that marketing leaders need to translate their metrics into business results, ideally together with finance (see here: McKinsey, The CMO’s comeback). For a brand vision this means: it needs a bridge to the numbers a company is measured by from the very start.
Making a brand vision measurable
Measurable does not mean that every facet gets a number. It means that marketing and finance agree on a few metrics that show whether the brand is growing in the right direction. That might be awareness in a new audience, the share of full-price sales or the repurchase rate. What matters is that these values stay stable over years.
I have had good experiences with setting these metrics together with the leadership team before a major campaign starts. Then later there is no argument about methods, only a conversation about results. How such values work in reporting to the leadership, I describe in the article on brand equity in board reporting.
The budget as the most honest expression
A vision shows most clearly where money is allocated. Anyone who talks about a new audience and keeps putting the budget into the old channels does not really have a new vision. That is why every brand vision needs a budget logic that makes it visible: how much flows into long-term brand building, how much into short-term activation, and why.
You have to be able to defend this logic, especially when a quarter’s numbers are weak. How I go about it, I described in the article on the marketing budget. A budget that gets overturned at every headwind shows that the vision was never really anchored.
What I would do differently
I would bring finance into the work on the vision earlier. For a long time I first thought a brand vision through and then translated it into numbers. It is better to develop both together from the start. Then you get a vision that does not need defending, because the people who scrutinise it helped build it.
What remains open for me is how long the period a vision describes should be. Three years often seem too short for real brand building to me, ten years too far for planning. Perhaps the answer lies in keeping a brand vision stable over a long time and reviewing its goals at shorter intervals.