Inhaltsverzeichnis
Why the brand belongs on the CEO’s desk — and what that means in practice
Inhaltsverzeichnis
Imagine your company owns an asset that accounts for somewhere between a fifth and half of your total enterprise value. It influences whether customers choose you or your competitor. It helps determine whether you can command higher prices. It decides whether you win the best talent. And it shapes whether your organisation pulls in one direction or every department does its own thing.
Now imagine that for this asset there is no real governance in your company. No clear responsibility at board level. No robust measurement. No strategic steering process. Instead it is delegated to a department that measures it in click rates and campaign reach.
That is the reality in most companies when it comes to brand.
Finance has a rulebook, audits and a CFO. Data has governance structures and increasingly a CDO. Intellectual property has patent portfolios and legal departments. But the brand asset — empirically established as one of the strongest drivers of enterprise value — is treated by many companies as a communications project.
That is not a marketing problem. It is a leadership problem.
The first step towards a solution is a different understanding of what a brand even is, because most misunderstandings start here.
A brand is not a logo. Not a slogan. Not a campaign. Not a colour system. All of those are forms of expression, not the thing itself. Nor is a brand a feeling that marketing departments produce. And it is not a self-description written into a mission statement.
A brand is a state in other people’s memory.
It forms in the minds of customers, talent, partners and employees. That is where associations, expectations and meanings take shape. That is where it is decided whether your company is remembered at all in a relevant decision moment. And that is where it is decided whether it is considered a credible option.
That sounds abstract but has a very concrete consequence: the brand does not belong to you. You cannot control it. You can only influence it — through what you do, say, show and make experienceable. And that is exactly what makes brand management a management task, not a creative one.
Because the decisive question is not: what does our brand look like? It is: what are we remembered for when it matters?
Before we talk about steering, the economic basis has to be clear. As long as brand is treated as a soft topic, it will never get the attention it deserves.
The evidence is unambiguous.
Brands drive revenue. Strong brands are recalled in more buying situations, considered more often and chosen more often. Companies with strong brands achieve measurably higher market penetration — not because they advertise more, but because they are more present in the minds of relevant buyers.
Brands protect margin. Companies with strong brands can command higher prices because customers attribute more meaning to them. Willingness to pay more is explained almost entirely by perceived relevance and distinctiveness — not by objective product superiority.
Brands secure the future. Companies with strong brands are four times more likely to increase their value share in the market. Conversely: cutting brand investment to improve short-term results reduces base revenue and later requires roughly twice the investment to win back the lost ground.
Brands lower the cost of capital. Portfolios of companies with strong brand equity have significantly outperformed broad stock indices over a period of some seventeen years. Strong brands reduce volatility because they generate steadier demand and higher customer retention.
The question is therefore not whether brands pay off. The question is why so few companies steer them accordingly.
Most executive teams intuitively understand the external value of a brand: awareness, preference, willingness to pay. What few understand is that a brand works at least as strongly inwards.
Studies show that employee behaviour accounts for around 30 percent of brand success. In service companies the figure is often above 50 percent. That means a third to a half of your brand effect arises not from communication but from the behaviour of your people.
That is an enormous lever — and an enormous risk.
Because in most companies a gap opens between what the brand promises and what employees know, understand and live of it. According to Gallup, two thirds of all employees have only a weak emotional bond with their employer. Almost a quarter have quietly checked out. And the majority cannot explain their company’s brand strategy in their own words.
That has direct consequences. If a brand promises simplicity but the internal process is complicated, the customer feels it. If a brand promises closeness but sales acts at a distance, a credibility problem arises. If a brand promises innovation but the organisation thinks in silos, the promise becomes an empty claim.
These gaps — the difference between promise and experience — are not operational problems. They are brand problems. And they systematically destroy the asset you have built.
Here lies the strategic point many executive teams overlook: a brand is not only an asset that works outwards. It is the most effective instrument for aligning the behaviour of hundreds or thousands of people towards a common goal.
Think about it. Most companies wrestle with one basic problem: how do I make sure every department, every team, every employee works in the same direction? Strategy papers get written and disappear into drawers. Mission statements hang in corridors and are ignored. OKRs are set and stay abstract.
A clear brand solves this problem at a deeper level. It creates a shared picture of what the company stands for — not as internal self-admiration, but as a promise to the people who decide about success: customers, talent, partners.
Once that picture is clear, it becomes a decision criterion. Does this product development fit what we stand for? Does this service experience match our promise? Does this hiring decision reflect our values? Does this investment pay into our brand?
The brand then becomes what it already is in the strongest companies: a steering instrument that synchronises decisions without centralising them. Employees do not need an instruction for every situation if they know what the brand stands for. They can decide independently and still act coherently.
That works only under three conditions.
First: employees must know the brand strategy. Not as a marketing slide, but translated into relevance for their own area of work. What does our brand promise mean for accounting? For reception? For IT? For sales? That translation is leadership work, not communications work.
Second: employees must identify with the brand. Knowledge alone is not enough. Someone who knows the values but feels no commitment to them works to rule. Identification comes from leaders who model what they demand. From stories that show what brand-consistent behaviour concretely means. And from a culture in which brand values are not posters on a wall but the yardstick for recognition and criticism.
Third: employees must be enabled to deliver the promise. That concerns processes, tools, decision latitude and skills. A brand that promises speed needs fast processes. A brand that promises personal care needs employees with genuine room to act.
Know. Want. Be able. When all three dimensions come together, the brand moves from communications instrument to organising principle.
If a brand is a strategic asset and a leadership instrument, then it needs governance to match. Five principles are decisive.
1. Clear responsibility at the top.
A brand must not be delegated to a department with no access to company strategy. The CEO is the first brand ambassador. Not because they should approve campaigns, but because they must ensure the brand is steered strategically — across all functions.
2. A brand strategy that is more than communication.
A robust brand strategy answers three questions: what do we want to stand for? (meaning) What are we recognised by? (brand codes) And where is our promise made experienceable? (delivery at touchpoints) These three dimensions form a system. Remove one and the brand weakens.
3. Marketing and HR work together.
If employee behaviour determines much of brand success, then the brand cannot be a pure marketing task. Brand strategy has to flow into HR processes: recruiting, onboarding, objectives, leadership development and performance review. That requires a collaboration which does not exist in most companies today.
4. Measurement beyond campaign KPIs.
Most companies measure their brand by reach, clicks and awareness. That is like judging the state of a building by the colour of its facade. Robust brand governance measures how the brand is perceived: awareness, familiarity, attribution of meaning, purchase intent, willingness to pay. And it measures internally: do employees know what the brand stands for? Do they identify with it? Do they act accordingly?
5. Treat brand investment as asset building.
As long as brand spending is booked as running cost and cut first under pressure, the company signals that it does not take its own asset seriously. Strong companies understand brand investment for what it is: building an asset that drives revenue, margin and enterprise value over the long term.
Brand management is not something you as CEO have to steer in detail. You do not have to approve drafts, choose typefaces or judge campaigns.
But there are four things only you can do.
You can make sure your organisation knows what it stands for. Not as a poster in the corridor, but as a lived basis for decisions. That starts with being able to articulate clearly yourself what your brand stands for and why it matters to customers.
You can ask the right questions. Not „do I like this?“ but „does this pay into our brand?“ Not „what does the campaign cost?“ but „how is our brand equity developing?“ Not „why do we need the budget?“ but „what happens if we do not invest here?“
You can insist on collaboration between marketing, HR, sales and product development. A brand is a cross-cutting task. Stuck in a silo, it cannot unfold its full effect.
And you can model what you expect. Employees watch what the leadership pays attention to. If you take the brand seriously — in meetings, in decisions, in priorities — your organisation will too.
A brand is not a marketing topic. It is an asset that wants to be led. And responsibility for it starts right at the top.
