Brand has never mattered more to the bottom line — or been easier to fracture across sprawling teams, tools, and touchpoints.
I started my career in a field that people at the time were still debating what to call: performance marketing. It was the early days of SEO and paid search, and I was working with global brands that were growing quickly online. The internet was giving marketers a direct line to customers and, more importantly, a way to measure everything. Budgets followed numbers, numbers told a story, and brand, by contrast, was harder to measure because it is intuition-led.
That tension never really went away. It followed me through a seismic shift to mobile and into B2B marketing, and it has shaped the way I think about brand strategy more than any framework or textbook ever could: brand and performance are not competing philosophies. But for some organizations, brand has been treated that way, and the consequences show up in the revenue line.
The Irony at the Heart of Modern Marketing
Here is something that should not be surprising but often is. Brand has never mattered more, and yet it has never been more at risk.
The data makes a compelling case for brand investment. According to the Boston Consulting Group, 95% of marketing leaders say brand plays an important role in building awareness and consideration, and 97% believe it helps companies differentiate from competitors. McKinsey’s 2024 B2B Pulse report found that B2B customers now use an average of ten interaction channels during the buying journey, and Harvard Business Review found that 90% of B2B buyers ultimately choose a vendor already on their day-one shortlist.
The problem is that the environment brands must show up in has never been harder to navigate. Scott Brinker’s 2025 Marketing Technology Landscape catalogs 15,384 distinct martech solutions, a 100-fold increase since 2011. More tools, more channels, more touchpoints, and more opportunities for the brand experience to fragment before it ever reaches the buyer.
Two Experiences, One Lesson
I have had the privilege of learning brand lessons from very different angles — some of the most constructive were the painful ones.
I have seen what happens when a company builds a brand that is genuinely customer-first and product-led from the ground up. The brand was not a campaign or a set of guidelines. It was the lived experience of the product, the culture, and the customer relationship. When brand and product move together, consistency follows almost naturally. When they do not, no amount of creative spend can create an authentic brand.
When I moved into working with B2B companies, one of the things I noticed was how much distance can exist between product and marketing teams and the customer itself. In many organizations, sales and customer success teams are the ones closest to customers day to day, and if there are no strong feedback loops back to marketing and product, or if those teams operate in silos, this can create a disjointed brand experience.
What often happens is that each function starts building around its own version of the customer. Product teams may design based on a narrow view of how customers use, or should use, the product. Marketing may create an aspirational version of the brand that is not always rooted in the customer’s actual experience. Sales teams, meanwhile, are focused on engaging customers at a specific moment in time, usually when they are ready to buy.
The problem is that no one is looking at the customer experience holistically. A brand is not defined by a single interaction or campaign; it is the sum of every experience a customer has with a business. If those experiences feel siloed or inconsistent, trust in the brand starts to erode.
The Catch-22 That Traps CMOs
What makes this especially difficult is that the institutional pressures CMOs face actively work against solving it. Gartner describes a brand’s “doom loop“: underfunded measurement leads to unclear impact, unclear impact breeds skeptic;sm, skepticism leads to tighter budgets, and tighter budgets make meaningful measurement impossible. Unfortunately, when CMOs push for larger brand budgets, they lose influence with the C-suite.
The influence problem is structural. Too few executives say their CMO makes compelling business strategy recommendations based on market or customer data, or that their CMO effectively identifies the marketing initiatives most likely to contribute to company growth. These are symptoms of a system in which a brand has been separated from growth, creativity from accountability, and marketing from the rest of the business.
When I join organizations, I ask myself a harder question than “How do we improve the brand?” Why has the brand ended up in this position, and what would it look like to treat it as a growth system rather than a support function?
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Reframing the Conversation
The approach I take is to reframe the brand entirely, internally first, then externally. Brand is not a function — it is a growth system, and like any growth system, it requires the right inputs, feedback loops, and cross-functional ownership to work.
That starts with deep customer research, not as a one-time project but as an ongoing practice. In my experience, the future customer problem is rarely the same as the past customer problem. When we did the work to truly understand our customers at a granular level, we found that different personas required entirely different journeys, messaging, and evidence to move forward. We had been treating them as one audience. They were not.
From research, positioning needs to be shaped collaboratively, not handed down. The positioning work we did was stress-tested with sales, product, and customer success before it was ever published externally. We gave the team explicit permission to question it and built feedback mechanisms to capture what did and did not resonate.
One of our sales leaders ran what amounted to a live A/B test at an industry event, shifting his pitch to reflect the new positioning and tracking whether it changed his conversation outcomes. It did. That kind of internal validation is what turns a brand framework from a document into something the organization actually uses.
Execution is where most brand strategies fail, not because the strategy is wrong, but because brand is treated as a project with a launch date rather than a system that needs to be maintained. Consistency across every touchpoint does not come from guidelines alone. It comes from ownership. That ownership must be built into the operating model, with clear accountability across marketing, sales, and product, and feedback loops that surface where the brand is breaking down before it shows up in the numbers.
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What CMOs Must Own
If there is one thing I have learned working across different industries and sectors, it’s that the marketing leader has to own the brand strategy. Not by doing all the work, but by holding the alignment it requires and translating brand investment into language that the CEO and CFO connect to revenue. The CMO who waits for permission to lead on brand will find that someone else, or no one at all, fills that space.
Brand has never been more powerful, and it has also never been more fragile. The difference now is that fragility shows up in conversions, sales cycles, and customer trust. Recognizing that is not the end of the conversation. It is where the real work begins.
