The case for the Chief Brand Officer

Creating a strong brand is more critical than it has ever been. Strong brands make us stand out within packed competitive environments; they encourage loyalty within fast-changing markets, build preference among customers and talent, create the conditions for improved margins, create resiliency from which to bounce back from mistakes, and give organizations the umbrella we need to make business strategies that emphasize innovation and constant renewal successful. Oh, and they can be worth billions.

As a result, establishing a strong brand might be the single most important factor for success in a new economy where barriers to entry have dropped, new competition is fierce, commoditization is rife, and technological disruption the norm. 

It is strange, then, that as any quick LinkedIn search will tell you, we see so few Chief Brand Officers. Especially when we consider the explosion of new CxOs within the leadership teams of organizations, all with a huge influence on the brand: Chief Customer Officers, Chief Digital Officers, Chief Experience Officers, Chief Innovation Officers, Chief Design Officers, and more.

New brand for a new world.

I wonder if businesses are still operating within the constraints of an old-fashioned frame of what a brand is, how it should be managed, and its role relative to the organization.

Within many organizations, “brand” as a job title or role sits within the marketing department, often reporting to the people responsible for advertising. Demonstrated simply: Marketing>Advertising>Brand.

When the primary vehicle for creating meaning and shaping the perception of brands was advertising, this was a logical structure. But that world no longer exists. Today, advertising is a single factor within a more distributed and complex system of experiences necessary to establish brand strength.

If we think about the total system of experiences that shape brand perceptions today, we first need to consider the reality of the world today. In today’s world, people make buying choices based not just on what we sell but on who we are, how we behave, what we stand for, and the experience we give them. We also know that what is inside is also outside. So the way our company does business affects our brand; the way we treat employees and suppliers affects our brand; our products and services affect our brand; the way we treat customers, society, and the environment affect our brand, the way people talk about our brand affects our brand, and yes, the way we conduct marketing, advertising and create specific branded experiences also affects our brand.

Take all of this together, and we can see that brands today achieve strength via the successful management and alignment of a complex system of factors that shape perceptions and create value.

Brand is not limited to the marketing department.

This might sound like a truism, but it’s the critical factor in why a Chief Brand Officer is necessary at the highest levels of executive leadership. The system of experiences that define brands and create value extends well beyond the limits of the typical marketing organization. It includes such disparate aspects as leadership vision, talent policies, culture, product pipeline, approach to innovation, operations, CSR, customer service, sales, and all of our ongoing marketing activities.

And while some organizations are responding to this new reality by breaking down silos and placing greater operational responsibility under the CMO, the simple fact is that brand is bigger than the marketing department. And while extending the remit of the CMO is likely to have a positive impact, we might not be setting our CMO up for success when we consider the amount of change they're already expected to cope with (think about the pressure a modern CMO is under to manage a complex and disparate tech stack, hit performance metrics, drive revenue, make sense of data, manage conflicting channels and conversations, engage customers, deliver and then act upon insights, shepherd consistently great creative ideas, contribute to business strategy, be a driver of digital transformation, and all the while keep a weather eye out for the competition).

Instead, it makes more sense to treat our brand with the care it deserves and elevate specific responsibility for it within the organization. After all, it may well be our most valuable asset.

In simple terms, we should invert the traditional structural relationship from Marketing>Advertising> Brand to Brand>Marketing>Advertising.

The keeper of the keys.

If we elevate brand within the organization and give someone responsibility at the seniormost executive level, what would be their role and area of responsibility?

I’m sure I’m missing plenty, but I think a CBO should have at least four specific areas of responsibility:

First, as modern business strategy becomes a process of constant innovation and renewal against the anchor of a common organizational purpose, the Chief Brand Officer should probably be the keeper of this purpose, advocate for it, and chief storyteller inside and outside the organization as to the power of this purpose with customers, employees, and society as a whole.

Second, and perhaps most importantly, the CBO would be responsible for defining the system through which the organization manages its brand against its overall strategy and purpose. Working with the HR team, the technology group, the product team, the customer service group, the design team, the sales team, the marketing organization, and more to define and utilize the principles, values, and ideals through which the brand is delivered. Coordinating, influencing, translating, and educating people through the choices and decisions they make, and over time developing a robust system of influence – a creative operating system, if you will – that defines how on-brand decisions get made irrespective of someone’s role or business silo.

Third, the CBO should be responsible for introducing and helping the organization manage a set of cross-silo brand metrics and measures based on a customer value standpoint. Taking a total view of what people experience as customers and as employees throughout their lifecycle and across the totality of their journey. Deliberately looking across silos and finding the areas where people and opportunities may have traditionally slipped through the cracks.

And finally, the CBO should be heavily involved in ongoing executive conversations around business strategy, M&A fit, capability building, and those critical decisions around the innovation pipeline that drive ongoing organic and inorganic growth and renewal.

A great coach.

So what kind of person would this role fit? It would be overly simplistic to say that a CMO would be the only fit. Under many circumstances, a CMO might make a great fit. However, based on my own client experiences, I’d suggest the net should be cast more widely. Some of the most successful brand-driven change agents I’ve met haven’t been marketers but COOs, Presidents, and even CFOs. People with a broad understanding of what it takes to drive change and have a good sense of the realities of the overall business and market.

Either way, it would be fair to say that whoever was to take on such a role would need to have the following characteristics:

1. A keen curiosity and a deep passion for the brand
2. To care about and have empathy for people
3. To be a great coach that can influence the actions of a broad array of people
4. The commercial gravitas to influence their fellow leadership team and members of their board
5. To take a systems approach to the levers of change
6. To have a strong eye for the future and a creative and innovative approach to taking advantage of it.

Most importantly, this would need to be someone others want to follow, capable of inspiring people to change rather than forcing them into it, and open enough to know that they won’t be right all the time or even most of the time.

Perhaps this is all a bit of a tall order, and maybe we won’t see growth in this role. But as the complexity of modern brand building expands, and as it becomes clear that current structures aren’t well suited to managing this complexity, I can only see the role of Chief Brand Officer, or whatever it might ultimately be called, expanding in the future.