Why brand development needs to move away from the marketing department
Uber’s recent company culture furore made it clear that a brand cannot simply rely on marketing team wizardry as a cover-up for bad brand purpose. Instead, the task of brand development must start with its leaders, writes Janice Radomsky.
My vision is that we take brand development and ownership out of the brand teams. Yes, that’s right. I’m suggesting we move it upstream, to leadership. Here’s why.
To start off on a positive note, experience tells me that more and more businesses are talking brand purpose. They’re in search of Simon Sinek’s “Why”: that guiding light that will give a business direction and its people a meaningful reason for doing what they do.
While I agree with most of what is said in the article, no one cares about the brand as much as the marketing team do. That team needs a leader that will develop that brand with management, and/or management need to empower that person or team to drive the development. Find the right person, and they’ll ask the right questions of leaders to implement the strategy.
Damien, I hear you and thanks for your response. But I guess the fact that “no one cares about the brand as much as the marketing team do” is the very reason we are seeing the misalignment in businesses that I talk about. I personally don’t separate a business and its brand. To me, they are one and the same. I’d love to see businesses making this shift, so they’ll stop paying lip service to their purpose via external comms, and start truly living and breathing it at every touch point, inside and out.