Everyone outside of brand wants to stick their nose in. When actually brand should be sticking its nose everywhere.
You don’t get many people poking around the pricing model. Or the supplier contracts, the warehouse layout, the payroll system. But everyone has a view on the logo, the name, the packaging, the principles. Brand is the one function that invites universal commentary, because it’s the only part of the business you can have an opinion on without being an expert in.
That’s usually the complaint. It should be the argument. If brand is everyone else’s business, everyone’s business is brand’s.
Because brand is experienced at every touchpoint, so brand has a claim on every touchpoint. The job ad. The pricing page. The onboarding email. The customer service script. The invoice. The out-of-office. The retail staff training. The CRM cadence. Customers never see the identity system – they see the delivery date, the price rise, the refund email, the person on the phone, the job ad they scrolled past. All of that is the brand.
So brand has the right to butt in.
I saw this with a property developer. The vast mixed use development as a whole is the product. Everything – the buildings, the routes between them, the planting, the coating on the fencing, every little detail combines to make the product. That’s what someone feels when they stand there. Every one of those decisions is a brand decision, and most dont come near a brand person.
Nobody would let the finance team pick the red on a Coke can.
I think the reason brand people don’t butt in isn’t a lack of bravery. It’s often not being asked to be involved to begin with: in a lot of businesses a brand is still read as the aesthetics function, so a view on pricing architecture gets heard as the logo person having opinions about money. A general misunderstanding that these are brand issues. The risk is also asymmetric. Stay quiet and the brand erodes slowly – incoherence has no author, there’s nobody to blame. Speak up and slow a launch by a fortnight and you’re to blame. You’re the reason Q4 slipped. Obstruction is attributable in a way that erosion never is. And by the time you’re looped in it’s past. Objecting then turns you into the blocker. So brand learns that intervention equals friction, and stops.
The fix is being in the room earlier, not arguing harder later. Turn up with a commercial argument rather than an aesthetic one. Ask a question rather than issue a verdict. Bring the customer, not your taste – not being the arbiter of what’s nice, but the person who spends the most time with what customers actually believe. That’s a legitimate seat and it isn’t a taste claim.
Which really means the brand controller should be in every meeting where a decision gets made. That is the job.
And September is the moment. Q4 planning, budgets getting signed, everything moving fast. In September you can still shape it. By November you’re just objecting to it.
