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Our Perspective

What this means for leaders navigating growth, change or transformation in their organisation.

The Hidden Drag

Separating objectives and key results (OKRs) from brand can look neat on a planning slide. In practice it creates a gap between what teams measure and what customers feel. That gap is where handoffs slow, compromises creep in, and near-term gains quietly trade away long-term advantage. When the commercial engine sprints and the brand story walks, you need more discounting, more explanation, and more rework to close the same deals.

What’s really at stake is momentum. Momentum isn’t raw speed; it’s coordinated force. Without a shared brand compass, departments move, but not together. The cost is cumulative and shows up just when you most need consistency.

Brand As Decision System

Treat brand less as an identity and more as an operating logic: a clear promise, a few grounded principles, and explicit behaviours that guide trade-offs. When brand sits at this level, OKRs stop being departmental targets and become a mechanism for enterprise coherence. Features, service models, and pricing choices all pull in the same direction.

In our experience with mid-market leadership teams, the turning point comes when brand language is plain enough to adjudicate everyday decisions: what to prioritise, what to stop, and what “good” actually means across roles. That’s when accountability becomes shared, not siloed.

Make Outcomes Visible

Brand alignment earns the right to set harder OKRs by making outcomes observable beyond a single quarter. Track a small set of customer and talent signals alongside the financials, and tell the story with evidence, not assertion. Marketing Week (with Kantar and Google) reports that 58.9% of over 1,000 brand marketers believe stronger brands enable higher pricing, reinforcing the link between alignment and price realisation.

Consider a balanced lens:

• Recommendation and repeat rates tied to specific promises kept
• Price realisation and discount dependency by segment
• Inbound talent quality and time-to-accept across priority roles
• Customer verbatims that evidence the promise in use

Leadership Implications

Three practical shifts help alignment move from rhetoric to rhythm:

• Anchor every quarterly objective to one brand promise and one target customer; state the customer outcome next to the metric.
• Cascade brand pillars into team-level key results with shared definitions; retire objectives that fight each other across functions.
• Add a light brand-fit check at approval gates for features, campaigns, and hiring; make exceptions explicit and time-bound.

These moves simplify governance. They also reduce the interpretive work managers do in every cycle.

Momentum As Governance

When brand shapes OKRs, you replace heroic coordination with repeatable judgment. The enterprise feels lighter because teams spend less energy negotiating meanings and more energy compounding progress. Over time, that compounding shows up as steadier pricing, cleaner handoffs, and a culture that knows what it’s building toward.

The organisations that persist aren’t the loudest; they’re the ones whose strategy reads the same in the board pack, the product backlog, and the experience a customer has next Tuesday.

Sources:

• Marketers struggle to quantify brand–pricing connection — Marketing Week (with Kantar and Google)

1. Elevating Brand Enablement for Team Alignment
2. How a Single Brand Promise Creates M&A Momentum
3. Brand Consistency Beyond Content Guidelines