Video
Brand Leadership: The Roles of the CMO and CBO
Clarify brand leadership between CMO and CBO by decision horizon to cut risk, align teams, and drive value-led growth with clear ownership.
Summary
Every brand hits a point where growth slows and price pressure bites. It tests strategic clarity and leadership mettle. The role of brand becomes clear when leaders go upstream, set a few non‑negotiables, and anchor decisions in evidence. From there, demand shifts, cycles shorten, and ROI becomes predictable.
Watch The Video
In this video, Preetum Mistry (CEO & Managing Partner) explores how to shift brand from a cost centre to a driver of measurable return.Our Perspective
What this means for leaders navigating growth, change or transformation in their organisation.
The Hidden Tax
When leaders treat brand as a line on the cost sheet, they’re reacting to symptoms, not causes. The real issue is misalignment: fuzzy choices about market, offer, and price cascade into inconsistent signals. That inconsistency makes customers hesitate, compresses pricing, and forces sales and hiring teams to do extra explanation. What looks thrifty on the spreadsheet turns into slower cycles and thinner margins in the real world.
Brand, at its best, is not decoration; it’s how an organisation decides. It clarifies where you play, why you matter, and how you behave when trade-offs bite. Viewed that way, return on investment (ROI) isn’t something you “do” in campaigns; it’s the compound result of thousands of aligned decisions.
Brand As Operating System
Think of brand as the operating system for choices that shape revenue: what you prioritise, how you price, which customers you lean into, and the proof you bring to every interaction. Codified well, it simplifies decisions and reduces rework across sales, product, and service. Prices hold more often. Pipelines get cleaner. Hiring improves because candidates can recognise a fit.
Evidence backs the commercial upside. McKinsey reports that over the 20 years to 2019, the forty strongest brands delivered almost twice the shareholder returns of the global equity benchmark, signalling that clarity and consistency pay back over time.
Where Value Shows Up
- Demand tilt: Clear positioning makes you easier to choose. Competitors must over-explain or discount while you maintain pricing and move first in the buyer’s shortlist.
- Decision velocity: Shared principles allow teams to say “no” faster and “yes” with confidence. From our experience this normally shows up as fewer approval loops and cleaner handoffs between marketing, sales, and delivery.
- Proof at scale: Consistent signals—case stories, product behaviours, partner rituals—build trust and shorten buying cycles. Reps stop selling from scratch; they reinforce what the market already believes.
Leadership Moves
- Go upstream before creative: Decide markets, offers, and price logic before debating messages or visuals. Messaging amplifies choices; it can’t replace them.
- Set a few non‑negotiables: Establish 3–5 principles that govern trade-offs (who we serve, what we won’t do, how we defend value) and coach leaders to use them daily.
- Measure behavioural proof: Track indicators that compound ROI—price realisation, win-rate by segment, sales cycle time, referral quality—and link shifts to specific brand choices.
- Treat weak ROI signals as alignment gaps: When a campaign underperforms, ask where strategic coherence broke down, not just what the creative missed.
The organisations that step beyond “brand as cost” and build it into the way they choose, prove, and price will find that ROI emerges less as a debate and more as the predictable outcome of disciplined alignment.
Sources:
- The future of brand strategy — Mckinsey
Further Resources
Every organisation hits brand questions it can’t solve alone — if you’d like an outside perspective, we’re here. Let’s talk.
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