Summary

Every brand hits a point when growth looks healthy, yet discounts climb and sales cycles stretch. It signals misalignment—and the hidden costs it carries—testing strategic clarity and leadership cohesion. Clarity returns when leaders codify intent and track pricing power, quality of demand and loyalty. Then margin strengthens and market momentum moves with purpose again.

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Our Perspective

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

The Growth Tax

Green dashboards can be deceiving. When brand and strategy pull in different directions, the organisation starts paying a hidden growth tax: discounts creep up, sales cycles stretch, and credibility thins even as top-line figures look healthy. Harvard Business Review notes that misalignment between sales and marketing alone drains around $1 trillion a year globally — a reminder that the true bill arrives in margin leakage, rework, turnover, and customer attrition.

Because this erosion happens in fragments across teams and time, leaders often confuse motion with progress. The pattern is subtle: the numbers move, but the business gets harder to run.

What Really Moves

The antidote isn’t more data; it’s choosing the few measures that connect intent to behaviour. Three lenses expose the gap between what you say and how the market responds:

• Price power: average discount, price realisation in core segments, and gross margin trend.
• Demand quality: inbound mix against your ideal customer profile, segment win rates, and cycle length by segment.
• Loyalty dynamics: retention, referral rate, complaint patterns, and unaided brand recall momentum.

Read together, they reveal whether growth is compounding or being subsidised by concessions.

Read The Friction

In our experience with scale-ups and mid-market organisations, misalignment tends to reveal itself first as friction, not failure. Track where effort spikes and decisions slow.

• Commercial drag: rising discounts, elongated cycles in core segments, and heroic quarter-end deals.
• Organisational drag: inconsistent narratives, longer approvals, rework loops, and attrition in pivotal roles.
• Reputation decay: flat referrals, more complaints, and a net promoter score that trails awareness.

Any one signal is manageable. Two or more in tandem signal compounding cost and a brand that isn’t doing its share of the heavy lifting.

Lead With Coherence

Treat brand as an operating system for decisions, not a campaign wrapper. Clarify the non-negotiables — where you will not trade price for volume, which segments you will not pursue, and what promises you will not make. Codify these choices in the deal desk, the messaging, and the product roadmap so price power and demand quality are protected by design.

Then instrument the three lenses in your board pack and review them through the lens of your stage: scaling, entering new markets, or transforming the offer. When coherence is maintained at that level, you don’t just reduce cost; you create a compounding effect where belief, behaviour, and performance reinforce one another.

Sources:

• 38 Sales and Marketing Alignment Statistics for 2025 — Harvard Business Review

Further Resources

1. Aligning Brand and Strategy to Overcome Misalignment
2. Brand Playbooks: Aligning Strategy with Consistent Execution
3. The Link Between Brand Strategy and Design Execution

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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