How The Chief Brand Officer Found Its Way Back To The C-Suite
A 5-minute read created by a human for anyone who wants to build brand equity
There was a time when brands sunk most of their marketing spend on TV and print. This is where they built and maintained the brand; it’s where everyone was. Other channels of touch were called (and some people found this derogatory) “below-the-line” marketing initiatives. For many agencies, strategists, and creatives below-the-line translated to “not important” – yes, a fundamentally flawed way of thinking.
As we’ve all experienced, the digital world upended this model a long time ago. The continued fragmentation of the customer experience enlightened the uninitiated to the importance of a properly branded experience at every point in the customer journey. Today, brands are considerably more decentralized, and a brand’s ecosystem is infinitely more subtle and complex. This digital shift changed multiple industries and consumer behavior, all the while increasing consumer empowerment. Consumers now expect your authentic brand self to show up at every point of contact, consistently, every time, without fail.
Your Brand Is Everything, And Everything Is Your Brand.
Of course, this is how brands are built – consistently over time, across every experience. With this renewed attention to every part of the customer experience, chief brand officers are making a comeback. The title has been around since the mid-’00s but didn’t seem to have much staying power. Often the brand cop role fell to CEOs – think Branson. But today? There has been a significant surge in CBOs hitting the C-Suite. It signifies to stakeholders the importance of and commitment to building equity in the brand and acknowledges the diverse way that happens. When a C-Suite brings in a chief brand officer, it defines the company’s culture as one with a brand-focused priority. Inevitably, sending this message (and following through) unifies an enterprise and energizes a market. It takes the role of enterprise-wide brand stewardship out of the marketing department giving it the gravitas it deserves.
Your perspective on the role of a chief brand officer directly relates to your world view of brand and your philosophy for building a sustainable and valuable company. This perspective finds clarity by answering questions like, what is a brand? How do you build brand equity? What is the importance of brand positioning? How do people fall in love with, and become loyal to brands? How does a strong and affect employee satisfaction and productivity? How is a brand nurtured and maintained? And most importantly, how do you make a brand more valuable. Answering these questions lead you to the inescapable conclusion that your brand is everywhere. Your brand is everything you do, every feeling you evoke. This truth demands a philosophical and operating commitment to nurturing brand within the enterprise, and at all points of customer experience. For any company wanting to increase performance and value, it is a corporate best-practice. It should be the way you do business, gospel from the top down. Everything is your brand.
With this newfound clarity (not sure where it’s been), CBOs are again finding new traction. Lululemon grabbed one last January. The Webster created the new role in August of last year. Taco Bell got theirs in January this year. Bed Bath & Beyond in March. Goldman Sachs stole AT&T’s last June. Visionary IBM got themselves one all the way back in 2017. The list goes on.
Contributing to chief brand officers becoming fast-tracked is the truth that there has never before been so many channels of communication or experience that are collectively responsible for brand building. Strong brands today are built across a myriad of channels. Customer preference happens through a far more complex and often convoluted sales funnel than ever before. In today’s turbulent times, you can add to that the idea that some forms of brand engagement can have very little to do with purchasing their products, rather more about a brand’s alignment with social issues and causes. Consumers have front row seats to everything a brand does, and tremendous power to judge, and they will judge. They are not afraid to make trouble, so don’t piss them off.
So, What Is The Role?
Remember, a chief brand officer must be a philosophy before it is a role. While the philosophy of the role should be intellectually consistent, the specific role of a chief brand officer will be unique for different companies depending on the industry, size, stage, and organizational structure. Regardless, for all companies, the brand is an asset that must be nurtured and grown. For some, it may include an externally facing role as well. A CBO is a 30-thousand-foot person ensuring consistent brand alignment and experience in support of, and in compliment to all the other chiefs in the C-Suite. At its core, the chief brand officer’s role is informed by data, insights, and grounded in a sustainable and differentiated positioning because, in the end, this is capitalism. First and foremost, you are identifying viable markets and appealing to specific audiences. But it is also quintessentially a creative role requiring a good amount of subjectivity and vision. It wants good creative instincts
A CBO must own not just the brand’s rational alignment with market opportunity but also the experience and emotional expression of the brand across every point of touch. And I mean every point. It’s not that they must be creative directors; rather they are stewards of consistency based on clearly defined brand standards. They will be, at times, the brand’s conscience. A chief brand officer can create and instill a unified culture, get everyone marching to the same drummer. The role is predicated on the fact that there is no part of the customer engagement that does not equally contribute to and reinforce the brand. It all matters.
It’s s a diverse and far-reaching role that straddles both tangible and intangible brand issues. It’s a role that can undoubtedly have a significant impact on performance and value. Smart CEOs will make the role of a chief brand officer an ongoing cost of doing business, a critical part of any value creation strategy. The truly encouraging aspect of the rise of the CBO is the Suite’s acknowledgment that successful companies must invest in building and maintaining both tangible and intangible brand equity, in addition to revenue-driven marketing tactics. The direct financial returns of the role will always be difficult to express on a P&L in the short term, but the value is well understood.
For Every Company, There’s Got To Be A Chief Brand Person
Every company, B2B or B2C, will benefit from this rediscovered reality driving the resurgence of the chief brand officer. Every company is a brand that has tangible and intangible attributes that can be grown to improve performance and increase value. Often, early-stage business founders wear many hats. Until such time that there is a dedicated hire for the role, there must be someone to nurture the business through this brand lens. Someone’s got to wear that hat and be responsible for holistically building and nurturing the brand. When we speak of building power brands, we know that embracing their underlying philosophical approach and adopting it as a way of doing business is the key to building long-term, sustainable enterprise value. The earlier this is a company’s way of doing business, the greater the return on investment. Bake it into your company’s DNA and culture, and you will reap the rewards.
We welcome back the Chief Brand Officer with open arms and a sardonic acknowledgment to business that… we told you so…
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