I want to share this recent conversation I had with another consultant. I think most of us don’t understand the significance of our approach to solving important and complex problems.
My counterpart is in Italics, I’m replying in Bold.
Nice to be connected Bobby. I see you’re in the branding space. I just saw this post about corporate destroying brands and thought of sharing it with you. What’s your take on that?*
[*She was referencing an article about how the founder of Lululemon was responding to the degradation of the brand he led by the investors who took it over. It’s a classic tale of a brand with significant value being destroyed by the notion that everything requires an ROI to have value. Does anyone believe Apple has a $1T valuation because of the technology alone? Of course not. The brand is what makes Apple so valuable. But this lesson is for another article, maybe next week.]
We all know wealth doesn’t equate to taste or intelligence.
Exactly. Spreadsheet logic over strategy or vision. Do you do more of the rescue work or fresh builds these days?
I’m more of a visionary, optimistic leader who helps when huge aspirations need to be vision-set, then led. My ideal clients are led by innovative and visionary CEOs, looking to make huge jumps from low to mid-8 figures to 9 and higher.
That’s awesome, helping visionary CEOs make that leap is where the real magic happens.
We’ve been hearing from some branding folks getting heavy price resistance to budgets they’ve gotten in years past. And that most clients are backburning the big impactful projects, and paying just for the little projects.
Are you seeing the same thing too?
Not at all.
I don’t treat brand strategy and creative direction as projects, and neither do my clients. It is foolish to consider those as a project alone. And even more ludicrous to put them under marketing. As the CEO, you hope to get it right, then take no part in it, and, no matter what, choose to live with the results. By the time you decide to start another project-as-solution, you’re so far behind that the price to get it right is astronomical, or you’re already dead.
Meanwhile, you’re incurring a massive cost by losing significant market share to competitors who treat brand strategy and creative direction as CEO adjacent leadership roles. Because that’s what they are.
There is no Steve Jobs without Jony Ive. Everyone wants to be Apple, but misses the fundamental truths about the brand and how it became so successful.
Summary
Brand strategy and creative direction are leadership functions, not marketing projects. My clients and I treat them as core to the company’s direction—CEO-level responsibilities that define how the business grows, competes, and endures. When leadership delegates brand vision to “projects,” they lose control of their future. The strongest brands—like Apple—prove that creative direction and executive vision must move in lockstep to build something truly lasting.
