This is a true story: a new head of marketing at a large consumer goods company was showing a CEO new slogans for several of the company’s brands.
The CEO didn’t think it was worth discussing it. To him, it was just a tactical marketing decision.
“I have strikes at two factories, retailer pressure on margins, shareholder presentations to prepare, and a budget gap to close,” he told us. “I’m not going to fight my CMO over a few words in a slogan.”
His reaction was understandable. A slogan hardly seemed like CEO territory.
That conversation, however, illustrates one of the biggest paradoxes in modern marketing. Top management takes a close look at spending capital on new projects, buying other companies, or making structural changes, because they know these choices affect the company’s future.
Brand equity deserves the same scrutiny.
Yet organizations routinely allow decisions that restructure a brand—its positioning, target audience, personality, distinctive assets or investment model—to be treated as too small to deserve serious executive discussion. Like the most dangerous diseases, they thrive because they escape the organization’s immune system.
By the time they are recognized, the damage is already well underway.
Bad strategies often arrive disguised as good marketing: agility, consumer centricity, creativity, or financial discipline.
Here’s how to spot them.
Impatience disguised as agility
Companies and their customers experience time in different ways.
A new campaign can soon feel really old for the people who’ve been working on it for months.
But consumers, noticing the ad for the first time, might just start associating the colors, symbols, sounds, or slogans with the brand—while the company is thinking about moving on to something new.
The greatest returns arrive late. Ironically, organizations often interrupt the process just as those returns start to accelerate, simply because people inside the company have become tired of the same assets.
What seems like a harmless creative refresh can actually dismantle valuable competitive advantages.
As Byron Sharp and System1 have both shown, distinctive assets become more valuable with repeated use.
Personal legacy disguised as consumer-centricity
Every new marketing leader wants to improve the business they inherit.
Trouble begins when improvement becomes confused with leaving a personal mark on the brand.
Companies often change their brand’s direction in small steps.
