Hey CMO, Is Your Organization Holding Back Your Brand’s Full Potential?  

As a CMO, you’re under growing pressure to deliver measurable growth and revenue from your brand investments, especially if you’re (re)launching the brand. 

The challenge is that while you’re being asked to do more with fewer resources, traditional Marketing functions often only control a fraction of the levers needed to maximize brand impact. In today’s complex environment, operating in such a silo is no longer viable – the entire organization must align and work together to deliver on the brand promise. Leading CMOs are connectors and orchestrators, working with multiple departments and the executive teams to point all the elements of your organizational DNA – strategy, purpose, values, behaviors, employer brand, CX and more – in the same direction. While this sounds straightforward, the reality is far from simple. You’re navigating a maze of existing frameworks, competing priorities and political agendas that must be simplified and negotiated – meaning you rarely start with a blank slate or direct path forward.  

So, how do you ensure your organization is aligned to deliver maximum brand impact?  

Design to Align 

Alignment is the critical foundation. When the core elements of your strategic framework are aligned with your brand strategy – or designed into it – everyone in the organization can drive in the same direction. This cohesion not only sets the stage for delivering on brand and customer promises but also fuels sustainable growth. Our latest Brand and Demand research underscores this, revealing that 89% of leading marketing organizations have a clear growth and brand strategy. These organizations know where they are going and share a common vision of how to get there, proving that alignment is essential for long-term success and partnership. 

Start Early with Other Functions 

The best CMOs focus on cross-functional relationships, with 84% of marketing leaders viewing themselves as organizational orchestrators who enable a modern, connected organization. To set the stage for success, it’s crucial to begin the alignment journey as early as possible by involving all functional and business unit stakeholders in the strategic brand exercise. Invite them to provide input upfront, ensuring the strategic components of their domains contribute meaningfully to shaping the brand strategy. This collaborative approach not only strengthens the brand’s foundation but also balances the tension between leveraging existing organizational strengths and adapting to market opportunities uncovered by the revised brand strategy. 

Stay Close Throughout  

Maintain close engagement with stakeholders throughout the brand strategy development and activation processes. Regular collaboration ensures the core functions and business units co-create activities that they need to own on their own roadmaps to reinforce and deliver against the brand values within their spheres of influence. This sustained alignment keeps momentum moving in the right direction across the organization. 

Select Priority Paths for Organizational Activation 

You have choices to make. Aligning an organization requires prioritization. The specific paths you take will depend on your brand ambitions and the current level of organizational alignment with your brand strategy. For example, if your brand stands for ‘innovation and speed,’ are your customer processes designed to deliver on those values accordingly? Is HR recruiting talent that embodies this mission? Is Finance easy to work with? Are Operations and R&D living up to the promise your advertising claims?  

From our client work, we see that typically, there are five paths to consider as you activate the organization and drive an aligned growth effort behind a new brand. Depending on your context and ambition, you may choose to focus on one as a priority or a combination of these:  

1. Functional Alignment

Equipping leaders across functions and business units with the tools needed to align on strategies and plans is essential for supporting brand strategy and driving growth. For instance, Vistra, a global corporate services firm, successfully aligned leadership across the entire C-suite and business units to embed a new brand strategy. This included defining associated values and behaviors within a newly merged global organization, ensuring alignment across all functions – from front office to back office. 

2. Employee Ignition (EX → CX)

Activating the brand internally is crucial for inspiring and enabling employees to live up to the brand promise, especially by reinforcing customer-facing behaviors. Embracing an always-on change management mindset is key to this effort – acknowledging and leaning into the challenges of transforming internal culture to align with the brand’s external vision. By focusing on customer and consumer centricity, organizations can ensure that their employees are not just aligned with the brand promise but are deeply committed to delivering it in every interaction. Nike provides a strong example of this approach. The company conducted extensive research into global Employee Experience (EX) best practices and experience design for retail store employees to help create the best environment where employees consistently deliver the brand promise directly to customers. 

3. Employer Brand

A well-defined employer brand and employer value proposition (EVP) can help retain and attract top talent who resonate with your brand’s promise. UBS exemplified this by bringing their global brand campaign, ’Craftmakers,’ to life internally. By aligning their EVP with the campaign, they not only strengthened their talent attraction efforts but also ensured alignment between their corporate and consumer brand strategies.  

4. Signature Moves and Change Management

Bold actions can reinforce a revised brand strategy to external audiences, but their success hinges on effective change management within the organization. T-Mobile demonstrated this through their game-changing move to eliminate customer contracts, embodying their ‘Uncarrier’ brand promise, disrupting and redefining the entire industry and underscoring their commitment to a customer-first approach.  

5. Culture Transformation

Sometimes, a revised brand strategy calls for a deep cultural shift across the organization. Kia’s brand transformation, driven by their pivot to electronic vehicles (EVs), is a prime example. Competing with premium brands like Audi and BMW required a closer focus on customer needs, sparking a fundamental shift in their organizational mindset and culture to prioritize innovation and customer-centricity. 

Figure 1: Potential organizational alignment pathways mapped to CMO’s brand ambition 

Hopefully, paths 1 and 2 are foundational when launching any brand repositioning aimed at creating significant impact. The remaining paths depend on the nature of your strategy. Are you looking to make bold changes that disrupt your industry that demand deeper organizational and cultural change? Or are you focused on refining your brand positioning to attract more customers? Perhaps it’s more about attracting the right front-line talent to bring your brand to life, or evaluating how your employee experience shapes the customer experience. There’s no need to tackle all five paths at once. The key is to be strategic and intentional about which areas to prioritize to drive real, tangible impact through a unified brand vision.  

To help you navigate this journey, we offer tailored discovery workshops for executive teams, designed to guide decision-making and foster collaboration, co-creation and alignment from the outset. By integrating this approach into your brand development, you can accelerate brand efforts and ensure the rest of the organization works in harmony and isn’t competing with or stifling the brand impact you could be making. It requires some focused effort along the way, but the old adage holds true here: “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.”