An ode to the wrong department

Most organisations say they value brand. But in practice, they still treat it as marketing’s responsibility. Visual, verbal, and campaign-led. That handoff may once have made sense. It doesn’t anymore. This piece, written by Dan Dimmock, is an ode to the consequence of that misplacement, and a call to move brand back to where it belongs: embedded in strategy, behaviour, and leadership.

When mass media took off—radio, TV, billboards—brand was handed to marketing.
Assigned. Not earned.

Marketing was the engine of reach.
Brand became the motif.
An image.
A colour palette.

Simplified.
Packaged.
Pushed through the pipes of advertising.

That handoff made sense at the time.
But times changed.
Only the handoff remained the same.
And so it has stayed.

Even as business evolved.
Even as enterprise globalised and digitised.
Even as value shifted from physical assets to intangible ones.
Even as brand's role expanded into culture, capital, community, and risk.

But few thought to move it.
Many organisations' stayed status quo.
A silenced threat to marketing best practice.

But conscious leadership saw what was coming.
It began to reframe brand as more than a marketing construct, embedding it into organisational purpose, strategy, and governance.

Felt in today's most celebrated.
In organisations built for regeneration, not extraction. In a small but growing group of institutions that treat brand not just as an expression, but as an experience contracted by society.

That's where authenticity happens.
And it's why those organisations earn disproportionate trust, talent, and resilience.

For every business making the shift, dozens stick.
Still treating brand as messaging.
Still defining it through look and feel.
Still delegating it to functions optimised for campaigns, not continuity.

And they're still getting help.
From an industry that has everything to lose.

Agencies—structured to serve marketing, not challenge it—reinforce the idea that brand is what you make, not how you behave.
They continue to sell tools, assets, and ideas.
Rarely accountability.

Global media platforms still scale the problem, turning brand-building into paid visibility and micro-metric optimisation.
Clicks replace credibility.
Campaigns replace commitments.

Together, they fuel an ecosystem where short-term attention is prioritised over long-term trust.
Making brands louder, not clearer.
More visible but less valuable.

Many are caught off guard by inconsistency, cultural gaps, and purpose-washing under pressure.
Because they never redefined brand as something enterprise-wide.
Something structural.
Something that lives in decisions, not just deliverables.

And now, those gaps are widening with AI and automation transforming how organisations communicate, operate, and scale.

Technology is accelerating everything:
Production, distribution, personalisation, performance.

But it's also amplifying inconsistency.
Exposing cultural misalignment.
Removing the human filters that once protected brand integrity.

Without leadership.
Without governance.
Without intent.

AI doesn't just move faster.

It moves faster in the wrong direction.
As businesses face real scrutiny—on purpose, sustainability, inequality, and long-term value—the brand still sits in the wrong corner.

Trapped in short-termism.
Measured by impressions, not impact.
Still seen as discretionary, when a source of direction, discipline, and defensibility

That's not marketing's fault.
But it is leadership's problem.

CEO accountability is still measured in quarters.
Shareholder value is reported in three-month increments.
Performance is sliced into forecast beats and earnings calls.

This cadence rewards visibility over value.
Tactics over systems.
Cosmetic wins over structural change.

And it punishes what brand requires:
Consistency;
Continuity;
Commitment over time.

It's not just short-termism.
It's a structural mismatch between how organisations are judged.
And what long-term survival depends on.

Until a brand is treated as a system—governed, protected, and led at the top—its value will always fall short of its potential.
It will remain reactive, underfunded, and disconnected from most business decisions.

And for CMOs, that presents a choice.
If you want to last longer and earn a seat at the table, stop chasing relevance.
Start creating it.

Work across functions.
Understand the business beyond the brand funnel.
Support value creation across the chain—from strategy to culture to capital allocation.

Because that's where brand lives.
Not in content calendars.
Not in campaign metrics.
But in decisions that shape the organisation's future, and contribute to the survival of humankind.

Brand isn't judged at face value.
Not in a world of collapsing trust, rising complexity, and urgent transformation.
It's judged on consequential value.
And that consequence is growing.

As generative AI reshapes production at scale, brand can no longer rely on craft, consistency, or control alone.
What once depended on manual curation now demands system logic—embedded in code, workflows, permissions, and protocols.

This is first-principles territory.
Brand must now be designed from the ground up:
As experience;
As infrastructure;
As a governance layer across human and machine systems.

Not just what people see.
But how decisions get made.

That's why we work where decisions are made.
Helping institutional leaders embed brand across critical systems:
AI integration;
EX and UX design;
Service and journey architecture;
Content creation, management, and measurement.

Not as gift wrapping.
But as mechanisms of coherence.

Because brand is not what you make.
It's what you're made of.

It always was.
Marketing made it easier to forget.
Now technology makes it harder to ignore.