Brand Meets Business
Brand work creates a different kind of value when it is not only about how an organisation looks, but about how it actually works.
Category:
Brand Strategy
Author:
Ana Andersen
Read:
5 min
Location:
Norway
Date:
Strategy becomes difficult when everyone interprets it differently
I was sitting in a planning meeting with leaders from different parts of an organisation when I noticed something. They knew their own areas well. They understood what they wanted to achieve and had plenty of ideas about what could be improved. But when those ambitions had to become concrete goals, uncertainty appeared. How do we know if we are succeeding? What actually makes a good KPI? What should we measure — and what should we do with the numbers afterwards? How does a new brand become relevant to each individual department? It made me look at brand work from a slightly different perspective. The brand formally sat within marketing. In practice, it depended on decisions being made across the organisation — in sales, operations, leadership, customer experience, employee experience and the priorities each area was working towards. So the challenge was not simply to explain a new brand. We needed a structure that helped people understand what the brand actually meant in practice.
A brand needs a path from direction to action
My role became developing a framework that could make those connections clearer. I spoke with leaders about their goals, helped translate broad ambitions into something more concrete, and brought the work together in a structure connecting direction, actions and measurement. Without a shared structure, strategy quickly becomes a matter of individual interpretation. Sales works towards its targets. Operations optimises its processes. Marketing focuses on visibility. Others continue doing what they have always done. None of those things are necessarily wrong. The problem begins when they are not moving in the same direction. An organisation can then communicate one thing, deliver another and measure something else entirely. And if only parts of a strategy are implemented, another problem appears: we do not really know whether the strategy worked. Maybe the direction was not wrong. Maybe it was never implemented consistently enough to be tested as a complete system.
A brand is also what people learn to expect
This is why the distinction between brand and business often feels artificial. A brand is not only what people see. It is shaped by what they learn to expect. By how decisions are made. How employees experience the workplace. How customers are treated. Whether the promises being made are actually kept. And whether the small physical and digital details tell the same story. This is something I keep coming back to: Brand work creates a different kind of value when it is not only about how an organisation should look, but about how it should actually work. And perhaps that is where credibility is really built — in the distance between what we say we are and what people actually experience.
