Why brands need to stand on business: A recalibration of brand value

Brands do not simply shape perception. They shape decisions.

There’s a higher ground for brands in business, a more pivotal role. A position that some accept intuitively, yet others miss. At times, they play this role unnoticed, unnamed and undefined. The bright lights of media and creativity have drawn us in, applauding and debating their hands at play, but when in their rightful place, they also mould the work that nobody’s watching.

I believe a brand's true place in business is to act as a compass, and by adopting this role, brands can have a greater positive impact on organic growth, provided four essential conditions are met.

We need to remind ourselves that a brand is not its advertising, nor is it the net sum of its in-market assets; these are brand outputs. While brand meaning can be interpreted via these outputs, there is a fundamental difference between what something is and what it means. Consequences of these outputs, such as differentiation (Ries and Trout, 2001), salience and mental availability (Sharp, 2010), price premium (King, 1971), emotional resonance (Wood, 2019), and ESOV (Binet and Field, 2013), shape much of the discourse around brand value, which is often associated with advertising effectiveness.

Brands exist across two dimensions. For a business, a brand is an embodiment of ideas, values, and principles that inform decisions; for the consumer, it is the individual associations they hold with a business, formed through reputation and touchpoints.

Therefore, a brand's role is to positively influence these associations wherever they can form, and to do this effectively, it must guide organisational philosophy, transcend the marketing function, and act as a bridge between business and consumer understanding.

In his acclaimed essay, Posh Spice & Persil, Jeremy Bullmore shared the inconvenient truth that the only time you can be certain of a brand’s value is immediately after it’s been sold (Bullmore, 2001). This draws on a widely cited economic principle that value is theoretical until realised. A more profound insight lies in a 2008 Berkshire Hathaway shareholder letter, written by the iconic investor and long-standing ambassador of brands, Warren Buffett, in which he stated, “Price is what you pay, value is what you get" (Berkshire Hathaway Inc., 2009).

Kantar’s 2025 BrandZ Report showcases its ‘Strong Brand Portfolio’ outperforming the S&P 500 between 2006 and 2025, highlighting the ability of brands to increase shareholder value over time (Kantar, 2025).

Brand value, therefore, lies in its ability to generate future shareholder value, with a strong emphasis on the word “future”. The seeds we sow today bear fruit tomorrow, and, like all good investments, those efforts should compound. Brand investment not only builds salience while reducing price elasticity (Gallo, 2015) but also primes audiences for future purchase decisions (WPP and Saïd Business School, 2025) and has been shown to be a force multiplier for short-term sales activation while hedging against the risk of diminishing returns (Kerwin, 2026).

However, when we focus our understanding of how brands grow solely on marketing outputs and their impacts, we constrain the role of brands in business, inevitably miss the full picture, and claim clarity with fundamental puzzle pieces unassessed.

Brands risk being defined by their ability to drive market penetration by increasing sales of existing products in current markets (Ansoff, 1957). Financial Analyst Martin Deboo expands on this, suggesting that a brand's role in impacting organic growth is defined simply and exclusively by its ability to impact price, volume, and mix (Deboo, 2024). Although aspects that impact organic growth extend beyond this, encompassing product and market development, diversification, distribution, operational efficiency, and infrastructure.

A brand's ability to influence these areas is often overlooked, despite elements such as product and place being pivotal to the foundational marketing mix. If the role of brands in business becomes restricted to promotion, we’re all inevitably doomed! The outcomes most commonly associated with brand growth are conversed with a disconnect from broader business operations and the internal decision-making that often defines their long-term success.

This dissonance between brand and business creates a blind spot for both.

Brand and business strategy are intrinsically linked. They’re co-dependent and should be designed to uphold each other. Without both actions and thought that transcends organisational silos, the two can become dangerously decoupled. Another treacherous path towards a tragic ending for all involved.

So, on the premise that a brand should guide organisational decision-making and act as the bridge between business and consumer understanding, what are these four conditions? Why are they important? And how are they as relevant to brand strategy as they are to business strategy?

Clarity, Conviction, Alignment, Sacrifice (C.C.A.S)

Clarity: creates direction.

Conviction: enables action.

Alignment: creates consistency.

Sacrifice: ensures focus.

Each condition is equally important. Deduct one, and you weaken the impact of others.

This answers the what.

Both brands and businesses operate across complex adaptive systems and therefore require enablement to influence outcomes (Tiltman, 2026). For a brand to successfully guide organisational direction, its consideration must include conditions that shape the behaviour of both external and internal stakeholders.

Richard Rumelt, described by McKinsey & Company as “a giant in the field of strategy”, suggests bad strategy fails by ignoring or failing to define key challenges (Rumelt, 2011). In consideration of these conditions, organisations can identify and navigate obstacles that constrain brand value. This answers the why.

The how, I hope, will become clear.

1. Clarity

From data accumulated over 20 years, on 7,800 CEOs from 3,500 public companies spanning 70 countries and 24 industries, McKinsey identifies the best leaders “advance the aspirations of their companies and society at large with compelling, singular narratives that inspire a wide range of internal and external stakeholders”, claiming the best leaders must have a deep understanding of their organisation's unique purpose (McKinsey & Company, 2024).

This isn’t a case for inauthentic altruism, or grandiose statements with little grounding in the realities of what an organisation actually aims to achieve. Without having a meaningful impact on practices, processes and products, purpose holds little value and understandably attracts cynicism (Liddell, 2025).

However, when realigning the word with its true meaning, purpose supports commercial intent, which, at its best, is customer-focused and forms clarity around a notion of achieving X by doing Y. On this basis, Amazon could be considered one of the world's most purpose-driven brands. I’ll come back to the Y later.

When this idea can be shared through a clear, simple narrative that supports commercial intent, it becomes a powerful tool that I believe is quintessential to the foundations of a truly great brand. Brand Strategist Nick Liddell describes this as an electric hare, making things run faster and in the same direction.

Nike’s clarity is famously defined around the notion of empowering athletes, or more recently, the athlete within us. While subtle amendments have been made to expand the brand's market and position against ideological shifts, the consistency of clarity has been a driving force behind Nike’s ability to resonate with consumers. In his book Emotion by Design, former CMO Greg Hoffman discusses the importance of building deep personal relationships between people and product, a balancing of art and science that serves both the rational and emotional needs of consumers (Hoffman, 2022).

In a 1992 interview with Harvard Business Review, Nike Co-founder Philip Knight stated: “Nike is a marketing-oriented company, and the product is our most important marketing tool” (Willigan, 1992).

Nike’s commitment to product innovation earned it the right to empower athletes, which in turn led to its adoption across cultures and shaped the requirements for authenticity in Nike’s advertising.

I use the word "cultures" intentionally, as no singular culture exists. 

When Nike produced the Air Jordan, it created an innovative product meticulously designed to fulfil the needs of an NBA basketball player. The product lived up to its purpose, so it could be embraced by Michael Jordan, the sport and its fans. It became aspirational through its association with the NBA star and was adopted across cultures, spanning streetwear and music, helping Nike earn its fame and the title of the most rapped-about sneaker brand in hip-hop (Jones, 2025).

The shoe was also adopted by the skateboarding community for its ankle support and cushioning, but when Nike attempted to break into the market in 1996, its early product range wasn’t well received. At the time, Nike sponsored a sixteen-year-old Bam Margera, who has since spoken publicly about how he would tape the Nike logo over the better-designed skate shoes, éS Accels (Wilson, 2025).

Nike was failing to enter a market it didn’t understand, attempting to buy its way into a grassroots counterculture that, at the time, held an anti-corporate ethos and directly opposed mainstream sports.

Despite multi-million dollar ad campaigns, including the award-winning “What if we treated everyone like skateboarders?” campaign in 1998, it wasn’t until 2002 that Nike secured its place in skateboarding (Banks, 2020).

Nike’s Sandy Booker led an in-house skateboarding team to produce the SB Dunk, drawing inspiration from the Air Jordan and the original Dunk, which had been adopted by the skateboarding community in the 80s. The SB Dunk was a shoe made and tested by skateboarders. When it launched, Nike pulled products from big-box retailers and distributed the shoe exclusively through independent skate shops in limited runs, igniting hype and paving the way for Nike SB (Banks, 2020).

It’s one thing to be seen within a culture, and another thing entirely to be valued in it.

The story of Nike SB shows how award-winning advertising, DBAs, broad distribution and mental availability don’t guarantee commercial impact. For Nike SB, cultural insight, consumer understanding and product-market fit laid the foundation for commercial success. The story highlights how brand, product and diversification should be considered cohesively and the dangers of allowing them to become dissociated.

Clarity isn’t simply a single idea communicated about a brand; it involves knowing what an organisation must do to uphold it. “We are what we repeatedly do” (Durant, 1926).

2. Conviction

Clarity creates direction, conviction enables action.

In practice, many strategies fail not because they’re flawed, but because they are abandoned too early or diluted under short-term pressure. Conviction enables organisations to act in the absence of complete information, maintaining direction when immediate returns are unclear.

Ogilvy Chairman Rory Sutherland has made numerous cases for the fact that not all value is immediately measurable, claiming “many effective forms of marketing activity simply do not deliver results immediately” (Sutherland, 2019). Delayed effects are not unique to the marketing department and create tension within organisations where short-term metrics are prioritised over long-term value. This can distort decision-making towards what is easily measurable over what is most valuable.

Jeff Bezos has consistently claimed that Amazon’s mission is to be the world's most customer-centric business. Throwing buzzwords aside, this organisational purpose is Amazon’s clarity, which I believe is more reflective of the brand than any of its DBAs, beyond Bezos himself. This clarity guides decisions and lays the foundations for conviction.

Amazon launched Prime in 2005, and by 2011, only 4% of customers were Prime members (Damodaran, 2017). As of 2026, Amazon Prime has over 200 million members, representing an estimated 65% of total Amazon users worldwide (Capital One Shopping, 2026).

An explanation of the loss-leading mechanics behind Prime is as follows. Amazon bears the cost of free shipping for its members, invests heavily in both distribution and media to make the membership attractive, and assumes the cost of membership acquisition. These costs often exceed membership fee revenue but, in turn, drive high customer loyalty, leading to higher spending; Prime members are estimated to spend 130% more than non-Prime members (Damodaran, 2017). Amazon secured market dominance, turning Prime into a flywheel with operating leverage that drove exponential growth. Amazon patiently played the long game with a monumental investment that took a decade to become fruitful.

Prime not only serves as a testament to strategic conviction and the ability to act without complete information, reflecting Bezos’s 70% rule, but also to the customer obsession that defines Amazon as a brand. Amazon’s commitment to enhancing the customer experience through Prime, despite slow initial uptake and monumental investment, was pivotal in producing one of the world’s most valuable brands.

Amazon built digital availability with over 35 million product listings, but Prime didn’t place its focus on the light buyer; it leaned into loyalty, then scaled it.

Conviction is not irrational defiance of short-term pressure, but having the discipline to sustain action across longer time horizons. It protects long-term value from being eroded by short-term optimisation, enabling organisations to act beyond what can be immediately proven, while sustaining decisions long enough for their value to emerge.

Without conviction, strategy becomes reactive. With it, strategy becomes cumulative.

3. Alignment

Alignment is the mechanism through which a brand moves from intention to impact.

The father of brand equity, David Aaker, has emphasised the importance of organisational alignment around a shared understanding of a brand, claiming that strong brands depend on employees not only understanding them, but also actively delivering on them (Aaker and Joachimsthaler, 2000). Alignment is not a cultural ideal, but a commercial necessity. An organisation that is misaligned sends mixed signals not only to its employees, but also to its consumers.

Examples can be seen in creative commitment, with Les Binet and Peter Field claiming it reflects how well a company is aligned behind a strategy (Binet and Field, 2013). Misalignment doesn’t just affect brands through a lack of creative consistency; it can also undermine the consumer experience when the promises made through media and communications are not upheld by other areas of operation.

Organisational alignment also enables clearer resource allocation. It begins to create focus, which in turn creates efficiency (Bossidy and Charan, 2002). Robert Kaplan and David Norton, the creators of the highly influential  erformance management framework, The Balanced Scorecard, highlighted that aligning people, processes, and resources behind a strategy is key to successful execution (Kaplan and Norton, 2006). This is supported by research on systemic strategy failure, which highlights the importance of an organisation’s ability to execute its strategy consistently. Failures are often driven by a lack of clarity and systemic misalignment, where decisions across the organisation diverge from the intended direction (Wadström, 2025).

Red Bull serves as a masterclass in organisational alignment around a brand idea: a notion of energy as a catalyst for human performance and extreme achievement. Red Bull promotes lifestyle while encompassing the category entry points of needing a physical or mental lift. This forms their clarity.

Their conviction provided a first-mover advantage, allowing them to dominate the sponsorship of extreme and alternative sports and to grow into a global sporting empire. With clarity and conviction in place, their strategic alignment extends beyond conventional campaigns to a flywheel that provides operational leverage. From its ownership of media production through Red Bull Media House to the production of global sporting events, Red Bull prioritised infrastructure, content creation and cultural participation over short-term media impact. In an interview with Fast Company, founder Dietrich Mateschitz discussed how brand philosophy guides “The World of Red Bull” (Lezzi, 2012).

Rather than communicating its positioning, Red Bull operationalises it. The result is a brand that can be relentlessly consistent not just in its concept and everything it encompasses, but also in its delivery, enabled by operational design. Red Bull achieved a strategic advantage in a fragmented media landscape with content poised for virality while amassing cultural relevance and mental availability. Not only that, they made the broad distribution of DBAs a profitable endeavour.

Alignment not only builds consistency; it can also create opportunity.

4. Sacrifice

Richard Rumelt argues that a core function of good strategy is to narrow an organisation's focus, which involves exclusion and clear decisions about what not to do (Rumelt, 2011).

Rumelt echoes the sentiments of other great minds in the field of corporate strategy. Michael Porter claimed that strategy requires trade-offs, and by saying “no” to opportunities, organisations sharpen their primary value proposition and avoid spreading resources too thinly (Porter, 1996). In Playing to Win, Alan Lafley and Roger Martin also claim "the very essence of strategy is explicit, purposeful choice.” Stating that strategy is saying explicitly and proactively, “we're going to do these things and not those things for these reasons" (Lafley and Martin, 2013).

The notion of strategy by exclusion is further emphasised by Mark Ritson as one of his key axioms summarising brand strategy, which he claims is probably the single biggest insight brand leaders can take from the world of corporate strategy. Ritson claims that “to be choiceful is to focus and to ensure that the maximum resources are invested into the most rewarding places” (Ritson, 2021).

Sacrifice doesn’t constrain growth. It supports it. By ensuring focus, it concentrates resources, sharpens positioning, and increases the likelihood of a sustained competitive advantage. Without sacrifice, a brand becomes a list of conflicting intentions. Efforts are spread too thin, and their impact becomes diluted. In The Art of War, Military Strategist Sun Tzu states, “victory is reserved for those who are willing to pay its price” (Tzu, 2005).

To be all things to all people is to become nothing to everyone.

When Steve Jobs left Apple in 1985, following a clash with the ex-PepsiCo CEO John Sculley, Apple inevitably lost its way, leading to a lack of innovation, a decline in market share, and near-bankruptcy in 1996 (Stephenson, 2011). While Jobs had been described as difficult to work with, his product vision and obsessive commitment to design excellence were well documented.

In addition, his understanding of how to communicate Apple’s intent, beliefs, and vision through its advertising had earned Apple an iconic brand status, with its 1984 Macintosh commercial produced by Chiat/Day and directed by Ridley Scott, winning multiple awards and, according to the New York Times, changing the Super Bowl forever  Austerlitz, 2024). Jobs understood showmanship and ultimately how to inspire stakeholders behind an idea.

Following his return to the company, during a presentation introducing Apple’s “Think Different” campaign, Jobs claimed that to him, marketing was about values, and that in a noisy world, Apple had to be very clear on what they wanted people to know about them. He claimed that at its fundamental core, Apple believed that people with passion can change the world for the better (Jobs, 1997).

Apple had clarity about its brand, forming a simple, clear narrative that supported its commercial intent: to challenge industry front-runners with innovative products and innovative thinking. This inspired stakeholders and produced alignment across Apple’s advertising and organisational philosophy. It had the conviction to defy category norms with ads that didn’t focus on product or features, and a willingness to channel resources behind a singular idea, which inevitably requires sacrifice.

At the same pivotal moment that redefined Apple’s future, these conditions were present across its business strategy. Apple had the clarity to focus on producing one truly innovative product. This led to the alignment of resources while producing the iMac and to the sacrifice of slashing Apple's product lines by 70% (Leswing, 2017).

None of which would have been possible without conviction.

The four essential conditions outlined are as valuable in brand strategy as they are in business strategy.

Left, Right, X, Y

Business runs a tightrope between commercial goals and consumer value, requiring both internal and external mindsets. Two voices blending between each other. A reflection of the left and right brain. The left personifies the business goals of growth, profitability and shareholder value. The right, consumer value, perception and reputation. At best, the two align with clarity. Achieving X by doing Y.

I believe that a brand can be the compass that keeps the voices centred, guiding organisational philosophy, and offering continuity that can outlast the short tenures of most C-suite executives. In doing so, brands help organisations maintain long-term strategic direction, foster interdepartmental cohesion, and bridge the gap between business and consumer understanding. Without a tool to adopt this role, potential is lost as thinking gets fragmented.

Caging a brand to the singular role of promotion is a fundamental mistake. It’s strategically destructive and sacrifices a brand's ability not only to create value, but to compound it. While answers do exist in science and in the analysis of effective campaigns, the decoupling of brands from business and the decisions that define it, often leaves half the story untold. To elevate the role of brands in business, we must also look inwards, assessing the conditions that enable outcomes amid the muddy waters of business complexity and stakeholder management. It is here that brands are either built or broken.

The notion of organic growth differentiates between genuine value created and value engineered through accounting practices. Its causality has been identified through investment, creation and performance (McKinsey & Company, 2017). Brand can and should influence all three.

This is a pursuit of clarity in complexity, a belief held with conviction. An alignment of brand and business with the sacrifice of transient concepts for enduring utility.

This is a call for the quiet work that nobody’s watching.

Let brand be the compass; these four conditions help calibrate it.

Consider them, and consider them deeply.

Ben Thompson is a Senior Account Manager at ICS-digital. This essay was submitted as part of the IPA Excellence Diploma in Brands.

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The opinions expressed here are those of the authors and were submitted in accordance with the IPA terms and conditions regarding the uploading and contribution of content to the IPA newsletters, IPA website, or other IPA media, and should not be interpreted as representing the opinion of the IPA.