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 Firstwater’s @DanDimmock.insp.social, 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.
An ode to the wrong department:
With the advent of media, brand was handed to marketing. Assigned. Not earned.
Marketing was the engine of reach.
Brand became the motif.
The image. The 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 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 in the status quo.
Silencing threat with 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.
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