Why Most Brand Strategies Never Stick

You’ve seen it happen before.

The marketing team, after months of work, unveils the new brand strategy. The CEO loves it. The deck is emailed to the leadership team with a note: “Team, please review and start using this.”

And then… silence.

The plan is approved at the top but never spreads through the company. The sales team goes back to its old deck. Customer support keeps using their old scripts.

In a few months, the big new strategy is just a new coat of paint in the marketing department. The huge investment has done nothing for the business.

This isn't a failure of vision. It's a failure of integration.

It happens because of a deep misunderstanding of where a brand actually lives.

A successful brand isn't owned by marketing. It's adopted by the entire leadership team and must touch every single department.

Why Your Brand Must Touch Every Department

A common and dangerous idea is that branding only lives in marketing. The reality is that your brand is being built—or broken—in every single customer interaction.

A customer doesn’t have a separate relationship with your marketing, sales, and finance teams. They have one relationship with your company.

Think about their journey. They might see your ad (Marketing). Then, they could talk to a salesperson (Sales). Next, they get the product (Operations) and receive an invoice (Finance). A month later, they might call for help (Support).

If these interactions feel disconnected or out of sync, the customer gets confused.

And a confused customer won't buy. They can't prefer a brand they don't understand.

Every department plays a role in how a customer sees your brand.

Your brand isn't what you say it is. It's what your customers experience.

To build a brand that drives growth, every team must understand how their actions shape that experience.

The Fatal Flaw of the Monologue

The main reason brand strategies fail to spread is because they are treated as a monologue.

This is when a message is dictated from one group and handed down to everyone else. It’s an old way of thinking from a "command-and-control" style of management.

In this model, the brand plan is treated like a finished product: a manual to be sent out. Structurally, the monologue reinforces the exact departmental silos you are trying to break. It keeps the "thinkers" in one department and the "doers" in others. This creates a gap between planning and reality.

The evidence proves this model is a categorical failure. A study by Professor Robert Kaplan and consultant David Norton found that 95% of employees don’t know or understand their company’s strategy.

Sending a plan down from the top simply does not work.

Start the Dialogue with Your Leadership Team

Creating this kind of consistency doesn't mean you need input from every single employee. That isn't practical. The solution starts with your leadership team. Brand consistency is built from the top down, not the bottom up.

The answer is to create a dialogue among your leadership team. Involve your department heads from the start. Make them co-owners.

Choosing to reject the monologue is important. It stops the strong principles of human commitment from taking root. By presenting a finished plan, it robs your department heads of the chance to invest their own labor and fails to create the very foundation of true buy-in.

The psychology behind the dialogue is simple but powerful. Research has proven that people commit to what they help create. This is driven by two key ideas:

• The IKEA Effect: This is our tendency to place a much higher value on things we helped build ourselves. The effort we put in makes us love the result more. A brand monologue robs your leaders of this chance to invest their own work.

• Psychological Ownership: When leaders help create the brand strategy, they feel a sense of ownership over it. The brand is no longer "marketing's brand." It becomes "our brand." This feeling that something is "MINE" is the foundation of buy-in. It motivates them to protect the brand and see it succeed.

This isn't just a "soft" goal. It drives real business results. Research from Gallup shows that highly engaged teams are 21% more profitable.

Equip Teams, Don’t Overwhelm Them

Once your leadership team is on the same page, the next step is to share the strategy with their departments.

One of the biggest mistakes here is overwhelming people with too much information.

A complete brand strategy manual is often a dense, complex document. That’s by design. A proper strategy isn't just for today's problems; it's built to scale with your business.

It must cover all possible scenarios, meaning much of it might not seem relevant right now. But that content becomes critical as your company grows and objectives change. The manual is a durable asset for making high-level strategic decisions.

This is why handing the entire manual over to your teams is a mistake. It's overwhelming and creates confusion, not clarity. When people feel overwhelmed, they often do nothing at all.

A well-designed brand strategy is holographic. Each small piece reflects the whole.

The strategy works as a single, unified system. So, you can trust that when each team executes its part correctly, all the pieces will add up to create the cohesive brand experience you intended.

Good internal communication isn't about giving everyone all the information. It's about giving each team the information they need to do their job well.

• Your customer service team doesn’t need a detailed competitive analysis. But they do need to understand the core brand promises and how to uphold them in every conversation.

• Your sales team needs to know the three key differentiators that help them win deals. Not the specific rules for typography in a press release.

When you keep your communication clear and tailored to each role, it helps your teams deliver a consistent, on-brand experience.

The Evidence: The Price of a Monologue vs. The Power of a Dialogue

JCPenney: The Disaster of a C-Suite Monologue

In 2011, JCPenney was stuck in a "promotional death spiral."

They ran 590 separate sales in a single year.

The board hired Ron Johnson, the genius behind the Apple Store, as a retail savior. Johnson put in place a pure C-suite monologue. It was a radical "Fair and Square" pricing plan that got rid of coupons and sales.

He launched it everywhere without testing it first, reportedly saying, "We didn't test at Apple".

This monologue failed on two fronts.

Inside the company, there was no real training for employees, and the plan came with massive layoffs that cut the staff by 27%. This created a climate of fear.

Outside the company, the plan ignored its customers' psychology. It took away the "thrilling of the hunt" that its core shoppers loved. The result was a disaster.

Total sales fell by 24.8% in one year, and the company lost nearly $1 billion.

HP-Compaq: A Collision of Incompatible Cultures

The 2002 merger of HP and Compaq was a necessary gamble.

Both companies needed to survive the threat from Dell’s hyper-efficient model. But the way it was done was a flawed leadership monologue.

The core of the failure was the deep gap between HP's team-focused, engineering culture (the "HP Way") and Compaq's aggressive, sales-driven style.

The company did a great job planning the merger's operations. However, top leaders had trouble merging the two cultures for the long term. They effectively "declared victory too soon" after the deal closed.

This created a leadership gap. It allowed the two different cultures to go to "internal warfare," which paralyzed the new company.

The internal chaos was a gift to Dell. They used the distraction to become the market leader.

The merger became a brutal change that destroyed the company's culture and hurt tens of thousands of laid-off employees.

IBM: Rebuilding Through an Internal-First Dialogue

In the early 1990s, IBM was a collection of "competing fiefdoms."

Its different teams actively hid information from each other. This paralysis led to a financial disaster of nearly $16 billion in losses from 1991 to 1993.

In 1993, the new CEO Lou Gerstner knew the brand had to be rebuilt from the inside out. He rejected the plan to break up the company, saying its real power was in providing integrated solutions.

To achieve this, he started an internal-first dialogue to create "One IBM".

His most powerful move was to completely change the bonus system. From then on, bonuses were tied to the performance of the entire company, not just one team. This single change touched every department. It forced people to work together and made the "One IBM" brand a financial reality for every employee.

This internal alignment was then turned into a clear "playbook" for sales and marketing. This made sure the new brand was delivered consistently to the customer.

Meta: Using Dialogue to Evolve the Brand's "Operating System"

In early 2022, Meta was facing a stock collapse and intense competition. Its leadership started a cultural overhaul.

CEO Mark Zuckerberg described the new values as a "cultural operating system" designed to fix known problems.

This was a dialogue with reality.

For example, the old value "Focus on Impact" had created a culture of short-term thinking. Employees were trying to impress managers during six-month review cycles.

To fix this, leadership didn't just change the slogan to "Focus on Long-Term Impact." They hardwired the change into the company's structure. They moved to an annual performance review cycle.

They listened to how the brand was truly working inside the company. Then, they made the structural changes needed to help every team succeed.

A Framework for Action: 3 Questions for Your Leadership Team

The success of your brand depends on how well your leadership team is aligned. To start the right dialogue, sit down with your department heads and ask:

1. Who really owns the customer experience across our company? This question forces you to look beyond departments. Agreeing on shared ownership is the first step to breaking down silos.

2. Are we helping our teams or overwhelming them? Look at your internal communication. Are you giving each team the simple, relevant tools they need to succeed? Or are you burying them in information that isn't for them?

3. How do we turn our brand strategy into daily actions for each department? It’s not enough to talk about values. You must define the specific behaviors that bring those values to life for every team.

When every department head is bought in and every team is equipped, the brand becomes a powerful, unifying force. Internal confusion disappears. Customers get a clear and consistent experience that earns their preference, again and again.

This process highlights the concept of organizational neuroplasticity.

Just as a brain can learn and adapt, so too can a company's brand. A brand is not a static plan carved in stone. It's a living system that can evolve.

The dialogue you create is the mechanism for this learning. This means listening to feedback from your sales team and understanding frustrations from your support team. It allows your organization to get stronger, adapt to the market, and build a more resilient brand over time.

Onward,

Aaron Shields

P.S. If you're struggling to get your whole company on the same page, think about the one department that seems most disconnected from your brand's main message. That 'crack in the foundation' is often the hardest to see from the inside. If you'd like to get an expert outside perspective on it, just reply to this email and I’ll set up a 15-minute call to help you start thinking through your roadblock.