Your brand is breaking from inside the building

Or something like that.

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Just for fun

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Your brand is breaking from inside the building.

My observation

A pattern I’m seeing across companies right now.

Brands are failing because the organization can’t support the strategy.

IMO, most brand problems are internal systems issues. What I mean: Leadership wants to go faster and bypasses thoughtful development. Timelines and budgets are restricted. Someone’s wife on the C suite likes purple so we’re adding it to the logo. Brand and product are running separately. Teams are siloed. Approvals? What approvals?

And it doesn’t stop there. Instead of clarifying the customer, the entire team starts arguing about vibes, product launches happen before the story is finished, sales is still using a deck from 2019 but asking marketing to jeuje it up for a prospect. And my all time favorite: The CEO forwards a competitor’s website at 10pm with “Let’s do this.” Or…no one agrees on the problem but somehow everyoneeee has an opinion on the color palette. Innovation dies because of CEO egos.

This is how systems fail the brand, which ends up collapsing from the inside long before it ever hits the market. I call it fear-based brand marketing.

What this signals

Why it matters, and where things are headed.

Why this matters right now:

• Too many companies are trying to scale (fast) without alignment.

• CMOs are getting fired for cross-functional failures.

• Founders blame “brand” when it’s actually incentives, communication, or power dynamics.

• Revenue leaders are breaking shit for the sake of growth.

• Investors are watching for internal consistency as a leading indicator of future performance.

• Misalignment = wasted money and resources and who can do that, in THIS economy??

Your decision model

A simple framework to apply in your work.

Here is what I call The Internal Brand Stability Test, and it asks just three questions:

1. Ownership: Who actually owns the brand? THERE IS ONLY ONE ANSWER TO THIS QUESTION. It is not sales, marketing and the CEO, I promise you.

2. Incentives: Do the decision-makers succeed from the same outcomes? (e.g., CMO wants reach, CFO wants CAC efficiency, CEO wants narrative.) This is the biggest point of friction because everyone is fighting for their metric instead of letting the tension intersecting them creates turn into progress.

3. Readiness: Do teams understand the strategy enough to execute it consistently with existing resources?

What this test really exposes is whether the organization is structurally capable of holding a brand at all. Most companies treat brand like something Marketing applies at the end, but it’s really a system that requires ownership, aligned incentives, and operational readiness. When those foundations aren’t there, the strategy falls apart instantly.

When to use this test: right before you approve a rebrand, a campaign, a positioning shift, or a GTM reset.

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Inside the work

How I’ve handled it with a client + the template we used.

Brand new CEO alert! We were brought in to a major staffing company to rebuild messaging after new leadership set fresh growth priorities. The internal operating model around messaging didn’t support high growth verticals and was too tied to the core brand and not the unique value propositions for those industries.

Here’s what we walked into: