The Case for Distributing Brand Ownership

(First floor plan, Elvers’ Seattle home remodel. Different hands, one outcome.)

I’m a recovering brand manager who wants everyone else to take ownership of brand.

You may not realize this is your domain. From where you sit, brand has always lived elsewhere. Something that’s neatly packaged into a marketing presentation, tucked into a comms brief. Not really in your remit.

And somehow so many decisions that play a material role in building your brand: product trade-offs, feature prioritization, pricing, hiring standards, supplier choices - sit with you.

My CPG beginnings grounded me in the discipline of brand management: what it is, how it works, why it matters. And my subsequent experiences in tech and retail left me in a state of perpetual frustration: brand accountability sat with marketing, yet the majority of the decisions that actually shaped the brand were made everywhere else.

But what these experiences taught me, through great teachers and hard lessons, is that brand management is a team sport. This conviction came from watching patterns repeat across very different businesses:

At Clorox, the decisions that determined whether a product earned loyalty or got swapped out at the shelf weren’t made in isolation during an annual brand planning meeting. They lived in frequent, often functionally dispersed places - the substrate development for the next Clorox Disinfecting Wipe, a fragrance supplier choice for Pine Sol, a decision over whether to invest in a trade event for Kingsford Charcoal.

At Amazon, I saw how product decisions impact a brand at scale. A feature touching tens of millions of people in their daily lives is a brand call, whether anyone in the room recognizes it or not. Brand trust is earned and lost through daily active use.

And in my time at Starbucks, Wayfair, and more recently consulting in other lifestyle categories, I came to appreciate that even where the product is genuinely differentiated, it’s rarely sufficient on its own. Here, the product is but one manifestation of the brand, along with the customer journey and experiences around it, all inspired by the people you served and what you are solving for them. And yet the decisions that held it together or eroded it were distributed across functions that didn’t think of themselves as brand stewards.

Across categories, industries, and business models I keep coming to the same conclusion: the distance between what a company intended its brand to be and what customers actually experienced isn’t a marketing problem, but an organizational one.

This has always been true. But it feels more urgent now.

For most of the last decade, narrative was air cover. Advertising, sharp creative, and thoughtfully curated partnerships gave us reasonable control of our narrative. What you said about yourself could outrun what customers actually experienced.

That’s no longer reliably true. AI is quickly becoming the primary aggregator of what a brand is - the sum of everything that’s been said about you, in reviews, in forums, in customer interactions, distilled and served back to the next person who asks.

Which means the only brand that holds is one where ownership is distributed to everyone making decisions that shape it.

I haven’t stopped thinking about this, as it’s a persistent theme I’ve seen in every corporate role I’ve held, and one that’s been reinforced in my engagements since.

We need to reestablish the role of brand in companies, not as a marketing discipline, but as the operating logic of a business: how the decisions being made across every function add up to something customers recognize, trust, and come back to.

If you’re a founder, an operator, a product leader, a CFO, a head of HR, or really anyone who makes decisions that shape what a customer eventually experiences - this is also for you. Because you’re already deep in the brand work. The question is whether you’re doing it deliberately, and in a way that compounds.