Let me say something that might make some of my fellow board members uncomfortable.
Most boards have no meaningful relationship with their brand. Not because they don’t care about the business, they do, deeply, but because somewhere along the way, a collective assumption took hold that brand is a marketing department matter. Something to be approved in a budget meeting, occasionally questioned when a campaign misfires, and largely left to the CMO to manage.
That assumption is wrong. And it’s costing businesses more than most boards will ever acknowledge, because the cost never appears as a line item.
What brand actually is
Before challenging how boards treat brand, it’s worth being precise about what brand actually is, because the confusion starts here: Brand is not your logo. It is not your colour palette, your tone of voice guidelines, or the campaign you ran last quarter. Those are expressions of brand, but they are not the thing itself.
Brand is the accumulated trust your stakeholders have in you. It’s the reason a customer chooses you over a competitor when the product specs are nearly identical. Why your best people stay when a recruiter calls. The thing that makes your pricing power possible, your recovery from crisis faster, and your market position harder to disrupt.
In short, brand is a strategic asset, one that takes years to build, can be damaged in weeks, and sits on no balance sheet that most CFOs will ever look at. When a board treats it as a marketing budget line, they are not just misclassifying an expense. They are misunderstanding the nature of the asset entirely.
What I see in the boardroom
I’ve sat on the boards of listed companies across different sectors. I chair Remuneration Committees. I’m involved in the governance conversations that shape how businesses are run at the highest level. And I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve heard brand discussed at board level as a strategic question rather than a communications one.
What I see instead is this: the board approves a marketing budget. The CMO reports on campaign performance. Someone occasionally asks about Net Promoter Score. And that’s largely where the brand conversation ends, until a reputational crisis forces it back onto the agenda, usually under conditions of significant pressure and very little time. By then, the damage has already been done. Not because the crisis was inevitable, but because the brand had been left unguarded. Nobody at board level had been asking the questions that would have seen it coming: Is our external promise consistent with our internal reality? Are we investing in the brand at a level that reflects its strategic importance? Do we understand what our brand means to the people who choose us, and the people who don’t?
These are not marketing questions. They are governance questions.
The board’s responsibility
I’m not suggesting that boards should be running brand strategy sessions or approving tone of voice guidelines. That is not where the value lies. What I am suggesting is that boards have a responsibility to treat brand with the same rigour they bring to financial performance, risk management, and executive succession. To ask whether the business is protecting and developing this asset with the same discipline it brings to everything else on the agenda.
That means understanding what the brand stands for and whether the strategy is consistent with it. It means asking whether the organisation’s culture, the day-to-day reality of working there, matches the promise being made in the market. It means ensuring that when major decisions are made about the business, brand impact is part of the analysis, not an afterthought.
None of this requires the board to become brand experts. It simply requires them to stop treating brand as someone else’s problem.
The moment it changes
In my experience, the businesses that manage their brand well at board level share one common characteristic: at least one person around the table understands that brand is a strategic question, and insists that it be treated as one.
That person doesn’t need to be a brand strategist. They need to be someone with enough credibility and enough conviction to ask the questions that others aren’t asking, and to keep asking them, even when the answers are uncomfortable. Because the uncomfortable truth is this: the businesses that ignore brand at board level tend to be the ones that discover its importance too late. When the market has moved. When the talent has left. When the crisis has landed.
Brand doesn’t forgive neglect. It just takes its time showing you the bill.
The Gap is a nine-month Hello Finch campaign exploring the space between boardroom strategy and brand reality. Chapter Three publishes in June.