Grow Partners’ Post

In the dynamic world of medium-sized service businesses, unifying brand culture across multiple value streams and national teams is essential to remain relevant, visible, and competitive. A recent project I completed for a national manufacturing and distribution business with 350 FTEs illustrates this well. Despite achieving the largest market share through five acquisitions over eight years, poor brand integration led to siloed teams, internal competition, and an overwhelmed marketing department and sales team managing multiple unrelated brands, websites, and product categories. An 18-month attempt to resolve these issues was unsuccessful, and a rebrand seemed like the only way forward. However, as a brand transformation consultant, I advised against a costly and disruptive rebrand that was unlikely to address the root causes. Instead, we needed a strategy that created a shared focus across all teams, recalibrating the brand from the inside out. This six-month project combined strategy formulation and activation support. The business invested only 25% of the cost of a full rebrand, significantly reduced the time to value, and enhanced internal collaboration. Not only that, but the approach unified the brand, and has fostered lasting engagement from senior leadership, driving wider adoption across their teams. It's a success story I'm delighted to share and one that really does showcase the power of an effective strategy at critical business junctions.

Well, it was another fabulous Henry Stewart Events Creative Operations New York. So many friendly faces, thought provoking conversations and new friends made! As always, I wanted to share my reflections from the day: 1. Creative is successful when it aligns with the wider business and supports the achievement of organizational goals. 2. Creating endorsement around creative and creative operations is imperative if budgets are going to be restored, so creative teams can thrive. 3. We are entering an era of simplification and consolidation as teams realize that adoption is more important than technical aspiration. I am coining this as the 'Goldilocks Approach' to tooling, where it’s about finding the platform that’s not too much, not tool little, but is - ‘just right’. 4. Digital Minimalism can be a beautiful thing, but requires great understanding of what your team needs to succeed. 5. Work-in-Progress assets can live in a more agile and more accessible DAM that supports the wider business, and live alongside the enterprise DAM to make it easier to manage and more effective. (Ref: Stockpress) 6. Could a lack of ownership, or ownership in the wrong hands be holding creative operations back? There was a very mixed consensus of where Creative Operations report into - COO, CMO, CDO and more… Which of these are most resonant to you?! Comment 👇 p.s. The day was made even better by making a new friend on the train back to Boston.

I had a startling realization today. No one owns the brand. To their credit some CMOs try but most are simply caretakers. Is that why so many brands are just okay? And, others are preferred irrationally? Could this be why there are so few truly great brands? We know great brands are inspired by a meaningful corporate purpose, in turn connected to every aspect of the business--the values, culture, communications and customer experience. Is that just too much for marketers to own? Could marketers succeed more if they took ownership? What do you think?

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Breaking the Status Quo! 😎 In this video, Simon Forster and Jess Cook dive into what makes a Challenger Brand tick—brands that don’t just play by the rules but rewrite them to stand out. We unpack how challengers align with purpose, embrace bold creativity, and unlock extraordinary opportunities. 👇

83% of executives say partnerships drive more than 20% of organizational revenue— so the stakes couldn’t be higher to build great partnerships. https://lnkd.in/e8FSawyk

Growing brands, means growing pains. As they grow, brands often outgrow organisation management foundations they have been built on. Brand strategies, brand management and governance systems, organisational set-up and ways of working. This happens with any (rapid) change in the business - whether it is a international market expansion, rebranding, merger & acquisitions or even internal organisation changes - think (de)centralisations, consolidation. Fact is that in any of these changes, business brand demands, exponentially outgrow people's capacity (not their capability) to deliver. Reason is simple, they're overrun by needs of a growing business. - internal tension - late campaigns & launches - brand inconsistency - micromanagement - (mis)alignment meetings - firefighting are just some of the symptoms. All of these remove focus and time from strategic brand management building and in the end trickle down to failures of financial value creation for the business - brand health metrics - pricing power - missed market opportunities ( late campaign launch) translate to - missed revenue The only way to solve pains of growth is to to start embedding scalability enablers inside your marketing and brand organisation management. Then you're set on the path of becoming a scalable brand. Scalable brand management is a journey where all elements of brand management, both across strategy definition and execution are redefined from scalability enablement perspective. #brand #globalbrand #brandmanagement #brandorganisationmanagement #globalcreative #marketingoperations #brandoperations #organisationaldesign

What is the key to brand alignment? Let's think about the word "alignment". What needs to happen when you bring anything into alignment? First it requires a structure to bring things into alignment with. You can't align to fuzz. This is not just alignment for alignments sake. We are bringing things: people, processes, etc. into the same relative position. So what are we aligning to? That is where many organizations get it wrong. We don't align to a process. We don't align to a product. We don't align to people. We align to the very backbone of a business. The vision, mission, values, and purpose. If any of our people and processes are out of alignment with these core principles of a business, it will feel "off". There will be confusion. Your teams need the structure and clarity of a solid vision, mission, values, and purpose to align their work to. So don't get distracted by stretching beyond the core tenants of your organization (unless the vision and mission of your business has changed). Stay the course, stay aligned.

🧠 "Here’s the paradox: the better your plan, the more flexible you can be." Those in pharma media know that effective planning takes time, effort, and precision. But what many forget is that planning isn't the enemy of flexibility — it’s the enabler... giving brand teams the flexibility to move fast and win big. Richard Springham explores this concept in his latest article here -> https://lnkd.in/eb9eCiyW

Great insight into what a challenger brand is and how rules can be rewritten to stand out from the rest.