Article published in Adweek on July 14, 2026
Brand value can be weakened one planning cycle at a time, one ‘harmless’ refresh at a time
This is a true story: a new head of marketing at a large consumer goods company was showing a CEO new slogans for several of the company’s brands.
The CEO didn’t think it was worth discussing it. To him, it was just a tactical marketing decision.
“I have strikes at two factories, retailer pressure on margins, shareholder presentations to prepare, and a budget gap to close,” he told us. “I’m not going to fight my CMO over a few words in a slogan.”
His reaction was understandable. A slogan hardly seemed like CEO territory.
That conversation, however, illustrates one of the biggest paradoxes in modern marketing. Top management takes a close look at spending capital on new projects, buying other companies, or making structural changes, because they know these choices affect the company’s future.
Brand equity deserves the same scrutiny.
Yet organizations routinely allow decisions that restructure a brand—its positioning, target audience, personality, distinctive assets or investment model—to be treated as too small to deserve serious executive discussion. Like the most dangerous diseases, they thrive because they escape the organization’s immune system.
By the time they are recognized, the damage is already well underway.
Bad strategies often arrive disguised as good marketing: agility, consumer centricity, creativity, or financial discipline.
Here’s how to spot them.
Impatience disguised as agility
Companies and their customers experience time in different ways.
A new campaign can soon feel really old for the people who’ve been working on it for months.
But consumers, noticing the ad for the first time, might just start associating the colors, symbols, sounds, or slogans with the brand—while the company is thinking about moving on to something new.
The greatest returns arrive late. Ironically, organizations often interrupt the process just as those returns start to accelerate, simply because people inside the company have become tired of the same assets.
What seems like a harmless creative refresh can actually dismantle valuable competitive advantages.
As Byron Sharp and System1 have both shown, distinctive assets become more valuable with repeated use.
Personal legacy disguised as consumer-centricity
Every new marketing leader wants to improve the business they inherit.
Trouble begins when improvement becomes confused with leaving a personal mark on the brand.
Companies often change their brand’s direction in small steps.
One marketing leader might tweak the brand’s image, the next might think it needs to appeal to a younger crowd, and another might decide to give it a whole new personality. But while career growth comes from visible change, brands accumulate value through consistency.
These culmulative changes can create a lot of confusion over what a brand represents to consumers.
While listening to consumers is indispensable, overzealous customer-centricity can lead to justifying bad decisions. Once an organization becomes convinced that change is needed, it often uses consumer research to justify the decision rather than challenge it.
Consumers might find a new visual identity more interesting than the old one, but that does not mean the change will create more value.
When the CEO said “I’m not going to fight my CMO over a few words in a slogan,” he thought those few words represented a small marketing decision. But it was actually a big choice that would affect the whole business.
Creative excitement disguised as effectiveness
Marketing loves visible work. New campaigns, redesigns, and limited editions generate energy because they are fun to create and easy to celebrate.
Some of marketing’s biggest growth opportunities are far less glamorous. Improving pack-price architecture, simplifying the portfolio, strengthening the core products, increasing availability, and improving promotional efficiency rarely generate the same excitement, but often create greater commercial impact.
They also require relatively little non-working investment. More of the budget reaches consumers, and less is consumed by the process of creating the work.
Marketing, like every profession, is drawn toward the work it enjoys. The highest-return work is not always the most exciting.
Short-sightedness disguised as financial discipline
Few ideas sound more responsible than financial discipline. Every CMO should demonstrate the commercial impact of marketing investment. Trouble begins when financial discipline becomes synonymous with immediate measurability.
You can see immediate results from price promotions, retail activation, and lower-funnel media.
Brand building is different, because it’s an investment in the future.
A strong brand creates memory structures, making people prefer your product over others, and even allowing you to charge higher prices.
These benefits often take years to fully develop.
But dangerous shifts happen one planning cycle at a time: a little more investment toward activities whose returns are easier to measure, a little less toward those that create future demand.
The dashboards will look reassuring, but growth gets harder.
Then, pressure to promote and advertise intensifies. This requires more investment just to keep demand at the same level, making it challenging and expensive to continue expanding.
Nike’s recent rebalancing toward brand building shows that maximizing short-term efficiency and maximizing long-term brand value are not the same objective.
The problem begins when the easiest returns to measure become the only returns that matter.
It was never just a slogan
The impact of these strategic mistakes can be far-reaching, undermining the very goals they appear to support.
By the time they recognize what has happened, years of small, sensible-looking decisions have blurred the brand’s shape beyond recognition.
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