The marketing department doesn't own the brand

Imagine a company spending six months defining its brand around simplicity, then requiring customers to complete three forms and make two phone calls to cancel a subscription.

The campaign looks excellent, though.

I've seen how much effort goes into getting a brand's language, identity and positioning right. Yet some of the decisions that influence how people perceive it are made by people who might never have opened the brand guidelines.

A finance team introduces an unexpected fee. Operations creates a process that makes a straightforward request unnecessarily complicated. Customer support is instructed to follow a script when a little common sense would solve the problem.

None of these decisions might look like branding work. To the customer, they absolutely are.

This is why I find it odd when brand strategy is developed almost entirely with marketing and senior management. The people responsible for delivering the experience often have very little involvement in defining it.

And they're usually the first to discover where the promises fall apart.

A brand built around personal service needs employees who can make decisions. One promising convenience should probably examine how many steps it takes to get something done. These aren't creative considerations in the traditional sense, but they're central to brand experience.

The same applies when introducing a new identity. A thoughtful brand rollout should involve the teams who will use it, not simply send everyone a PDF and hope for the best. I've written before about how much of the brand lives in the handover.

None of this means the finance department needs to debate the logo or that every customer service representative should become a brand strategist.

But people should understand what the business is promising, and have enough freedom to help deliver it.

I'd rather see a brand workshop include someone who regularly handles customer complaints than another hour spent debating whether the personality should be described as bold or confident.

Especially when the cancellation process is still a nightmare.