The Chief Brand Officer: Duties and Value to A Board of Directors

The Era Of Brands

Creating a strong brand is more important than it has ever been in history. 

A strong brand makes you stand-out within packed competitive environments. They create loyalty within fast changing markets; they build preference among customers and talent; they create the conditions for improved margins; create resilience from which to come back from mistakes and recessions; give organizations the umbrella you need to make business strategies that emphasize innovation and constant renewal successful. 

As a result, establishing a strong brand is perhaps the single most important factor for success in a new economy where barriers to entry have dropped, new competition is fierce, commoditization is commonplace, and technological disruption is the norm. 

“The difference between branding and sales is simple. Are you trying to convert or are you trying to create an experience? The latter always wins.” - Gary Vaynerchuk

What Is a Chief Brand Officer? 

A Chief Brand Officer (CBO) is a relatively new executive-level position at a corporation, company, organization, or agency. A CBO typically reports to the CEO or board of directors and is responsible for a brand's image, experience, and promise. The CBO oversees marketing, advertising, design, public relations, and customer service.

The system of communications and experiences, which define brands and creates value, extend well beyond the limits of the typical marketing organization. It includes such diverse aspects as leadership vision, talent policies, culture, product pipeline, approach to innovation, operations, social responsibility, customer service, sales, and all of your ongoing marketing activities.

And while some organizations are responding to this new reality by breaking these functions down into silos, thus spreading the operational responsibilities to multiple resources, it requires a savvy QB to coordinate all these people, agencies, and functions. 

An effective CBO must possess the following characteristics:

• A keen curiosity and a fierce passion for the brand he represents 
• To truly care about and have an empathy for people
• To be a great coach that is able to influence the actions of a broad array of people
• The gravitas to influence their fellow leadership team and members of their board
• To take a systems approach to understanding the winds of change
• To have a strong eye for the future and a creative and innovative approach to taking advantage of it.

A CBO is someone who possesses the vision, discipline, and ability to successfully implement ideas that relate to a central purpose of an organization. They balance internal culture and external perception.

The Primary Hats of A CBO

One: Keeper Of Purpose: Storyteller

As modern business strategy becomes a process of constant innovation and renewal against the anchor of a common purpose, then the Chief Brand Officer should be the keeper of this purpose, advocate for it, and chief storyteller inside and outside the organization as to the power of this purpose with customers, employees and society as a whole.

Attempting to differentiate a brand through price or quality of service is no longer an effective method to stand heads and tails above a competitor. Powerful branding touches not only the mind, but the emotional and spiritual needs of individuals.

Great storytelling builds a value and equity that cannot be built through traditional advertising. This is an aspect that any CBO pays great attention to in all their content strategies and customer experiences. 

Two: Educator

Customers and team members believe deeds not words.

The entire customer experience, rather than the latest advertising tactics, is how brands stand out and become trusted. And this means influencing colleagues in many other departments, including product design, engineering and customer service. 

Many organizations, as we’ve seen, are keen to build the right brand in the minds of employees, just as much among consumers. They use branding to change how employees think, feel and act. Often, they produce a set of guidelines for how employees should behave – even in meetings that no consumer will ever see.

A conscientious CBO builds culture, an ethos, professionalism, care and empathy. 

The CBO’s  task becomes an educational one. In some cases, this means teaching the whole organization to collectively deliver the best possible customer experience, in order to build the right brand for consumers.

Three: Science Nerd & Creative Director 

Big Data now plays a central role in branding, marketing, advertising, and storytelling. 

Much of what a company does in the market – communicating, selling and delivering its product or service – now happens online, which means it gets tracked. In other words, there is a valuable trail left of how consumers behave and why. 

Big data can inform a CBO which online campaigns get most clicks, which posts get most the most shares, which discounts work best, which sales channels are most efficient, who the customers are, where they are, what else they like, how much they use your product, and what they say about it on Yelp and Google.

Using this data, the CBO’s goal is to build a brand which attencipates people’s changing needs. Based on that prediction, better content and experiences can be created. 

Big data can help you identify new trends and new needs. For example: by analyzing what people are searching for on Google. Big data can help you get pricing right, and to experiment with new products. And of course it can help you target communication at exactly the right people – for example, showing people advertising based on what they’ve been writing about in their emails. 

“Obscurity is a bigger problem than money.” - Grant Cardone

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Edwin Dearborn currently serves on the Board at ROMTech.