Parliament: I Watched a Company Die
I watched a company die this year.
Not slowly, either. Sales dipped, so they fired a marketing person. Sales stayed down, so they fired another one. Then the doors closed entirely, and everyone stood around asking what the marketing team did wrong.
Nothing, is the answer. The marketing team did nothing wrong. People were showing up. The doing was working. The problem was what they found when they arrived: something different from what they were promised. That is not a sales problem or a marketing problem. That is a brand problem, and no amount of firing can fix it, because the person responsible for it was never on the marketing team's org chart.
I've written before about what happens when we misdiagnose structural problems as individual ones.
This is the same move in a different department. When sales are down, we look for a person to blame instead of a truth to face.
And the person we blame is almost always the CMO.
The average CMO tenure is the shortest in the C-suite, and it keeps shrinking. Part of that is the job itself. The modern CMO is expected to be a data scientist, a creative director, a media buyer, a PR strategist, and an AI whisperer, often with a budget that got cut in the last planning cycle. But the bigger part is what the role has become: the designated absorber of problems that started somewhere else.
Here's the distinction that I think would have saved that company, and it's the one we build our entire practice on.
Brand is the being. Marketing is the doing. Your brand is who you are: your purpose, your values, the promise embedded in every interaction.
Marketing is how you express that to the world. When people ask whether branding can increase sales, this is the honest answer: branding is what makes your sales sustainable, because it's what makes the promise and the experience match.
Marketing can get people in the door. Only brand determines what they find when they walk through it.
So when a customer shows up for something and gets something else, you don't have a performance problem. You have an identity problem.
You can fire every marketer in the building and the gap between promise and reality will still be standing there, holding the door.
Most CEOs don't want to hear this, because the tactical diagnosis is so much more comfortable. Fire someone. Change agencies. Run a new campaign. Tactics have timelines and line items. Asking "who are we, actually?" has neither. It requires the CEO to sit in the room, not delegate the question downward, and to consider that the answer might implicate decisions they made themselves.
That's the other thing about brand work that makes it easy to avoid: it belongs to the CEO. Not the CMO. You cannot delegate your being. And when I say brand, I don't mean your logo or your color palette. Plenty of companies with beautiful visual identities have died the same death, because a beautiful label on a jar of the wrong thing is not a brand.
The company that closed had good marketers. What it never had was a leadership team willing to name who they were and build everything, including the experience, from that truth.
