Volume 191: The Brand Moat.

The Brand Moat.

tl;dr: I’m gonna write a book. Gulp.

Over the holiday break, I spent much time thinking about 2025 and the direction of Off Kilter. Mostly, I got stuck thinking about Scott Galloway, AKA Prof. G’s wildly nonsensical posturing that “the brand era is dead.” What struck me wasn’t so much that his argument had more holes than substance; it was the fact that he received so little pushback. And when thinking about why that may have been, the mostlogical conclusion is that it's for a simple reason - most people lack the knowledge to pushback forcefully because the subject of ‘brand’ has become sothoroughly soaked in snake oil, bullshit, and competing academic theories that very few people know how to push back effectively.

Add it all up, and put simply the term ‘brand’ has come to mean everything and thus nothing.

For some, a brand is a mental shorthand for things people don’t want to think about, like dishwasher detergent. For others, a brand is a mental shorthand for something people can’t stop obsessing over, like a supercar. For some, the bounds of the term ‘brand’ end at the corporation’s distinctive assets, like its logo and tagline. For others, it encompasses the entirety of the corporation’s activities.

Because the term simultaneously means everything and thus nothing, it lacks the conceptual scaffolding necessary for business leaders to understand its desirable business effects and thus do something with it.

Reviewing the dialog on the subject, you’ll find that we cross the full gamut from the rhetorically vague: “a promise…a promise, delivered!” to the rhetorically certain: “the 95:5 rule.” You’ll find wildly conflicting theories, from “brand love” to “marketing science” to “STP,” and you’ll find talking heads more intent on competing for attention and intellectual superiority against each other than helping others move things forward.

Curiously, what you won’t find is a meaningful and practical discussion on why and how the C-Suite, specifically the CEO, should think about the subject relative to their own business.

As a result, C-Suite understanding of brand as a value-enhancing business imperative is wildly inconsistent at best and outright hostile at worst. For every CEO who starts a first meeting saying “brand is destiny” (as one of my clients recently did), you’ll find a hundred who ‘do not believe’ and have little or no ‘faith’ in something as ephemeral as a ‘brand,’ which they then like to demean with statements like “it’s just marketing.”

Here’s the thing, though. Brands aren’t a matter of faith; they’re far from ephemeral and are often about far more than just the marketing department. The empirical evidence is crystal clear: Built successfully, brands represent economic moats that mimic monopoly advantages without the downside of monopoly frustrations (meaning people buy because they want to, not because they have to). In other words, brand strength creates volume effects (attracts more demand at lower overall cost) and pricing effects (can charge a premium), which means strongly branded corporations become akin to the Holy Grail for investors - higher returns at lower overall risk.

The impact of these combined effects means the job that a brand does for the corporation is to accelerate the performance of the underlying business - accelerating, increasing, and sustaining cashflows. As a result, brands aren’t independently valuable assets per se (sorry, Interbrand, Kantar, et al). More accurately, the accelerated performance that a strong brand delivers results in a higher valuation for the overall corporation. Empirically, a strongly branded company could be worth circa 3X more than an equivalent yet weakly branded competitor.

The reason the above should matter to any CEO is twofold:

1. Any business that outperforms its peers in attracting demand, commanding a premium, and doing so efficiently enough to demonstrate a performance-accelerating effect at lower overall risk will simultaneously win with customers and potentially be valued 3X more than a weakly branded competitor.

2. When even NYU marketing professors like Prof G. claim without more than anecdotal evidence that the brand era is dead and nobody pushes back because we lack the necessary conceptual scaffolding to do so, it creates an unprecedented opportunity for those willing to buck the trend and exploit what appears to be a widely held leadership blindspot as a competitive weakness.

So, where am I going with this? Well, I’ve decided to row against the ‘brand is dead’ tide due to three beliefs:

1. A well-run corporation with sound economics and strong future potential should outperform its peers by maximizing its strengths and relentlessly exploiting its competitors’ weaknesses.

2. Based on years of empirical research, adding the accelerating effect of brand can be a particularly effective way to achieve this, not for all, but for many.

3. Based on years of my own experience, the CEO is the brand leader who matters the most in any corporation yet is often the least informed and prepared to do the leading.

As a result, I intend to write a book on the subject tentatively titled “The Brand Moat: A Leadership Guide For CEOs & Those Who Want To Be.”

The focus will be on creating a unifying way for CEOs to think about their brands relative to their businesses. One that isn’t intent on creating a new theory and isn’t based on one or two anecdotal stories of others' success but that tries to reconcile and make sense of the best of what’s already out there.

Rather than a tactical “playbook,” the idea is to create the necessary conceptual scaffolding to enable the CEO and C-Suite peers to understand what it means to think about brand as an economic moat and business accelerator. As an outcome, I’d like them to have the confidence to invest in and pursue brand as a meaningful component of their overall strategy because they now have the understanding necessary to lead it strategically.

To force me into actually writing this tome rather than continue pontificating on it, I intend to reserve one OffKilter edition per month for an early draft of each chapter. I sincerely hope that at least some of you will be interested enough to read it and collaborate with feedback to help make it better. I can’t pay you, but I will try to find a way to acknowledge any and all assistance.

So, Happy New Year. Here’s to 2025…andThe Brand Moat.

p.

PS: Watch out for next week’s edition, where I’ll review what happened when Nike deconstructed one of the most successful brand-driven economic moats in history. Plot spoiler: it cost Nike shareholders $55bn and will likely take a decade to repair.