To build an enduring company, ensure every customer interaction—from packaging tape to email pop-ups—reflects the quality of a major brand. This consistency across all touchpoints is what separates long-lasting brands from those that fade away after a short trend cycle.

Laura Kneebush's "Living Our Brands" initiative treats brand building as a company-wide responsibility. By training sales, R&D, and even manufacturing on brand strategy, the entire organization becomes accountable for the consumer experience, leading to deeper alignment and cultural change.

Establishing a strong brand involves more than customer research. It's critical that the internal team and key partners are aligned on the brand's vision and messaging. This internal clarity serves as the stable foundation for all external marketing efforts.

Brands meticulously map the customer journey but often ignore the employee experience. To build a strong culture, apply the same brand principles to every employee touchpoint—from the job offer to their first day—to ensure everyone is aligned and delivering on the brand's promise.

Excellent marketing's primary function is to unify the product, revenue, user perception, and community aspects of the business. Marketing is the only team that sits at this intersection, making it responsible for ensuring all brand touchpoints are coherent and work together.

To ensure a brand promise like "simplicity" permeates beyond ads, Expedia involves teams like product and supply in the initial consumer insight phase. This collaborative process leads to a shared "brand blueprint" that the entire organization rallies around, ensuring a consistent traveler experience.

In a crowded market, brand is defined by the product experience, not marketing campaigns. Every interaction must evoke the intended brand feeling (e.g., "lovable"). This transforms brand into a core product responsibility and creates a powerful, defensible moat that activates word-of-mouth and differentiates you from competitors.

To ensure brand is a shared responsibility, Ally includes brand health KPIs on the scorecards of the CEO, CFO, and other business leaders. This elevates brand from a marketing concern to a core business objective, fostering cross-functional alignment and accountability.

A powerful brand story serves as an internal rallying cry. By sharing marketing assets like brand videos internally, teams like product, engineering, and finance become inspired by the mission. This raises the internal bar and motivates them to build a product that lives up to the brand's promise.