To truly change a brand's narrative, marketing's 'talking the talk' is insufficient. The product experience itself must embody the desired story. This 'walking the walk' through the product is the most powerful way to shape core brand perception and make the narrative shareable.

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.

To ensure their new brand strategy was practical, Ford required every department to articulate how they would activate it. This exercise revealed gaps and ensured the strategy would guide daily decisions on what to do and, crucially, what to stop doing.

Ford's CMO credits their rebrand's success to a two-year process of embedding the new strategy across all departments, from HR to product development. This ensured it was more than a marketing campaign by influencing core business operations and decision-making.

To avoid an inconsistent, 'all over the place' approach, companies must establish a common brand-building philosophy or framework. This shared point of view, like Molson Coors's MUSCLE framework, ensures organizational alignment and helps build a cohesive marketing culture.

To modernize her team, Ally's CMO designed a new structure based on core capabilities (Insights, Execution, Creative, Measurement) rather than traditional functional silos. This model, benchmarked against other high-performing organizations, creates clearer ownership and a more effective workflow.

The CMO transitioned from a hands-on "doer" to a strategic leader not gradually, but through a pivotal team reorganization. This structural change reassigned ownership and forced him to empower his directors, shifting his own focus from execution to shaping and inquiring.

During Ford's two-year rebrand, moments where stakeholder alignment was lost were not failures. The CMO found these "regroups" were critical for strengthening the strategy, revealing where initial agreements were superficial or impractical and making the final plan more durable.

When presenting their rebrand strategy, Ford's CEO encouraged his team to transparently share challenges they hadn't yet solved. This demonstrated deep, critical thinking and built more confidence with the board than a perfectly polished presentation would have.