Knowing What You Want Is a Skill: Decision Making In Brand Management
Leading a powerhouse brand requires a deep bench of skills spanning visual design, communication, content strategy, and organizational design (and beyond!) Brand leaders must especially know how to make effective decisions that serve the business strategy. This skill of decision making, or discernment, is one of the most difficult and essential requirements of any brand leader, and it’s rarely explored as a core capability for the role.
Brand execution is usually talked about in the context of customer engagement and external impacts, but there are a plethora of internal impacts from a brand. Quality decision making is critical to each of them:
Brand Identity: Effective decision making helps shape and maintain a brand’s identity. Every brand decision must align with the company’s vision, mission, and values to build brand equity over time.
Alignment and Consistency: Well-informed decisions create alignment between departments and stakeholders. Brand managers bridge the gap between marketing, product development, sales, and other teams, so they are uniquely positioned to unify the business.
Resource Optimization: Brand managers allocate resources and prioritize initiatives. By making quality decisions, brand managers maximize the impact of limited resources (and there’s never enough time, money, or energy for all we need to do!).
Adaptability and Innovation: Brand decisions that adapt to the business and market foster creativity, encourage experimentation, and drive continuous improvement. This agility allows brands to stay relevant and seize opportunities to outpace competition.
Empowering decision making for brand leaders matters to the business.
Throughout my professional journey, I’ve seen a variety of symptoms that an organization has a discernment situation. The root cause may be that managers don’t understand who is empowered to make decisions. Or being accountable for decisions feels unsafe. And in situations where design or subjective decisions are required, some managers feel unqualified to have an opinion.
When decision making isn’t safe and empowered, companies and brands suffer. There’s lost efficiency with convoluted approval processes, stagnation because of decision avoidance, and disengagement because of micromanagement or excessive control.
We need good decision makers in brand management, and we need a culture that supports action.
How can you tell if a decision is good? The outcome is not the only (or even the best) measure of a decision’s quality. The work leading up to the decision is often a better measure of a decision’s quality than the results that come after it. Here are five key considerations when making a decision:
Has the problem been defined? It’s remarkable how many times a solution has been implemented before time was spent interrogating the problem.
Have the success criteria been defined? Do you know what success looks like and how you will measure it?
Have you explored more than one course of action? Have you evaluated the alternatives with an open mind?
Have you considered future context? How does today’s need match expectations for the future?
Have you aligned the decisions to the org’s vision and values? Branding decisions should be tightly bound to the company vision and goals rather than to personal preferences or trends.
In summary, the skill of decision making is a fundamental requirement for brand leaders. It influences all aspects of the brand’s internal and external impact, so organizations must foster a culture that supports safe and empowered decision making. By prioritizing discernment and following a thoughtful decision-making process, brand leaders can steer their brands towards success, adapt to changing conditions, and create a unified and innovative business. You will also find that empowered decision making also leads to more engaged team members, better relationships with employees, designers, and vendors, and a more cohesive brand strategy.
Additional Resources:
15 Ways to Promote Psychological Safety at Work (via Forbes)
How to Make Great Decisions Quickly (via Harvard Business Review)
