Sales Over Night, Brand Over Time
CMO Confidential Newsletter: Week of June 23rd
You’re Brought in to Fix the Brand — Now What?
Guest: Nancie McDonnell Ruder, Founder & CEO, Noetic Consulting
This week on CMO Confidential, Mike Linton sits down with Nancie McDonnell Ruder, the founder of Noetic, a consultancy focused on building brand strategy from the inside out. The episode tackles one of the most common mandates in marketing: “Fix the brand.” But as Nancie explains, brand issues exist on a wide spectrum—from misalignment to outright crisis—and the solution depends entirely on understanding where your organization and your brand truly stand. Whether you’re parachuting into a troubled situation or working to reverse a slow decline, this episode provides a field guide for diagnosing, organizing, and activating an organizational brand transformation.
1. Brand Problems Exist on a Spectrum — Figure Out Where You Are by Finding the True Root Cause
“Fixing the brand” can mean anything from light refinement to full-scale transformation. Nancie breaks it down into three categories: refinement (like Georgetown University’s disjointed visual identity), standing up a brand for the first time (as with the Mayo Clinic), or managing a crisis (as with a currently unnamed healthcare system facing steep reputational decline).
The critical insight? You can’t treat them all the same.
“Lead with your who to know your what.”
That means understanding your audience’s perception before jumping to solutions.
Organizations often leap to brand or marketing fixes without validating the root cause.
“You have to be willing to test your hypotheses,” Nancie says.
In the case of Mayo Clinic, brand awareness was strong, but affinity and willingness to travel were declining—clear metrics that told a story. In contrast, many companies skip the data entirely, assuming the problem is messaging or media. But sometimes the issue isn’t perception—it’s product, operations, or even pricing.
The key: look at the entire business and the full customer journey.
2. Don’t Skip the Homework: Talk to Real Customers
One of the biggest mistakes? Skipping customer research. Many companies and leaders assume they understand the problem—and often believe they know the solution. This is usually a major mistake.
“Even if you have a modest budget, you can’t afford to skip talking to your audience,” she emphasizes.
While a full-fledged research approach is ideal, scrappy methods like social listening, qualitative interviews, or in-store walkthroughs can provide powerful directional insight—especially for those with limited budgets.
Leaders often operate under outdated or unverified assumptions, particularly when internal teams cling to long-held beliefs about customer loyalty or pricing power. While those beliefs may once have been true, markets shift, customers evolve, and competitors adapt.
3. Brand Is a Company-Wide Effort—Not Just Marketing’s Job
If your brand reboot is confined to the marketing team, expect internal resistance. Nancie recommends launching a “Teach Me Tonight” campaign—her playful, Taylor Swift–inspired way of describing internal brand education.
“Most people don’t even know what ‘brand’ really means,” she says, “but they are often a critical element of delivering the brand value to customers.”
To succeed, companies must align leadership, customer-facing teams, and skeptics around a shared understanding of brand purpose and behavior. That includes educating employees on how their individual actions contribute to delivering on the brand promise.
Marketers are often so focused on the launch campaign that they forget one of the most important brand ambassadors: employees.
“If your people don’t know how to live the brand, it’s just a campaign.”
She cites Mayo Clinic as a gold standard, where staff behavior reinforces the brand promise at every touchpoint by ensuring patients feel that everyone at the Clinic is invested in their health. Without internal alignment and activation, external brand efforts can lose steam quickly.
4. Co-Create the Strategy to Get the Company Involved — A Big Unveil Is Often a Fail
One key to successful transformation is buy-in from the entire company. While that can seem like a lot of work, it almost always produces better results.
A common failure point starts with “The Grand Reveal”—the ta-da moment where Marketing shares its finished work with the rest of the company. It often backfires, triggering resistance instead of excitement.
Instead, Nancie urges marketers to involve key stakeholders early in the process.
“We co-create the strategy so no one can cross their arms and say it’s not theirs.”
This doesn’t mean every voice gets a vote, but it does mean that perceived ownership becomes actual alignment—a crucial factor for internal adoption.
5. Don’t Confuse Mission with Brand—Especially in Purpose-Driven Organizations
It’s a common trap, especially in sectors like higher education, healthcare, and nonprofits: leaders assume their mission is their brand. But as Nancie explains, that assumption can actually derail effective brand strategy.
“Mission is internal,” she says. “Brand is how people experience you.”
In other words, your mission defines why you exist and what you aim to accomplish. But your brand is the external perception of that purpose, shaped by every interaction, message, and experience your audience has with you. They’re connected—but not interchangeable.
Nancie points out that mission-driven organizations often lean heavily on communications and PR—telling people what they stand for—without investing in the intentional management of how they’re perceived. This leaves the brand to form by accident, through scattered impressions and inconsistent touchpoints.
That’s a risk. Audiences today expect clarity and coherence. If what you say (mission) doesn’t line up with what they experience (brand), trust erodes.
“The mission might be noble,” Nancie says, “but that doesn’t mean people understand who you are, what you offer, or why you matter.”
The takeaway: A powerful mission doesn’t exempt you from managing your brand—it actually raises the stakes. The more important your purpose, the more critical it is that people truly experience it.
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