A marketing chief I worked with twice on the agency side posted a goodbye note last week. Grateful for the journey, proud of the team, excited for the next chapter. Nineteen months. The brand platform she bought, fought for, and got past a skeptical board is fourteen months old, and it will not survive her.
I have watched this happen often enough to set a watch by it.
Someone arrives with a mandate to show impact fast. Brand work takes three to five years to compound. The math does not close, so the mandate wins and the work gets traded for whatever reports inside four quarters.
Which means the strategy deck is not really a strategy deck. It is a resume.
Almost nothing we call brand building is actually being built, because the person building it is measured on a clock shorter than the thing itself.
Three costs, and they compound.
One, the reset tax. Every arrival triggers a refresh, an agency review, a new architecture, a new tone document. The company pays twice, once in fees and once in the year the market spends re-learning who you are. Most of it buys nothing but a slide that says new.
Two, institutional memory loss. The reason a brand said no to something in 2017 lives in one person's head, and that person is gone. So the company relitigates decisions it already made, badly, from scratch.
Three, the drain underneath. Directors and managers watch the platform they staffed and defended get thrown out by the fourth boss in six years. They stop investing. They start optimizing for whatever survives a leadership change, which is performance metrics, which is precisely the short-termism everyone in the room claims to hate.
The brands that age well are almost always the ones where somebody stayed. Patagonia has held roughly one point of view since the seventies. Salt & Straw is still run by the two cousins who started it, which is why the flavor list can be strange on purpose and nobody panics. Continuity is not a personality trait. It is an operating condition.
If you are running marketing somewhere, the useful move is not promising a tenure you do not control. It is building the thing so it can outlive you. Write the decisions down, including the nos. Teach it to the layer below you. Resist the urge to sign your name across the front of it.
Continuity is not a personality trait. It is an operating condition.
I sent congratulations, which is what you do. Then I sat with a cold Stumptown americano and reread her platform document, the one nobody at that company will open again. It was good. That is the part that gets me. It was genuinely good.