Culture is the new brand: how CMOs can lead the next wave of change

The old model is cracking

For decades, branding was seen as a top-down broadcast function. You create a story. You package it beautifully. You push it out through ads, campaigns, and activations. The job was to shape perception.

But perception and awareness alone no longer drive brand preference. Today, experience has such a big role as does community and belief.

It’s tribal and, I believe, is a shift that is born from local communities dissolving. How many of you know six of your neighbours on a first-name basis? Or are part of a local group that physically meet up each week? P.S. WhatsApp and Facebook groups don’t count!

We’ve shifted away from our local communities, from going out to a local pub or club and replaced it with a Netflix binge. This has been happening for a long time. To be honest, it’s been happening since the first televisions were wheeled into our front rooms.

But what is happening instead is that brands pick up the tribal need for all of us to be part of something. The leaders in this are B2C businesses such as Patagonia, Harley Davidson and Gymshark. These are brands powered not only by the right marketing messaging, but by how they show up and the wider message they create. Patagonia, for instance, has supported grassroots groups working to find solutions to the environmental crisis since 1972. Interestingly, the more niche you go the stronger the relationship your ‘tribe’ has to your brand.

This culture can’t be faked. You can’t “message” your way into it. You become part of it by living it.

Which means the job of the modern CMO isn’t just to market the brand, it’s to cultivate the culture that creates the brand. The great news is that B2B brands are often way behind in this, making the goal posts low.

What does “culture is the brand” actually mean?

Culture isn’t just your values written on a poster in HR or as I remember large vinyl’s in office spaces.

Culture is how your company actually behaves both inside and out. With your audience and employees.

It’s how your brand shows up on TikTok, at a trade show or in crisis. It’s how your team use the right tone of voice in customer complaints. It’s how decisions are made against the brand strategy when the leader isn’t there. It’s the unwritten code that governs everything.

Far from just being captured in a brand strategy deck, it’s felt deeply by your customers. You may think you’re selling services, apps or supplements. But in a crowded market, customers aren’t actually buying products. They’re buying the feeling of what it means to be part of your brand’s world. They’re buying alignment, a sense of self identity and meaning.

CMOs as culture architects

So, if culture is the brand, then what’s the role of the Chief Marketing Officers (CMO)? This job role needs to evolve and its putting strain on an already incredibly stretched person.

If you’re in that role, perhaps some of these might have you nodding along; it’s Chief Meaning Officer; Chief Movement Officer; Chief Misfit Officer even – someone who’s brave enough to break norms and champion the why behind the what.

Here’s some thoughts on how a CMO will lead the next wave of change:

Start inside the business

Your culture doesn’t start with customers. It starts with your team. CMOs must work closely with founders, HR and product leaders to ensure the internal culture matches the external promise.

• Are your values actionable and lived?
• Does your team understand the brand beyond a brand visual guidelines?
• Can everyone – from product to ops – articulate what makes you different?

Define a clear point of view

Brands without a point of view can and will fade into the noise. The best brands I know have a clear brand strategy and build a culture around it. At the extreme end, think Oatly’s rebellion against the dairy industry. Or Tony’s Chocolonely’s fight against slavery in chocolate production.

This isn’t just storytelling, it’s movement building.

Is there anything within your business that you can use as a clear differentiator (it doesn’t need to be as rebellious as the examples above)?. CMOs can help define and communicate a bold point of view. One that gives customers and employees something clear to believe in.

Build culture assets, not just campaigns

Most marketing departments are set up to build short-term campaigns, great at generating a boost in awareness. But culture compounds and it needs consistency, not one-off stunts.

That means investing in:

• Long-term brand building and community programs
• Creator collaborations that go deep, not wide (if appropriate)
• Brand language (tone of voice) that becomes part of people’s identity

The aim here is to create a sense of belonging.

Act like a media company

Today, every brand needs to act like a media brand, whether they like it or not. If you’re not creating your own narrative someone else will. CMOs now need to think more like editors-in-chief, curating the voice, the vibe and the worldview of the brand. This doesn’t mean spamming every platform. It means owning the story and telling it in a way that resonates – across content, community, product, and even hiring.

The cost of cultural inconsistency

When culture isn’t embedded, branding collapses under its own weight. You’ve seen it and you’ve probably felt it.

• A leadership team launches a new mission, only for employees to shrug.
• Values are listed in onboarding packs but never referenced again.
• A rebrand goes live without the internal team knowing how to talk about it or feeling truly part of it.

It’s both frustrating and it’s damaging.

Take BrewDog as an example – a brand that wore rebellious values as a badge of honour. Yet when internal culture clashed with external image via an open letter in 2021, the brand was called out by its own people, very publicly and very loudly. The press had an absolute field day. And the damage wasn’t cosmetic, it was commercial. I know a lot of people who think twice about buying the brand, purely because of that infamous open letter.

Final thought

Brand culture is messy. Although culture is based on a solid brand strategy backed by some decent research. it isn’t something that’s static and remains in your guidelines. Brand culture is alive, ever-changing and (often) highly unpredictable. But it’s also the most potent brand-building force there is.

The question isn’t whether culture matters to your brand. The question is ‘are you brave enough to lead with it?’

Because in a world full of noise, sameness and algorithm-chasing, brands that lead with culture won’t just win more market share. They’ll build movements starting from within.