Brands Have the Problems They Deserve

Not long ago, I heard Daniel Granatta say that brands get the advertising they deserve.

His point was less about advertising itself than about everything that happens before it: internal processes, a lack of vision, decisions that keep getting postponed, standards that gradually erode, and structures that, sooner or later, reveal themselves in what a brand puts in front of the public.

The idea stayed with me. Advertising is only one of the ways an organisation eventually reveals what it has decided to tolerate.

A hire meant to cover four jobs at once. A senior team replaced without a transition. Strategic counsel that could wait another quarter. A budget cut in the wrong place. An approval step removed because it slowed things down. An operational problem given a patch good enough to make it to Friday. A responsibility that ended up in the hands of someone who should never have been expected to carry it alone. None of these decisions seem particularly serious when they happen. Until it is.

A brand does not start having problems when consumers see them. The problems begin much earlier: in a hiring decision, a budget cut, an approval that ceased to exist, a misplaced responsibility, or a decision no one was willing to question. What reaches the public is usually only the outcome.

So rather than thinking that brands get the advertising they deserve, I have started thinking something slightly more uncomfortable:

brands have the problems they deserve.

The Silent Deterioration

During the pandemic, many organisations had to learn how to operate with less. Teams were reduced, hiring was frozen, budgets disappeared, and entire sets of responsibilities had to be redistributed among those who remained. In many cases, there was little room to debate whether this was the ideal structure. The priority was survival.

More than six years have passed.

Some of that emergency logic seems to have become embedded in the way we work.

Smaller teams took on more functions. Senior positions disappeared, and their responsibilities moved several levels down the organisation. Roles began to expand: strategy, content, design, paid media, video, influencers, events, reporting. All of it could belong in a single job description. External strategic counsel became something that could wait. Review processes were shortened. Many decisions that once required experience began to be made with whatever resources were available.

The explanation is usually simple: there is no budget.

For many companies, that is a genuine reality. Costs have risen, markets have become more uncertain, and no organisation has unlimited resources. A lack of budget, however, stops being merely a constraint to manage when it becomes a permanent explanation for decisions that continue to weaken the organisation’s capabilities.

Six years later, another question is worth asking: how did we reach a point where we need more and more from people, teams and suppliers while being willing to give them fewer and fewer resources?

A company loses its senior team and distributes its responsibilities among those who remain. A vacancy disappears for a quarter and never returns. Strategic counsel is postponed while the team deals with urgent matters. A problem receives a temporary solution that ends up staying in place for years. The demands of the day-to-day consume the space that was meant for thinking about what should happen next.

And for a while, it works.

Content keeps going out. Meetings keep happening. Reports arrive. Campaigns launch. Problems are solved just well enough for operations to continue.

That ability to keep going can conceal structural deterioration for a very long time.

Until the signs become difficult to ignore: constant rework, exhausted teams, contradictory decisions, loss of consistency, suppliers that change continuously, strategies that last only weeks, and problems that keep returning under different names. At that point, the conversation usually turns to fixing the symptom.

We need a new campaign. We need to change agencies. We need to hire someone to “manage the brand”. We need to publish more. Let’s try another strategy. Maybe a new identity will help us bring everything back into order.

By then, the problem has been unfolding inside the organisation for years.

Who “Manages the Brand”?

There is a phrase that appears frequently in conversations and job postings: we need someone to “manage the brand”.

Then comes the job description.

Brand strategy. Content planning and creation. Social media management. Graphic design. Video editing. Paid media. Influencer coordination. Events. Supplier relationships. Reporting. Commercial follow-up. Sometimes photography, copywriting and community management make the list too.

All under a single role.

It is not unusual for a company to need versatile professionals. In smaller organisations especially, the boundaries between functions are necessarily more flexible. What is concerning is the assumption that accumulating tasks is the same as managing a brand.

A brand is one of an organisation’s intangible assets. Managing it means working with perception, reputation, trust, differentiation, associations, experience and value built over time. It also requires understanding the business behind it: what it promises, how it delivers on that promise, where it falls short, and which decisions can strengthen or erode it.

That hardly fits into a list of posts due this week.

Brand management extends across areas that often do not even report to Marketing. It is present in the product, customer service, sales, internal culture, experience, operations, corporate communications and the relationships an organisation builds with its different audiences.

It also becomes visible when things go wrong.

A reputational crisis does not become Marketing’s responsibility the moment it reaches Instagram. By then, it may involve operational, legal, commercial, employment or institutional decisions made long before. Communications will have to respond to the consequences, but it needs an organisation capable of establishing what happened, what position it will take, who has the authority to respond, and what it is prepared to do about it.

That, too, is brand management.

Which is why it is strange to hand “the brand” to one person and expect them to protect, develop and grow an asset that depends on the behaviour of an entire organisation.

We can have a Brand Manager. We can define custodians, decision-makers and teams capable of giving the brand direction and consistency. We can establish processes for making decisions and protecting what we have built.

What we cannot do is treat the brand as an object that simply changes hands.

When an organisation hires someone to “manage the brand”, it may be asking them to think strategically, produce content, edit videos, manage channels, coordinate suppliers, interpret data, manage communities, identify reputational risks and respond when something goes wrong.

That job description reveals something more significant than an excessive workload: how much the organisation understands about what it is placing under that person’s responsibility.

When We Delegate Reputation

Delegation is inevitable. No organisation can concentrate every decision in the hands of a few people, and no senior team should personally oversee every post, response or everyday interaction involving a brand. The question is what gets delegated, to whom, and under what conditions. This becomes particularly evident in social media.

For years, social media was treated as a relatively operational function: publishing content, responding to comments, following trends, keeping a content calendar active. That perception made it one of the first areas many organisations handed over to junior professionals, interns, small suppliers or teams with limited resources.

Meanwhile, the channel changed.

Today, a social media platform can simultaneously function as a space for customer service, public relations, corporate communications, social listening and reputation building. A complaint can escalate within hours. A response can become a screenshot. A post can travel far beyond the audience it was intended for and reach thousands of people who know nothing about the brand’s context.

The scope of the responsibility grew much faster than the structures created to manage it.

But if someone with six months of experience can, from their phone, publish something that forces the CEO to explain himself the next day, that person should not be making that decision alone.

This is not about distrusting young talent. It is about recognising the level of responsibility we have placed in their hands.

Hiring junior professionals is necessary. Organisations need to develop talent, and someone has to give people their first opportunity. There is nothing inherently wrong with an agency founded by three university students either. Every company started somewhere, with little experience and a great deal to prove. Capitol Circle included.

Experience has to begin somewhere, and acquiring it inevitably involves making mistakes. Every decision develops the judgement needed for the next one. For the person learning, that process is essential; for the organisation placing a brand in their hands, it also represents a risk that needs to be managed.

That is why guidance matters.

A professional at the beginning of their career can research, propose, execute, experiment and gradually take on more complex decisions. They may even notice things that someone with twenty years of experience is missing. What they should not be expected to do is replace, for the sake of budget convenience, a structure that no longer exists.

The same logic applies when reputation is delegated outside the organisation.

• An influencer may understand their audience extraordinarily well, know its codes and build a community that would take a brand years to develop. That does not make them responsible for defining the company’s reputational boundaries.

• An agency can manage a brand’s channels. It needs to know where its autonomy ends.

• A community manager can respond to an everyday conversation. They need to know when that conversation is no longer ordinary.

• And an organisation needs to have defined those answers before someone is forced to improvise them in front of thousands of people.

Crisis management begins long before the statement.

It begins with escalation criteria, approval levels, protocols, clarity about who makes decisions, and the ability to recognise when something that looks like just another post has stopped being content and become reputation.

Social media is not merely a calendar that needs to remain active. It is also a microphone. And handing over the microphone means deciding who gets to speak, about what, and what happens when the conversation changes.

The Problem Is Not the Tool

Not the junior professional. Not the influencer. Not the new agency. Not artificial intelligence.

All of them can have a legitimate place within an organisation. A small supplier may be exactly what a company needs. A professional at the beginning of their career can bring talent, knowledge and a different perspective. An influencer can build relationships with audiences that a brand would struggle to reach otherwise. And artificial intelligence can accelerate research, analysis, production and processes that once required many more hours.

The difficulty begins when we stop distinguishing between capability and responsibility.

A tool can help us analyse information, compare alternatives, synthesise research, develop scenarios or challenge hypotheses. It can also produce, within seconds, answers convincing enough to make us forget that someone still has to decide whether they are correct, relevant and appropriate to the context.

The same applies to people and suppliers.

We can hire for execution when there is strategic thinking behind it. We can work with a small team if we clearly define its scope. We can bring in less experienced professionals when guidance is available. We can delegate decisions when we know which ones require another level of review.

When those distinctions disappear, an organisation hires one person and expects a department. It buys execution and demands strategy. It hands over reputation without building protocols. It reduces supervision while increasing responsibility. It changes direction every time a new trend appears and confuses the ability to produce faster with the ability to make better decisions.

The same thing happens when we use artificial intelligence to replace conversations the organisation still needs to have.

Bringing AI into our work does not eliminate the need for experience. It can expand our capabilities, accelerate processes and allow professionals to spend more time on higher-value problems. Judgement is still necessary to formulate the questions, interpret the answers and recognise everything a prompt cannot fully capture.

A tool cannot take responsibility for a decision. The organisation can.

And that distinction matters most when something goes wrong.

Problems Are Outputs Too

When an error appears, the natural reaction is to look for the exact point where it happened. Who published it. Who designed it. Who responded. Who approved it. Who hired them. Who made the decision. We need to know, but stopping there gives us an incomplete explanation.

We should also ask what had to happen within the organisation for that error to make its way through the system and become a problem.

If an inappropriate post reached the public, it matters who published it. It also matters who could have reviewed it, what criteria were in place, how much autonomy that person had, and what signals should have stopped it earlier.

If a strategy is constantly changing, it is worth examining who proposes each change, but also how clear the original direction was and why a trend, a new tool or an everyday urgency carries enough weight to alter it.

If a team is permanently reacting, the problem is probably not its ability to organise itself. The structure may have normalised a workload that can only be sustained by constantly reacting.

If a company has spent years solving the same problem with temporary solutions, each new patch stops being an isolated event and starts describing how the organisation operates.

Systems produce outcomes.

They produce the good ones: consistency, clarity, responsiveness, accumulated knowledge, better decisions.

They produce the others too.

A bad post, a misguided campaign or a hire that did not work out can happen in any organisation. The risk lies in building systems that allow those errors to keep moving forward without anyone detecting, questioning or stopping them.

That is why some problems that appear sudden have been building for a very long time.

They were there in the vacancy designed to cover five different functions. In the strategic counsel that was postponed yet again. In the process that lost a review step. In the person who took on a responsibility without ever receiving the guidance they needed. In the strategy that changed so many times it stopped providing direction. In the patch that worked just well enough to avoid solving the underlying problem.

By the time they finally reach the consumer, they look like an event.

Inside the organisation, they have been a pattern for some time.

Problems are outputs too.

Brands Have the Problems They Deserve

Saying that a brand has the problems it deserves may sound cruel. It is not. “Deserve”, in this case, is not about punishment. It is about consequence.

An organisation cannot control every shift in the market, every reaction from its audience or every mistake made by the people who work within it. Nor can it build a system in which nothing ever goes wrong. What it can decide is what happens before and after the mistake.

It can define which responsibilities require experience, which decisions need supervision, and which risks should not rest on one person alone. It can build protocols before they are needed. It can make room for thinking before urgency becomes the only way of working. It can recognise when a temporary solution has spent too long pretending to be enough.

It can also ask why certain problems keep returning.

If problems were nothing more than accidents, there would be little we could do to prevent them. When they are the consequence of decisions, structures and priorities, they can also be prevented.

That moves the conversation somewhere far more useful than finding someone to blame.

It restores agency.

The next time a brand faces a crisis, loses consistency, exhausts its team, changes direction yet again, or discovers that something it has postponed for months has finally become urgent, perhaps the first question should not be who made the mistake. It should be what made it possible for the mistake to get that far.

Branding cannot compensate for structural problems. A brilliant campaign cannot fix a poor experience. A brilliant community manager cannot replace a crisis protocol. A new identity cannot correct a mediocre operation. And a talented junior professional cannot replace a structure that should be there to support them.

Brands reveal far more about how they operate internally than they tend to imagine. In their campaigns, in their silences, in the way they respond when something goes wrong, and in the decisions the public will never know about.

Problems tell that story too.

Brands have the problems their systems allow them to have.

And fortunately, systems can change.