When a business is performing well, we assume everything about it must be working. Strategy. Leadership. Culture. Brand. When performance dips, we assume the opposite.
That instinct is understandable – but wrong.
I’ve been reading The Halo Effect by Phil Rosenzweig, which explains how business success creates a kind of glow. Strong results make us tell great stories about why things are working. Weak results do the same, just in reverse. We retrofit explanations based on outcomes, not evidence.
Brand is especially vulnerable to this kind of misreading. Not because it doesn’t matter – but because you never see it directly.
Brand is rarely “seen” directly. It shows up sideways, in friction. In how hard the business has to work to be understood, trusted, and chosen. Longer sales cycles. More discounting. More explanation. More internal reassurance. All the cost, none of it labelled “brand”.
Which makes brand dangerously easy to misdiagnose, particularly inside leadership teams looking at short-term performance data and trying to make fast decisions.
The tricky part is that brand doesn’t behave like most other business assets. If a factory is failing, you can measure it. If cashflow is broken, you can see it. But when brand is weak, the effects don’t show up as one obvious number – they show up as drag. Longer sales cycles. More discounting. More explaining. More internal stakeholders needed to sign off the decision. All hidden in different areas.
And there’s a time delay too. The business results you’re looking at today aren’t a perfect reflection of the brand as it is right now. They’re often a reflection of the brand as it was a couple of years ago – when customers formed their view, the trust was built (or lost), and your reputation settled into place. Buyers don’t experience your brand in real time the way brand managers do.
Which is exactly why the Halo Effect is so seductive. When performance is strong, it’s easy for the business to conclude the brand must be in great shape. And when performance drops, it’s easy to assume the brand must be the problem. Both stories can be wrong because brand impact arrives late, and it arrives indirectly.
This is why brand is so easy to misread inside organisations.
Most leadership teams are looking at “now” data: revenue this month, pipeline this quarter, margin this year. It’s immediate and feels objective. It feels like reality.
But brand is a slow-moving asset. It’s made up of accumulated impressions, remembered experiences, and second-hand opinions. It builds over time, and it decays over time. Which means the business can be riding on old brand equity long after the brand has started drifting – and it can also be investing in the brand for months without seeing the commercial payback yet.
That mismatch creates two common mistakes:
Sometimes the business is performing well and assumes the brand must be strong, so it stops paying attention. It gets complacent. It keeps adding messages and initiatives because “it’s working”. But what’s really happening is the business is living off momentum – and quietly increasing friction for the next wave of buyers.
Other times performance softens and the business panics. Suddenly the brand becomes the culprit. The language gets dramatic: “We’ve lost relevance.” “We need a refresh.” “We need a rebrand.” But often the problem isn’t the brand’s look or tone. It’s the offer. The sales motion. The product experience. The ability to articulate value in a way that makes buying feel safe.
Brand gets blamed because it’s the most editable thing in the room.
And because the effects of brand show up indirectly, it’s easy to treat it like a story you can rewrite and mould, rather than an asset you have to manage with discipline. Reading the book, this really hit me. All of the other business signals show up more immediately and clearly than brand – which means brand must be managed much more carefully.
So, what does a good brand guardian do with that reality?
First, they stop treating brand like a real-time performance lever.
Brand isn’t a switch you flick to fix a quarter. It’s more like steering. Small degrees of drift become big problems later, but they’re almost invisible while things are going well. That’s why brand leadership is most valuable when the business doesn’t feel urgent. When revenue is healthy. When the pipeline looks fine. That’s the moment you can still make clean decisions without panic in the room.
Second, they learn to look for brand impact in the right places – refusing to swap diagnosis for storytelling.
Not in vanity metrics. Not in internal opinion. Not in whether the CEO “likes the new line”.
But in friction.
If your brand is doing its job, you feel it in commercial efficiency:
• Sales needs fewer slides to explain what you do.
• Deals move with less reassurance and less internal politics.
• You hold price because the value feels obvious.
• Prospects don’t keep asking “so what’s the difference?”
• Customers repeat your story back to you in their own words.
• Hiring gets easier because people understand what you stand for.
That’s brand as an asset. It reduces the cost of selling.
And it’s why the Halo Effect is so dangerous. When performance is up, it’s easy to tell yourself the brand must be strong. When performance drops, it’s easy to tell yourself the brand must be broken. Both stories can be comforting. Both can be wrong.
The disciplined move is to keep coming back to the same question:
Where is friction increasing and what decisions need made to reduce it?
Brand is the easiest thing to misread because it’s the easiest thing to tell stories about. And everyone’s got an opinion.
When the business is winning, everyone assumes the brand is strong. When it’s not, everyone wants to “fix the brand”. Both reactions are usually just storytelling, and storytelling is cheaper than decision-making.
The real work is less glamorous: spotting friction early, resisting panic moves, and editing the brand before the business is forced into change.
That’s what protects margin. And momentum.