The power of consistency and removing silos: Your Marketing Week
At the end of every week, we look at the key stories, offering our view on what they mean for you and the industry. From Disney’s marketing reshuffle to the importance of consistency when scaling a brand, it’s been a busy week. Here is my take.
Nuts and bolts
Nut butter brand Pip & Nut is a real success story. From a relative unknown a decade ago, it is now the market leader in the UK. And for good reason. It tapped into a market looking for a peanut butter without added sugar, palm oil, or other nasties, and that tasted good – better – than the existing products on offer.
More than a million and a half households – mine included – buy Pip & Nut now, and that’s just in the nut butter category. Over the past decade the brand has expanded into other sweet treats and snacks, which opens the brand up to occasions beyond breakfast and taps into people’s obsession for all things peanut butter.
With a small team it’s relatively easy to ensure consistency in terms of how a brand is portrayed to the world, from visual identity to tone of voice. But as a business grows and there are more people involved – working across different projects, with different objectives – even if the ultimate goal is a shared one, it can be easy for a brand to become diluted or drift, which could be detrimental to future growth.
This is something Pip Murray, founder of Pip & Nut, has been focused on avoiding, describing it as one of the hardest things about building a brand. Because while some element of evolution is necessary to grow, wholesale changes could be damaging. You don’t want to “constantly rip up the raw bit”, she told us this week, because “consistency is number one”.
It underlines the need for clear, well-defined and properly communicated brand codes that are stuck to religiously by everyone within the business, and used across every touchpoint a customer interacts with.
Murray makes a good point about being selective too – more messages doesn’t mean more recognition or a higher chance of conversion. All it does is weaken the brand and lead to confusion.
“You’ve got to make sure those visual cues are being repeated over and over and over again, and if you’ve got too many of them, then there’s just more noise,” she said.
Mission critical
If maintaining consistency is challenging within a fast-growing scale-up, imagine the complexity of working in an organisation with hundreds of thousands of employees, working across multiple businesses and hundreds of brands all around the world.
Challenging is an understatement.
There is no one-size-fits-all formula but removing silos and ensuring marketing teams are connected is essential. Having a CMO or equivalent in place to oversee everything is also crucial.
It’s something The Walt Disney Company is looking to resolve by connecting all its marketing teams through the introduction of a new centralised marketing and brand function. Led by former brand chief Asad Ayaz, who takes on the newly created role of chief marketing and brand officer, Disney is looking to better share capabilities and drive “greater continuity and agility”.
“As our businesses have evolved, it’s clear that we need a company-wide role that ensures brand consistency and allows consumers today to seamlessly interact with our wonderful products and experiences,” said CEO Bob Iger. “The chief marketing and brand officer role is critical for this moment.”
This the first time Disney has had a CMO overseeing marketing across the entire organisation. The fact its CEO describes the position as being “critical” to the business underlines the enormous power marketing – when done well – wields. And at a time when other organisations are removing the C-level role, it is a real signal of intent. At the same time, it’s surprising to learn this position didn’t exist before. If consistency is key, having someone to set the parameters and ensure they are upheld is essential.
Don’t forget the Asics
The new year often brings with it calls to wipe the slate clean and try new things. And that’s all very well. But among all the talk of AI, hyper personalisation, immersive experiences and cries to rip up the rule book, it’s important not to forget the basics.
Technology is a tool, channels a means of delivery, and yes, they offer brands new and exciting ways to reach audiences but they are not the message.
Asics’ head of marketing Gary Raucher put it well when he said new tech “might change our tactic, but it doesn’t change our strategy”. It opens up different opportunities for the brand to engage with people, but it doesn’t impact what it says.
Asics is built on the ethos of ‘sound mind, sound body’, which is baked into its foundations. Its name is an acronym of the Latin phrase ‘anima sana in corpore sano’, which means sound mind in a sound body. And this message is at the core of everything the brand does. “We’re constantly looking for new and creative ways to tell that same story again and again,” Raucher said.
Again it comes back to the value of consistency in brand building. Asics is 75 years old, but its reason for being is the same now as it was back then.
As Raucher put it: “The strongest brands are the ones that are masters in consistency.”
The future is bright
I’d like to end by saying a huge congratulations to our 2026 Future Marketing Leaders. They might not be the most senior marketer in their organisation but the work they do is having a demonstrable impact on the brands and businesses they work for.
They are leading on groundbreaking initiatives, unlocking opportunities for growth and pushing their brands forward – all against what remains a challenging backdrop. More on their thoughts about the biggest opportunities marketers should be embracing here.
As well as showcasing the immense achievements of those included, it also highlights there is no one clean path into marketing. Our Future Marketing Leaders’ way into the industry are many and varied, as are their roles now. But one thing they have in common is a love for what they do and the difference they are making.
Congrats again to our 2026 Future Marketing Leaders.
The week ahead
We will be sharing more thoughts from our Future Marketing Leaders next week, this time looking at the greatest challenges impacting the industry.
