McKinsey’s Andrew on Brand Marketing: What It Gets Right

McKinsey’s work on brand marketing, much of it shaped by partner-level thinking from figures like Marc de Swaan Arons and the broader strategy practice, argues that brand is not a communications function. It is a commercial one. Brand decisions belong at the same table as pricing, product, and distribution. That framing is more useful than most of what gets published on brand strategy, and it is worth taking seriously.

The challenge is that most organisations still treat brand as something the marketing department owns, the finance department tolerates, and the CEO references in annual reports. McKinsey’s position challenges that directly. Whether companies act on it is a different question.

I have spent more than two decades running agencies, managing client P&Ls, and watching how brand strategy gets made in practice. The gap between how consultancies like McKinsey describe brand and how it actually functions inside most organisations is wide. This article is about that gap, and what to do with it.

What McKinsey’s Framework Actually Says About Brand

McKinsey’s brand marketing thinking has consistently pushed against the idea that brand is primarily about awareness or emotional resonance. The more commercially grounded argument is that brand creates pricing power, reduces customer acquisition costs over time, and provides a buffer against competitive pressure. These are measurable business outcomes, not soft metrics.

The BCG perspective on brand strategy aligns with this. BCG’s work on brand and go-to-market strategy makes the case that brand alignment across HR, marketing, and commercial functions creates a coherent customer experience that individual campaigns cannot replicate. The brand is not what you say it is. It is what every touchpoint confirms or contradicts.

That principle sounds obvious. In practice, most organisations violate it constantly. The brand team produces positioning documents that the sales team ignores. Customer service operates on different values than the brand guidelines suggest. Pricing decisions undermine premium positioning. I have seen this pattern in every sector I have worked in, from retail to financial services to travel.

If you are looking for a broader framework for thinking through brand positioning decisions, the brand strategy hub on The Marketing Juice covers the strategic architecture behind how strong brands are built and maintained over time.

Why Brand Awareness Is the Wrong Primary Metric

Brand awareness is the metric that marketing teams most frequently report to boards, and it is often the least useful one. Awareness tells you that people have heard of you. It does not tell you whether they prefer you, trust you, or intend to buy from you. Those are different things, and the distance between them is where most brand investment disappears.

Wistia makes this point clearly in their analysis of the problem with focusing on brand awareness as a primary objective. The core argument is that awareness without engagement or intent is a vanity metric. You can have high awareness and declining revenue simultaneously, which means the awareness is not doing commercial work.

I judged the Effie Awards, which are specifically designed to recognise marketing effectiveness rather than creative quality. One of the most consistent patterns I noticed was that campaigns with strong commercial results often had modest awareness numbers but very high relevance scores within a specific target segment. They were not trying to be known by everyone. They were trying to be the obvious choice for someone specific. That is a fundamentally different strategic objective, and it produces fundamentally different creative and media decisions.

If you do want to measure brand awareness in a way that connects to commercial outcomes, Semrush’s guide to measuring brand awareness offers practical frameworks for connecting awareness data to search behaviour and conversion patterns. The point is not to stop measuring awareness. It is to stop treating it as the destination.

The Operational Truth Problem in Brand Strategy

McKinsey’s brand thinking, at its best, insists that brand positioning must be grounded in what the business can actually deliver. A brand promise that exceeds operational capability is not aspirational. It is a liability. It creates expectations that generate disappointment, and disappointed customers are more vocal than satisfied ones.

Early in my career, I worked on a client account where the brand had built a strong reputation for customer service. The positioning was genuine, earned over years. Then the business scaled rapidly, the service infrastructure did not keep pace, and the brand promise became a source of customer frustration rather than loyalty. The marketing team kept spending on brand communications that were reinforcing expectations the operation could no longer meet. It took two years and a significant commercial decline before the business acknowledged the problem was structural, not creative.

This is not an unusual story. MarketingProfs’ data on brand loyalty under pressure shows that loyalty erodes fastest when the gap between brand promise and delivered experience widens. Customers are not disloyal by nature. They are rational. When the brand stops delivering what it promised, they leave.

The implication for brand strategy is that before you invest in positioning, you need an honest assessment of what your business consistently delivers. Not what it delivers on its best day. What it delivers reliably, at scale, across every customer segment you are targeting. Brand investment built on a shaky operational foundation is not just wasteful. It accelerates the reputational damage when things go wrong.

Where Brand Strategy Fails in Practice

Most brand failures are not creative failures. The visual identity is fine. The messaging is coherent. The campaign executions are competent. The failure is strategic: the wrong audience, the wrong promise, or a positioning that made sense at one point in the business lifecycle but no longer reflects commercial reality.

I have run agencies through multiple economic cycles. When I was building the performance marketing operation at iProspect, growing the team from around 20 people to over 100, one of the consistent tensions was between brand teams and performance teams within the same client organisations. Brand teams were protective of positioning and long-term equity. Performance teams were focused on immediate conversion. Neither was wrong, but the absence of a shared commercial framework meant they were often working against each other.

The McKinsey model, and the BCG agile marketing framework, both point toward integration as the answer. Not organisational integration for its own sake, but a shared understanding of what the brand is trying to achieve commercially, and how both brand and performance activity contributes to that outcome. When that shared framework exists, the tension between brand and performance becomes productive. Without it, it is just internal politics dressed up as strategic debate.

Brand strategy also fails when it is built around competitive differentiation that is not sustainable. Positioning yourself as the most innovative, the most customer-centric, or the most affordable only works if you can maintain that position as competitors respond. I have watched brands build entire identities around price leadership and then get caught between discount retailers and premium competitors with nowhere to go. Differentiation needs to be rooted in something the business owns structurally, not just something it claims rhetorically.

How AI Is Changing the Brand Equity Calculation

The McKinsey brand framework was largely developed before generative AI became a mainstream marketing tool. The principles hold, but there is a new variable that most brand strategies are not yet accounting for: the risk that AI-generated content erodes the distinctiveness that brand equity depends on.

Moz has written directly about the risks AI poses to brand equity, and the core concern is legitimate. When large volumes of content are generated at speed without genuine editorial oversight, brand voice becomes inconsistent. The specific perspective, the particular way a brand frames problems and solutions, gets averaged out. The content becomes competent but generic, and generic content does not build brand equity. It fills space.

I have seen this happen in real time. Agencies and in-house teams that adopted AI content generation without a strong editorial framework ended up with websites and social feeds that were technically accurate but tonally indistinct. They sounded like everyone else. The volume was there. The brand was not.

The answer is not to avoid AI. It is to treat brand voice as a governance question, not just a style guide question. The brand’s perspective, its specific way of seeing the category and the customer, needs to be encoded into every AI-assisted output with the same rigour that a good editor would apply. That requires more strategic investment in defining what the brand actually stands for, not less.

The B2B Brand Problem McKinsey Consistently Identifies

McKinsey’s brand work has repeatedly highlighted that B2B organisations systematically underinvest in brand relative to their B2C counterparts, and that this underinvestment has measurable commercial consequences. The argument is not that B2B brands should behave like consumer brands. It is that B2B buyers are still people, and people respond to brand signals even in professional purchasing contexts.

The MarketingProfs case study on B2B brand building from zero illustrates how even modest brand investment can generate significant lead volume when it is targeted correctly. The point is not the specific tactic. It is that brand investment in B2B contexts is not a luxury reserved for large enterprises. It is a commercial lever that most B2B organisations are leaving unused.

When I was managing paid search campaigns early in my career, one of the things that became obvious very quickly was that branded search terms converted at dramatically higher rates than generic ones. The brand was doing commercial work that the performance campaigns could not replicate. Every click on a branded term was a signal that the brand had already done some of the selling. That dynamic exists in B2B too, and it compounds over time. A recognised, trusted brand lowers the cost of every subsequent commercial interaction.

The practical implication is that B2B brand investment should be evaluated on the same commercial terms as any other marketing investment: what does it cost to acquire a customer with strong brand awareness versus without it? What is the sales cycle length difference? What is the win rate in competitive situations? These are measurable questions, and the answers almost always support more brand investment, not less.

What the McKinsey Brand Framework Gets Right (and What It Misses)

The McKinsey approach to brand marketing is more commercially rigorous than most. It treats brand as a business asset with measurable returns, insists on operational grounding, and pushes back against the idea that brand is primarily a creative or communications function. These are the right instincts.

Where the framework is less useful is in the translation from principle to practice. McKinsey can tell a business that brand alignment across functions is critical. It is harder to tell them how to achieve that alignment when the CMO and the COO have different incentive structures, when the brand team and the sales team report to different executives, and when the business is under short-term revenue pressure that makes long-term brand investment politically difficult to defend.

I have been in those rooms. The strategic case for brand investment is usually clear. The organisational and political barriers to acting on it are where most brand strategies stall. The practical work is building the internal case: connecting brand metrics to commercial outcomes in language that finance and operations can engage with, identifying the specific moments where brand investment changes customer behaviour in measurable ways, and creating governance structures that prevent short-term pressure from eroding long-term brand equity.

That work is less elegant than a McKinsey framework. It is also more likely to produce a brand that actually functions as a commercial asset rather than a document that sits in a shared drive.

For a deeper look at how brand positioning decisions connect to broader marketing strategy, the brand strategy section of The Marketing Juice covers the full range of positioning frameworks and how to apply them in practice.

About the Author

Keith Lacy is a marketing strategist and former agency CEO with 20+ years of experience across agency leadership, performance marketing, and commercial strategy. He writes The Marketing Juice to cut through the noise and share what works.

Frequently Asked Questions