BRAND. RISK. GOVERNANCE. THE CASE FOR CONNECTION

By Melissa Roth Mendez, Growth & Risk Advisor, Formerly Global VP @Burberry

August 21st, 2025

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THESE AREN’T SEPARATE CONVERSATIONS

When people talk about brand, risk, and governance, they tend to talk about them in isolation. Brand sits with marketing. Risk with legal or compliance. Governance with the boardroom.

But, in reality, they’re anything but separate. Brand shapes how risk shows up. Risk influences how the brand is experienced. Governance determines how both are managed, prioritized, and sustained. These aren’t separate functions. They’re different ways of framing decisions about what the company stands for, how it shows up, and what it’s willing to stand behind.

And yet, they’re rarely treated that way. Brand is often managed as something external – a message, a campaign, a visual identity. Governance is procedural. Risk becomes shorthand for legal exposure or compliance checklists. Each operates with its own scope and vocabulary.

But these functions should be deeply intertwined. This isn’t about adding complexity. It’s about creating the kind of alignment that allows bold decisions to take root – and hold up under pressure.

IMBALANCE HAS CONSEQUENCES

When brand, risk, and governance are in balance, leadership moves with more confidence, teams execute with more clarity, and the brand becomes more resilient – not because it’s rigid, but because it’s grounded.

But, balance is the key. When it slips, the damage may be quiet, but it’s rarely trivial. 

In creatively driven environments,  it’s not uncommon for things that don’t quite feel “on brand” to get waved through under the name of creativity or innovation. A new product direction. A provocative campaign. An influencer partnership. None of them are fatal in isolation. But over time, they add up.

And because the risk doesn’t carry obvious red flags – there are no lawsuits, no viral backlash – it doesn’t show up as a “risk” at all. Governance often isn’t part of the conversation until much later, if at all.

But absence of controversy is not the same as alignment. 

Without a shared understanding of what the brand truly stands for – and structured oversight to reinforce it – decisions start to pull in different directions. Not because anyone is being careless, but because no one is asking the harder questions: Does this reflect who we are? Will it still make sense a year from now? Are we building something coherent—or just moving quickly?

What once felt distinct becomes inconsistent. What once reflected purpose starts to blur. You see it in a loss of pricing power. In teams making decisions based on different interpretations of the brand. In loyal customers no longer recognizing what drew them in to begin with.

This isn’t about stifling creativity or innovation. It’s about anchoring it with structure so that the brand evolves with intention, not by accident. 

BRAND IS BIGGER THAN MARKETING

One reason imbalance happens is that brand itself is often misunderstood. It’s treated as something outward facing – a campaign, a tagline, a visual identity. Something the marketing team leads and others support.

But that framing is too narrow. Brand isn’t just what a company says. It’s how it behaves. It shows up in how decisions get made, how leaders communicate, how teams prioritize, how people are hired, and how the company responds under pressure. Marketing may bring the brand to life externally – but internally, brand is shaped across the organization.

And if the people inside the company don’t understand or believe in it, the brand breaks down long before it ever reaches the customer. 

Because brand is intangible, it doesn’t sit on a balance sheet. It may shape creative direction, but too often, but it rarely receives the same strategic weight, oversight, or operational accountability as other drivers of long-term value.

That’s the blind spot.

Brand is an enterprise-wide system. It sits at the center of trust, reputation, identity, culture, and stakeholder expectations. It shapes how the company earns loyalty, attracts talent, and builds resilience.

It’s not just a reflection of the business. It’s the structure that holds it together.

But it often gets overlooked. That is, until something goes wrong.

Boards and leadership teams don’t need a new framework to fix this. But they do need to widen their lens.

Not just: Is the brand tracking with consumers?

But also:

• Are we reinforcing the brand internally in the way we lead, hire, and operate?

• Does our governance structure support what we say we stand for?

• Are we treating brand as a core business system or something that lives off to the side?

Because brand doesn’t live in one department. And if it isn’t clearly understood or supported at the highest levels, it becomes everyone’s job and no one’s responsibility.

WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU GET IT RIGHT

When brand, risk, and governance are aligned early, something shifts. 

Creative decisions aren’t made in a vacuum. They’re shaped by structure – not to water them down, but to sharpen them.

Teams move quickly, even provocatively, because they’ve already asked the hard questions: Where is this likely to land? What does it signal? Are we clear on where we’re taking a risk and why it’s worth it?

The best creative work I’ve seen didn’t happen in spite of governance. It happened because of it. Because the right people were in the room at the right time. Because there was shared language around risk. Because no one was guessing where the line was or waiting for a crisis to find out.

The kind of alignment doesn’t require more process. It requires earlier conversations. It requires brand, legal, comms, and leadership to stop handing off decisions like a baton – and start shaping them together. It requires governance to be seen not as a barrier to creative freedom, but as the thing that makes it sustainable. Risk isn’t treated as something to avoid, but as a lens to help the business see more clearly. And brand isn’t reduced to a creative output, but recognized as the connective tissue across functions.

When companies get this right, they’re not just safer. They’re bolder. Because they know when to take a risk - and how to stand behind it when they do.

THE CASE FOR BETTER PARTNERSHIP 

Brand, governance, and risk aren’t competing forces. They’re co-pilots. When one takes over without the others, decisions skew – and so does the business.

This isn’t about structure for structure’s sake. It’s about making sure the right things are in the room early enough to shape what comes next. If brand is treated as surface, or risk as a checklist, or governance as a sign-off—clarity gets lost. Decisions get made, but not always with the full picture in view.

In the companies that get this right, brand becomes more than expression. Governance becomes a tool for focus. Risk becomes a lens, not a red flag.

And that kind of alignment doesn’t require a new framework.
It requires better partnership.

It means asking different questions.
It means making space for more than one perspective.
It means recognizing that brand isn’t something to protect after the fact—it’s something to lead with.

And it starts by treating brand, risk, and governance not as separate conversations, but as a shared responsibility.

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