By Alexander Puutio
Marketing done right is increasingly boiling down to using your brand with strategic precision.
Knowing what you stand for, what your customers value, and how to meet them at the intersection of relevance and trust might sound like the beginnings of an abstract mission statement, but in 2025 it’s simply the table stakes for making marketing work.
In their recently launched book, Brand Global, Adapt Local, Nataly Kelly (CMO of Zappi) and Katherine Melchior Ray (former global brand executive at Louis Vuitton and Nike) argue that successful marketing begins by treating branding not as a one-time exercise or a PowerPoint but as the central thread that weaves across the entire organization.
The brand, they explain, is not a coat of paint one slaps on the organization. Instead, it’s the frame through which customers understand your values, your product, and whether you belong in their lives.
“Global brands are under more pressure than ever to balance consistency with customization,” Kelly explains. “Any brand entering a new market is almost starting from the beginning.”
Their book outlines how 70% of global brand failures stem from cultural misalignment and makes the case that cultural intelligence (CQ) is the cornerstone of a winning strategy. “Cultural intelligence is how brands work to understand today’s diverse consumers and reflect their values,” she continues.
Ray is sharper still: “Winning brands think global, but feel local. 77% of global consumers prefer to buy from brands that share their values, yet many companies still try to go to market with a one-size-fits-all playbook. Since brands represent promises, which live in the minds of the consumers, these companies don’t even reach the starting line.”
“Trust isn’t transferable,” says Ray. “It’s built on shared values, and showing up the right way in the right place. That’s what cultural intelligence delivers”.
The book introduces the “Brand Fulcrum” model that Ray developed when she was Vice President Marketing at Louis Vuitton Japan, a framework that allows any organization to integrate seemingly opposing themes like traditional and innovative, for greater local resonance. The Brand Fulcrum framework ensures brand range, relevance and vitality in an ever-changing marketplace.
“As brands adapt to culture, they can get overextended, which is where the fulcrum comes in. Brands then need to tactically balance opposing yet complementary intrinsic values to bring to life across cultures,” she added.
Their approach to brand building is rooted in hard-earned lessons from years of running some of the world’s most valuable brands across cultures, and it serves as a stark reminder for all wishing to pump out results from their marketing budget.
If trust is the currency, the brand is how it is earned, kept, or lost. And keeping these flows moving is by no means the CMO’s job alone.
As Kelly and Ray explain, it is the CEO who owns the promise of the brand, but they emphasize shared ownership. “When marketing is done right, it becomes the connective tissue between product, people, and performance. It’s a leadership imperative where the brand is front and centre, and the CEO is in the driver’s seat, but the marketing organization carries it across borders,” they continue.
The CEO as Chief Storyteller and Custodian of the Brand
Janine Pelosi understands this better than most. As the former CMO of Zoom and now the CEO of Neat, she’s lived through hypergrowth, media firestorms, and the reality of building trust at global scale.
She explains that in the best companies, the CEO and CMO don’t operate on separate tracks. Instead, they share the core function of telling the story of the business in a way that builds belief, inside and out.
Pelosi’s journey makes her uniquely fluent in both roles. At Zoom, she helped define one of the most recognizable brands of the pandemic era, not by leading with hype but with clarity. Now, as CEO of Neat, she brings that same ethos to building a next-generation workplace tech company.
“The CEO has to be the custodian of the brand,” she says. “Marketing can scale belief, but only if the leadership is embodying it, too. If you’re saying one thing and doing another, no campaign will fix that.”
She’s quick to stress that the brand is not a static asset. It’s adaptable, localised, personal—and those same pressures sit squarely on the CEO. “You have to be OK with the level of autonomy and responsibility that comes with leading through change,” she says. “The world isn’t one-size-fits-all, and neither is your story.”
Reflecting on the chaos of 2020, she doesn’t talk in superlatives, but in systems that have to all work seamlessly together, from crisis comms, global coordination to the brand and the trust it builds. “If I hadn’t gone through all that, would I have learned what actually matters when it comes to scaling a global brand?”
As for the shift to hardware at Neat, she’s direct: “What I did learn is that there’s no playbook for this and mindset is everything. If you bring a problem, also bring three ways to solve it.”
In many ways, Pelosi represents the kind of executive that modern brands need: someone who understands that storytelling is at the heart of the CEOs task. And that being the brand means living its values visibly, even when it’s uncomfortable.
In fact, CEOs are often pulled into the gravitational force of the brand, willingly or not. Just ask Elon Musk, who embodies his companies’ brand stories to the point of becoming indistinguishable from them. For better or worse, the CEO is now part of the product. Pelosi doesn’t chase that spotlight, but she doesn’t run from the responsibility either.
“When you’re building a brand that’s global, you have to be ready for it to get personal. People don’t trust logos. They trust people,” she says. “So the question becomes: Are you someone worth trusting?”
For Pelosi, the answer lies not in charisma, but in coherence. Marketing scales belief, but only when leadership walks the talk. That’s not a handoff between departments. That’s shared DNA.
The CEO as Chief Trust Officer And Making Marketing Work at Scale
The relationship between a brand and its audience relies on trust, and trust has the CEO’s name written all over it.
Heather Neary, President and CEO of Taco John’s, a Mexican restaurant brand with nearly 400 locations and half a century behind it, knows this well.
For Neary, trust goes far beyond what the company sells or does, extending well into building authentic relationships, understanding franchisees and customers deeply, and aligning the entire organization to deliver on its promises.
“Trust starts with listening,” Neary begins, reflecting on her first six months at Taco John’s. “I spent every second week in the field, visiting restaurants, sitting down with franchisees, and hearing about what’s really happening. You can’t make meaningful decisions if you don’t understand the business at its core.”
Neary’’s leadership approach is centered on transparency and collaboration. “At the end of the day, people want to feel heard. Whether it’s franchisees, restaurant operators, or customers, trust is built by being intentional about collaboration and open communication,” she explains.
In a franchising model, Neary emphasizes the importance of aligning incentives and being honest about opportunities. “If we’re asking franchisees to invest thousands, we owe them transparency on the ROI. The best way to sell a franchise is to have an existing franchisee champion the opportunity,” she says.
For Neary, the role of CEO is centered around trust-building as much as it is strategy. “I see myself as Chief Trustbuilder. Every decision I make needs to strengthen the brand, respect the entrepreneurial spirit of our franchisees, and ensure we’re delivering on our promise to customers,” she concludes.
Scaling this sense of trust is also where the story of Luke Mahoney, CEO of FuturHealth, begins.
Mahoney started his career in marketing but quickly pivoted into entrepreneurship—founding eight companies from scratch, all bootstrapped or leanly funded. His latest, FuturHealth, is a GLP-1 weight-loss telehealth platform that’s now one of the fastest-scaling players in the space.
Mahoney’s approach is blunt, and all the better for it: “Most people are offering access to a product, but you need to do more. That the product works is a given, good marketing and great branding is the amplifier without which nothing happens.”
That philosophy where product is the proof and brand is the resonance runs through every venture he’s built. At G-Plans, a nutrition platform that has reached over 28 million users, he started with metabolic data before a PR push. At You & Yours, a design-forward distillery in San Diego it was the architecture, music, and mood before the marketing.
“Our website didn’t even say half of what we did at first,” Mahoney admits. “We worked with an agency to make the messaging tighter. That’s what good marketing is, clarity in motion.”
And while marketing may have come after the product, he doesn’t view it as a downstream activity. Far from it, he argues that its place is upstream and central for FuturHealth.
“The weight loss journey is tough and you need tools, yes, but more than that, you need an experience that supports it. We built that into the product, the branding and our marketing.”
This trifecta of a product that works, a story worth sharing and a brand worth trusting is exactly what Mahoney argues makes marketing work at scale.
How Localization and Personal Branding Can Change Everything
Which leads us to one of the more fascinating case studies in the realm of founder-led marketing: Playtime Engineering.
Founded by Kate and Troy Sheets, the company produces synthesizers and grooveboxes that look like toys but function like the real deal. The underlying innovation, a living instrument called myTRACKS, evolved out of obsession, problem-solving, and a love for music that refuses to be dumbed down for kids.
“We really lucked out with a designer, he came from the synth world, understood our hardware inside and out,” Troy Sheets recalls. “The product was always going to be solid, but marketing it? That was the part we had to learn.”
They started in earnest in 2018, self-funded and wildly iterative. A DIY prototype led to a showcase appearance, which led to a successful crowdfund. Then came their first stumble, selling out with no post-campaign stock. “It was six months of silence,” they say. “But it taught us about forecasting, logistics, and the long tail of attention.”
It also taught them how important it is for marketing to be backed up with the good, lest you risk burning trust with your audience.
Based on these lessons they’ve since built a modest but mighty brand that leverages fun.
It also makes the brand personal in ways that bigger players aren’t capitalizing on yet.
Clara Venice, a synth-pop artist and producer who has recorded with Blipblox, puts it this way: “I work with a lot of synth products and I’ve always wondered ‘Why don’t they make a pink one?’ The larger brands don’t get how intimidating it is to go into a music shop and be confronted with a wall of black. If they make a colour that reflects you, that sells. I want high-quality gear, but I also want it to speak to me.”
For Venice, branding is as much about the look and feel of the product as it is about the product making it’s user feel seen. “It’s a sophisticated approach that most of the big players are missing. Companies like Blipblox have realized you can be a serious musician and still be fun. You can make an instrument that’s fun to play and still make really good music with it, and the brand doesn’t suffer from embracing a wider group of people, quite the contrary.”
In short, localization can be as simple, and powerful, as a design choice. A splash of your favourite colour, a texture that feels friendly instead of cold, a name that makes you smile. Sometimes, that’s all it takes for a brand to resonate.
Sheet’s agrees, and notes how their brand growth has been much more durable because of their approach. Their instruments still remain the main draw, and they bridge a gap between high-end equipment and creative play. That bridge is now also their brand.
“We aren’t making junk toys that get thrown away,” Sheets says. “These are products kids grow with. And we’re growing with them, every year a new product, every month new sounds.”
Now, with the support of a long-time marketing consultant who understands both music gear and consumer psychology, they’re moving deeper into digital. New geographies, new pricing experiments, even a warehouse in the Czech Republic to beat tariffs. Places where the product opens the doors, but the brand and marketing make the sales both locally and globally.
Playtime’s approach is not based on an obsession over product-market fit, instead, it’s one that builds upon brand-customer resonance. They build instruments with purpose, and that purpose travels through every channel they use, no matter what language the message gets translated into.
And here, we see the common thread that Nataly Kelly and Katherine Melchior Ray opened up for us. The global framework for brand building that Pelosi, Mahoney and the Sheets instinctively have followed shows how smart marketing doesn’t sell hype. Instead, it emphasizes value and instead of shouting “look at me” it whispers “this is for you.”
And when marketing is done right, it doesn’t feel like marketing at all. Instead, it feels like a brand that is authentic, a leader you can trust and more increasingly than ever, that’s the only thing that sells.
Feature image credit: Getty
Find Alexander Puutio on LinkedIn. Visit Alexander’s website.
Sourced from Forbes
