Here’s what’s keeping CMOs up at night: 91% of marketers know their brand must evolve continuously, yet 63% can’t get campaigns to market on time, according to data from our recent report: The CMO’s Guide to Brand Milestones. In a majority of organisations, it seems, there’s a fundamental disconnect between strategic awareness and operational reality.
As part of our research for the ‘Brand milestones’ report, we surveyed over one hundred senior marketers across the UK and Dach, and the results showed that whilst 84% share they are satisfied with their brand’s evolution, their day to day struggles tell a different story, writes Digge Zetterberg Odh, VP of marketing at Frontify.
Can you send me that file again?
Of the marketers surveyed for The CMO’s Guide to Brand Milestones, 59% agree that organisation-wide adoption of campaigns is a challenge. This isn’t surprising when you consider that teams pour time and resources into creating content, yet much of it goes unused, a staggering waste of creative resources.
The solution lies in brand portals that increase adoption of all brand assets, including campaign materials, across complex brand ecosystems. When teams can easily find, access, and implement campaign elements, adoption rates soar.
The stakeholder misalignment
The disconnect becomes more obvious when you examine different perspectives across organisations. We asked marketers about their perceptions of customers and C-suite priorities, revealing misalignments in how they view organisational priorities.
Of the brand milestones we asked about, 55% of marketers rated launching new products as important, whilst only 53% believed customers feel the same way, a gap that suggests marketers may be slightly overvaluing product launches compared to what they think customers actually want.
Meanwhile, they tend to perceive that C-Suite executives prioritise creating brand strategies, whilst believing customers place this dead last on their priority list.
This isn’t just misalignment: it’s three groups that marketers believe are planning for completely different outcomes. Whilst leadership focuses on positioning frameworks that customers supposedly don’t care about, marketers are prioritising product launches slightly more than they believe customers actually demand.
Subscribe to Marketing Beat for free
Sign up here to get the latest agency-related news sent straight to your inbox each morning
The five minute competitive advantage
The data reveals that companies using proper brand templates create marketing assets in just five minutes. Most organisations take three times longer, not because their teams are less capable, but because they are operating with broken infrastructure.
At Frontify, we’ve analysed user behaviour across thousands of teams and consistently see this pattern. Organisations with well-structured brand systems—from accessible, easy to use templates, to streamlined approval workflows—operate at fundamentally different speeds than those still managing their brands through email chains and shared drives.
This isn’t merely about speed, it’s about creative capacity. Teams that eliminate operational friction can test more ideas, iterate faster, and respond to market opportunities in real-time, rather than quarterly cycles.
Going global to local with brand governance
Global brand expansion can be challenging. In fact, one of our customers from a PR agency shared with us that, if not done correctly, it can weaken the brand’s core identity or confuse the global audience.
And of course, it’s never one size fits all. 61% of marketers struggle with global-to-local brand governance, which makes sense given how most companies approach the problem. Traditional brand governance assumes markets are predictable and local teams can wait for headquarters approval- which isn’t always the case.
The companies succeeding in global markets aren’t those with the tightest brand control- they’re those who’ve figured out how to maintain consistency while enabling local agility.
The path forward
The solution isn’t more oversight or tighter controls. It’s about building brand systems that work as hard as your teams do. When operational friction disappears, creative capacity multiplies. When brand architecture is clear, decision-making accelerates. When global-to-local governance flows seamlessly, brands can scale without losing their essence.
The 59% of organisations struggling with campaign adoption and the 62% fighting brand architecture challenges aren’t facing inevitable problems—they’re facing solvable infrastructure issues.
Leading global brands don’t have access to magic. Creative consistency and workflow efficiency is what happens when brand operations finally match brand ambitions.
