The Rise of the Chief Brand Officer: Why Design Has a Seat at the Table
The chief brand officer role is rewriting how companies think about design at the highest level. We trace the evolution, the mandate, and what it means for creative careers.
In early 2024, Uber appointed Dara Khosrowshahi's long-time collaborator and brand strategist to a newly created executive position: Global Head of Brand. It was not the first time a technology company had elevated brand leadership to the senior-most tier of the organisation, but it was among the most visible. Uber's brand had been, for years, the company's most complicated asset — a name synonymous with convenience but also with controversy, regulatory friction, and a corporate culture that nearly consumed the company from within. That Uber chose to address this not through a marketing campaign or an agency brief but through structural executive leadership said something important about where the industry is headed.
Uber is not an outlier. Airbnb has operated with brand leadership embedded at the executive level since Brian Chesky effectively assumed the role of chief brand steward himself, working alongside design leadership that reports directly to him rather than through a marketing hierarchy. Nike's brand leadership structure has long functioned with a gravity that exceeds traditional marketing oversight. Apple has never had a Chief Brand Officer by title, but the role's substance — the singular, organisation-wide stewardship of how the company is perceived, experienced, and felt — has been central to its executive function since Steve Jobs, and continues under the creative leadership that shapes everything from retail environments to packaging to keynote staging.
The pattern is clear even when the titles vary. Companies that compete on experience, on cultural relevance, on the coherent expression of a point of view — companies where brand is not a department but a strategic position — are increasingly placing brand leadership at the table where decisions about the future of the business are made. The chief brand officer role, whether it carries that exact title or not, has become one of the most consequential developments in corporate leadership in the past decade.
The phrase "brand manager" once described a mid-level marketing function. At Procter & Gamble, where the modern brand management system was formalised in the 1930s, the brand manager was responsible for the commercial performance of a single product line — its packaging, its advertising, its shelf placement, its pricing strategy. It was an important job, but it was a product job. The brand manager served the brand, and the brand served the product.
For decades, this model held. Brand management was a subset of marketing, and marketing was a subset of commercial operations. The people who ran brands were trained in business, not in design. Their tools were consumer research, media planning, and promotional strategy. Their measure of success was market share. Design entered their world as a supplier relationship — something you commissioned from agencies and evaluated in focus groups, not something you led.
The shift began, gradually and then suddenly, when technology companies started demonstrating that brand was not a wrapper around a product but the product's primary competitive advantage. Apple's resurgence under Jobs in the late 1990s is the obvious inflection point, but the lesson took years to propagate. What Apple proved was not simply that good design sells — that had been evident since Braun, since Olivetti, since the Eames Office. What Apple proved was that the coherent expression of a design-led point of view, applied consistently across every touchpoint, could make a company the most valuable in the world. Brand, in this formulation, was not downstream of product strategy. Brand was the strategy.
The implications rippled outward slowly. Through the 2010s, companies like Warby Parker, Glossier, and Airbnb demonstrated that a startup could build enormous enterprise value on the strength of its brand experience — that in categories where functional differentiation was thin, the brand itself became the differentiator. Venture capital began treating brand as a moat. Private equity began pricing it into acquisitions. And gradually, corporate leadership structures began to reflect what the market had already decided: brand was too important to be managed from the middle of the org chart.
The chief brand officer role emerged from this recognition. It is not a rebranding of the CMO position. It is a different job, with different responsibilities, a different mandate, and — critically — a different relationship to the rest of the C-suite.
The distinction between a Chief Brand Officer, a Chief Marketing Officer, and a Chief Design Officer is not merely semantic, though the industry's fondness for title proliferation makes scepticism understandable. Each role reflects a fundamentally different theory about what drives commercial success.
The CMO, in its traditional form, owns demand generation. The CMO's mandate is to drive awareness, acquire customers, and grow revenue through marketing channels. The CMO thinks in campaigns, in audience segments, in conversion funnels, in media spend and attribution models. It is a role oriented toward performance — toward measurable, short-to-medium-term commercial outcomes. The CMO asks: How do we reach the right people with the right message at the right time?
The CDO, where the role exists, owns the quality and coherence of the designed experience. The CDO's mandate is to ensure that the company's products, services, and environments meet a standard of design excellence and usability. The CDO thinks in systems, in user experience, in craft, in the tangible expression of how something looks, works, and feels. The CDO asks: How do we make the experience excellent?
The CBO occupies different territory. The chief brand officer's mandate is the meaning of the company — not its marketing performance, not its product experience, but its cultural position. The CBO asks: What does this company stand for, and does every expression of the company — from the product to the hiring page to the CEO's public remarks — reinforce that position coherently? The CBO's authority, when the role is functioning properly, cuts across the organisation horizontally. Where the CMO owns a function and the CDO owns a discipline, the CBO owns a narrative.
This is why the CBO role requires a fundamentally different skill set. The most effective brand executives tend to be people who have moved through multiple disciplines — design, strategy, communications, sometimes product — and arrived at a vantage point from which they can see the company as a cultural actor rather than as a collection of business units. They are, in the best cases, bilingual: fluent in the language of design and fluent in the language of business, able to translate between the two without losing the nuance of either.
The tension between these roles is real and sometimes productive. A CMO may resist a CBO's authority over brand messaging that the CMO views as marketing territory. A CDO may see the CBO as an unnecessary intermediary between design and the CEO. These tensions are features, not bugs — they reflect genuine differences in how a company prioritises its resources and attention. The companies that navigate them well tend to be the ones where the CEO has a clear conviction about brand's role in the business, and empowers the CBO accordingly.
The argument for CBO-level brand leadership is most persuasive when examined through the cases where it has reshaped a company's trajectory. Three examples illustrate different dimensions of the impact.
Airbnb's transformation under Brian Chesky's direct brand stewardship is perhaps the most cited, and for good reason. When Chesky and his team, working with the London-based agency DesignStudio, unveiled the Bélo symbol and the "Belong Anywhere" positioning in 2014, they were doing something that a marketing department would not have been empowered to do: redefining what the company was. Airbnb was not a hotel alternative. It was a belonging platform. That redefinition — which required changes to the product experience, the host onboarding process, the photography standards, the customer service protocols, and the physical environments of Airbnb's offices — could only have been driven from the top of the organisation. A CMO could have launched a campaign around belonging. Only brand leadership at the CEO level could have reorganised the company around it. The result was a brand that transcended its category and became, for a time, one of the most emotionally resonant companies in technology. Stripe's design-led approach to building a financial infrastructure empire demonstrates a parallel dynamic — brand authority emanating from the founders' conviction rather than from a marketing function.
Nike offers a different model. The company has never, to public knowledge, used the Chief Brand Officer title. But Nike's brand leadership structure — in which the global brand function operates with significant autonomy from the commercial divisions, reports at the highest levels of the organisation, and exercises authority over everything from athlete partnerships to retail environments to the cadence and tone of product launches — functions as CBO-level leadership in all but name. Nike's brand decisions are not marketing decisions. They are business decisions. The choice to feature Colin Kaepernick in the 2018 "Dream Crazy" campaign was not a media buy. It was a statement about what Nike stands for, made at the level where such statements have organisational consequences. That the campaign generated controversy, stock fluctuation, and ultimately significant brand equity gains demonstrates precisely why brand leadership at this level matters: the decision required someone with the authority to accept short-term commercial risk in service of long-term brand position.
A third instructive case is Spotify. Daniel Ek's company has invested heavily in brand leadership that sits outside and above the traditional marketing function. Spotify's in-house creative team, which produces campaigns like the annual "Wrapped" experience, operates with a mandate that extends well beyond advertising. "Wrapped" is not a marketing campaign — it is a cultural event, a product feature, a social media phenomenon, and a brand statement simultaneously. The ability to conceive and execute something that crosses those boundaries requires brand leadership with authority across product, engineering, marketing, and communications. Spotify's organisational structure reflects this — its brand and creative functions are empowered to initiate projects that a traditional marketing department would need to request permission for. The approach has been explored and refined by studios like Collins, which have long argued that brand identity is a cultural act rather than a corporate exercise.
For designers, the rise of the chief brand officer role represents both an opportunity and a challenge. The opportunity is obvious: a discipline that has spent decades fighting for organisational influence now has a clear path to the highest levels of corporate leadership. The CBO role is, in many cases, a design executive role — or at least a role that privileges design thinking, visual literacy, and the kind of systems-level aesthetic judgement that designers develop through practice.
But the challenge is equally real. The designers best positioned to step into CBO-level roles are not the ones with the strongest portfolios of visual work. They are the ones who have invested in understanding business strategy, financial modelling, organisational psychology, and corporate governance. The design-to-business pipeline — the path from creative practitioner to brand executive — requires fluency in languages that design education rarely teaches. Reading a P&L statement, presenting to a board of directors, managing a cross-functional team of hundreds, navigating corporate politics at the senior-most level: these are not skills that emerge naturally from a design career, and the industry has not yet built reliable systems for developing them.
The designers who have made this transition successfully — people like Mauro Porcini at PepsiCo, who holds the title of SVP and Chief Design Officer but whose mandate extends deeply into brand strategy, or Ivy Ross at Google, whose leadership of hardware design encompasses brand experience at the product level — tend to be people who sought out business education and cross-functional experience deliberately, often against the advice of peers who viewed such moves as departures from "real" design work.
The implication is clear. If design wants to sustain its seat at the executive table, the discipline needs to take business literacy as seriously as it takes craft. The CBO role is not a gift from the corporate world to the design community. It is a job that must be earned, and earning it requires designers to expand their definition of what design leadership means.
There is, of course, a sceptic's case to be made. Title inflation is endemic in corporate life, and the C-suite has expanded in recent years to include roles — Chief Happiness Officer, Chief Evangelist, Chief People Officer — that sometimes represent genuine organisational innovation and sometimes represent little more than a LinkedIn upgrade. Is the Chief Brand Officer a structural shift in how companies value design and brand? Or is it a prestige title grafted onto a function that was already being performed, adequately, by existing leadership?
The honest answer is that it depends on the company. Where the CBO role carries genuine authority — budget control, organisational scope, direct CEO access, and a mandate that crosses functional boundaries — it represents something new and important. Where it is a rebranded VP of Marketing with a better title and no additional power, it is exactly the title inflation that sceptics describe. The difference is not in the title. It is in the org chart, the reporting lines, the budget authority, and the degree to which the CEO treats brand as a strategic asset rather than a cost centre.
The trend, however, is directional. The companies that are winning in brand-driven categories are the ones that have elevated brand leadership structurally, not cosmetically. And as more companies compete on experience, on cultural relevance, on the coherent expression of a point of view — as more markets come to resemble the ones where Apple and Nike and Airbnb have set the terms — the demand for genuine, empowered brand leadership at the executive level will only increase.
The chief brand officer role is not a trend. It is a correction — the corporate world catching up, slowly and imperfectly, to something that design has understood for a long time: that how a company looks, feels, and behaves in the world is not a secondary concern. It is the concern. And the people best equipped to steward it deserve to be in the room where the decisions are made.
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