Corporate reorganisation and Brand Governance: how to protect identity and consistency when the organisation changes

A corporate reorganisation changes the organisational chart and, above all, changes the system through which decisions are made. Managers, delegated authority, business units, markets, reporting lines and centres of power all change. Every time who can decide changes, the way the brand is governed changes too.

Many reorganisations leave precisely this step uncovered. The company redesigns its structure and processes while identity, positioning and reputation continue to be managed under rules created for the previous organisation.

The phenomenon is common. A 2025 McKinsey study of 2,000 executives across 16 sectors finds that around two thirds of leaders had experienced an operating model redesign in the previous two years and that 50% expect a further reorganisation in the following two years. McKinsey urges leaders to look beyond “boxes and lines” alone, including processes, people, responsibilities and decision-making practices in the redesign.

Meanwhile, the intangible assets these decisions influence continue to grow. The World Intangible Investment Highlights 2026 by WIPO and Luiss Business School estimates brand investment in the countries analysed at 1.4 trillion dollars in 2025, with average annual growth of 4.2% since 2015. The report treats brands as an investment category worth more than a trillion dollars.

For a CEO the consequence is practical: every major reorganisation should include a review of the system that governs the brand, because the organisational chart also determines who can act on promise, pricing, communication, customer experience and reputation.

A reorganisation also changes who governs the brand

A reorganisation can arise from very different needs: improving efficiency and margins, integrating an acquisition, creating new business units, decentralising, entering new markets or reducing dependence on certain individuals. In every case, some decisions change owner.

A new sales director may gain greater autonomy over pricing. A business unit may manage its own communications. A country organisation may select agencies and partnerships locally. A newly appointed CMO may change priorities and tone. HR may take on a stronger role in employer branding. Taken together, these choices shape a new system for governing the brand.

This is the distinction addressed in Bliss’s analysis of Brand Management and Brand Governance: management coordinates the brand’s activities, while governance establishes who can decide, on what criteria, with what authority and through which controls.

The critical step, therefore, is to map, alongside the new organisational chart, which brand decisions change ownership and which must remain under central oversight.

The invisible risk: the organisation changes, the old rules remain

The first months of a new structure are often the most delicate. People take on different roles while procedures, approval matrices and repositories remain the old ones. Managers bring criteria developed elsewhere, and local offices gain autonomy before it is clear which elements of the positioning can be adapted.

Fragmentation tends to appear gradually. One business unit uses a different commercial promise, the sales team introduces discounts at odds with the positioning, HR describes the company in language far removed from the corporate voice, different agencies receive incompatible briefs and old materials stay in circulation alongside the new.

Research on organisational identity helps explain why. A study by Riikka Harikkala-Laihinen of a company that moved from family ownership to a corporate investor shows that an organisation’s ability to signal continuity of identity influences how people interpret the transformation. The study is published in the International Journal of Project Management.

Cloutier and Ravasi have also observed how certain elements of organisational identity carry different weight in shaping continuity and change over the long term. Identity Trajectories was published in the Academy of Management Journal.

The brand comes in at this point because it makes visible the meanings the organisation wants to keep carrying into the market while structure, people and processes change.

Why brand guidelines alone do not solve the problem

Guidelines mainly answer questions about the use of logos, colours, tone of voice, assets and applications. A reorganisation raises a prior question: who has the right to decide when exceptions, commercial tensions or cases the guidelines never anticipated arise?

A document can define standards and principles. A conflict between corporate marketing and a business unit, the choice of a sensitive partnership or the degree of autonomy granted to a local market require recognisable accountability and escalation thresholds.

Bain’s RAPID model addresses this need by distinguishing who recommends, who provides input, who must agree, who makes the final decision and who performs. The framework was created precisely to make decision roles explicit. Each organisation may choose different tools; the principle remains useful whenever an important decision risks being blocked or claimed by several functions at once.

Responsibilities and decision rights: what to redesign alongside the organisational chart

The first task is to build a map of the decisions that can materially alter the value or perception of the brand. The useful criterion is materiality: economic, reputational and strategic impact, and how difficult a decision is to reverse.

From the Board’s perspective, this approach is consistent with the G20/OECD Principles of Corporate Governance 2023, which assign the board responsibility for strategic guidance and for overseeing risk management systems. When reputation, positioning and brand equity are material, the decisions that affect them naturally fall within that scope of oversight.

Approval matrix: centralising the right decisions

When fragmentation increases, the simplest reaction is to pull every approval back to the centre. The organisational cost can become high: the CMO signs off every piece of content, the CEO steps into every partnership and local offices wait for HQ to make even minor changes.

A sound approval matrix separates at least three levels. Delegated decisions can be taken autonomously within clear criteria. Controlled decisions require specialist review. Strategic decisions reach the top because their impact on brand equity justifies the escalation.

The question therefore becomes: what is the lowest level of authority capable of taking a specific decision correctly? This approach preserves speed and accountability without leaving every area to interpret the brand from scratch.

Brand guardianship: transferring criteria along with roles

A reorganisation can formally transfer a role in a day. The criteria that person used to assess partnerships, exceptions, pricing or local adaptations required a longer handover.

This is where the brand’s Key Person Risk emerges. If one person knows intuitively which partnerships to turn down or when an adaptation goes beyond the acceptable limit, part of the system continues to live in their memory.

The handover should therefore turn tacit knowledge into criteria that can be consulted: principles, cases, exceptions, escalation thresholds, examples of past decisions, up-to-date repositories and training sessions. The aim is to give people enough knowledge to act autonomously while maintaining a common direction.

Brand KPIs during change: measuring before the market signals the problem

During a reorganisation, revenue, awareness and NPS can remain stable for months. Brand governance problems, by contrast, can surface earlier in decision flows and in the use of assets.

ISO 20671-1:2021 defines an integrated framework for brand evaluation based on inputs, output dimensions and indicators. The standard applies to both internal and external brand evaluations.

To build a broader control system, Bliss has produced a guide to Brand Governance KPIs, covering signals on decision times, deviations from standards, asset use and dependence on key people.

During a reorganisation these indicators become valuable when measured before the change, during the transition and a few months after the new structure is fully in place. The baseline shows whether the new structure is genuinely improving the system.

When a Brand Governance Audit is needed

An audit is particularly useful when a reorganisation changes people, processes and decision-making powers at the same time. The most significant signals are longer approval chains, recurring conflicts between sales and marketing, business units producing materials independently, growing dependence on individual managers, local markets applying differing interpretations, and decisions already approved being reopened time and again.

In these cases a Brand Audit can capture the actual structure, the assets, the points of dispersion, the responsibilities and the mechanisms through which the brand is governed in the new organisation.

The useful output for management is a map of the points where the new structure risks creating inconsistency, slowdown or reputational exposure, with associated priorities and responsibilities.

A reorganisation truly changes things when the way the company makes decisions changes. Brand Governance ensures that, within that new system, the brand retains a recognisable direction.