Why we have reserved Brand Advisory for CEOs and Boards of Directors

We have decided that the Bliss Brand Advisory model is available exclusively to Chief Executive Officers and Boards of Directors. The decision concerns the counterpart. The process remains the same: what changes is the corporate level with which it is conducted and to which it reports.

The reason is structural. The decisions that Brand Advisory produces concern positioning, brand architecture, the economic value the brand helps to create and the way it is protected over time through Brand Governance. These are choices that require specific authority. Entrusting them to those without the mandate to make them means producing sound analysis destined to be only half applied.

The decision at a glance

The repositioning acts on three elements. The first is the counterpart: we work with top management, the level that holds the mandate to decide. The second is the subject of discussion: allocation of investment, brand architecture and efficiency of the capital deployed; individual materials remain downstream. The third is accountability over time: we maintain ongoing oversight of the decisions arising from that discussion, for the entire duration of the engagement.

We have applied the model to organisations at different stages of maturity, from established industrial businesses to organisations in a growth phase. Our engagements include those with Doreca, a Ho.Re.Ca. distribution operator with turnover of 214.92 million euros during the project period, BiAuto Group and Liveinup. Three different companies, three different decision-making structures, one constant: direction came from the top.

Thinking outside the box is innovation

A car repair garage opens a go-kart track. It organises its own branded meet-ups, builds a calendar of events and gathers a community of enthusiasts who spend Saturday in the same place where, on Monday, they bring their car in for servicing.

In this way a service business also becomes a place of belonging and builds a reason to be chosen that a competitor struggles to replicate by cutting the price of a service.

Decisions of this kind have no direct precedent in the sector, require capital before producing evidence and deliver results over a long horizon. That is why they almost always come from the top, and the reason has little to do with the talent of the people involved.

A middle management level is assessed on predictable results over a short horizon. Proposing something no one in the sector has yet attempted exposes it to an asymmetric risk: if it works, the credit is spread across the organisation; if it fails, the responsibility is theirs alone. Faced with that incentive, the rational choice is clear. They propose what has already been done elsewhere, with a reference ready in case of debate.

The aggregate effect is convergence. Companies in the same sector occupy the same channels, adopt the same formats and repeat the same messages, because each looks to the others to justify its own choices. The market becomes progressively indistinguishable and price carries ever more weight in negotiations.

At that point, companies that have stopped innovating gradually lose reasons to be chosen. The process is slow and there is no single event that signals it. Margins shrink. Negotiations slide towards discounts. Long-standing customers stay out of habit, until someone offers them the same thing for less.

The go-kart track creates value on one condition: it must be consistent with what the workshop stands for and with the audience it intends to serve. Without that consistency, it remains an investment without direction. It is a brand decision before it is an operational one, and it requires a table where vision, capital and accountability sit together.

In most Italian companies, that table is not yet where the brand is discussed.

The problem we observed

Established practice has brand management delegated to intermediate operational levels. The functions involved carry out their mandate correctly, and that mandate is execution. The phenomenon originates in the structure, and we point this out because it is often misunderstood.

A strategic vision passes through several stages of translation before it becomes action. Each stage introduces a margin of interpretation. At the end of the chain, what reaches the market retains the form of the original intention and may have lost part of its substance.

There is a second effect, less visible and more costly. When responsibility for the brand sits at a level without decision-making authority, the requests we receive often serve to protect internal positions: urgencies without real priority, materials whose purpose is to demonstrate activity, indicators chosen because they are easy to present. Here too the behaviour is rational given the incentive. The result remains misaligned.

The third effect concerns time. An operational level is assessed over the short term and tends to optimise for the short term. Brand equity is built up in layers over several financial years. Every decision taken to improve a quarterly figure at the expense of consistency can erode value that no monthly dashboard records.

The model we intend to move beyond

The paradigm to leave behind is that of the execution-only supplier, in a market where the goal has often been reduced to producing materials for channels and chasing surface metrics.

In many cases the quality of that execution is high. The difficulty arises upstream. Without a defined direction, execution generates activity without building a position.

An organisation can publish consistently, achieve engagement in line with industry benchmarks and leave its recognition among purchasing decision-makers almost unchanged. If none of those activities answers to a formalised positioning choice, the investment tends to be renewed without accumulating enough value over time.

Those companies pay periodically to be remembered and will bear the same cost the following year.

The brand and enterprise value

Underpinning this choice is a precise conviction: the brand contributes to the economic value of the business and must be governed at a level consistent with the decisions it can influence.

This reading has a verifiable basis. According to Ocean Tomo’s 2025 Intangible Asset Market Value Study, published in February 2026, intangible assets account for around 92% of the market capitalisation of S&P 500 companies, compared with 17% in 1975. The study covers intangibles as a whole: the brand is one of the possible components of that value, alongside intellectual property, data, software, relationships and other non-physical resources.

From an accounting perspective there is an important asymmetry. IAS 38 establishes that internally generated brands are not recognised as intangible assets. The principle is explicit in the IFRS standard on intangible assets. A brand’s capacity to create economic value can therefore grow without appearing on the balance sheet as a separate, internally built asset.

The managerial consequences are significant. When the brand is viewed solely through the year’s expenditure, at times of margin pressure it becomes easier to cut investments whose effects play out over longer horizons. That same decision can then affect recognition, the ability to sustain prices, acquisition costs and the attractiveness of the business.

As Francesco Acri, CEO of Bliss, has stated, the market requires “strategic advisory capable of engaging directly with the Board’s financial needs”. The statement was reported by Engage. The shift in perspective is clear-cut: from approving operational activities to assessing the efficiency of investments and brand architecture.

How we work: Advisory, Governance, Operations

We apply a proprietary method, based on frameworks tested and proven over the years, to turn strategy, identity and communication into a coherent, measurable system. The model is structured on three levels, linked by the principle of decision, governance and execution.

Advisory defines the direction: positioning, architecture, investment priorities and the criteria by which options are assessed. It is the level that requires the authority of senior leadership, because it produces choices that bind the organisation over several financial years.

Governance safeguards consistency over time. It establishes who decides what, under which constraints and with what verification, so that the defined direction remains recognisable regardless of who is executing it at any given moment.

Operations execute on what Advisory has defined and Governance safeguards. The executional level remains central, positioned where it creates the greatest value: downstream of a formalised direction.

To explain our model, we distinguish three common set-ups. Individual consultancies and agencies may of course organise themselves differently; the table describes the scope that Bliss has chosen to cover.

What sets us apart is continuity of responsibility. In the model we have chosen, analysis does not end at delivery and execution does not proceed without oversight from leadership. Brand equity is built over the months and years that follow, and it is over that horizon that we intend to remain accountable.

Generational succession

There is a circumstance in which placing the brand at top-management level stops being a matter of efficiency. It becomes a condition of continuity.

In family businesses, positioning is often embodied in the person who founded them. The vision exists implicitly and is passed on through proximity. When that figure steps back from management, the organisation discovers that it does not hold in documented form what had until then guided every decision.

Founder-independent branding work makes explicit and transferable what resided in the individual: positioning, decision-making criteria, brand architecture, rules of consistency. It requires the direct involvement of whoever holds that vision. No intermediate level can lead it by delegation, because the content to be formalised resides elsewhere.

The scale of the phenomenon is significant. A study by the School of Management of Politecnico di Milano with Pictet Wealth Management estimates almost 4,000 liquidity events in Italian family businesses between 2026 and 2035, with an expected value of 346 billion euros. The research was presented in 2026. In these transactions, documented brand equity can make continuity, dependencies and the transferability of value easier to read; what exists only in the person of the founder may instead be read as a risk.

What it means in practice

Reserving the engagement for senior leadership has practical consequences and determines how the relationship works.

We engage with those who hold a mandate to decide, on a defined cadence and with an agenda built around choices rather than approvals. The decisions taken there become documented constraints for the executive levels, internal or external, which continue to operate within their own remit under clearer rules. Operational functions benefit from this arrangement because they are relieved of the burden of making, by default, decisions that belonged to senior leadership.

Meetings follow a regular cadence and a stable format, designed so that senior leadership’s time is spent on matters that warrant that level. The agenda covers positioning choices, the evaluation of ongoing investments and architecture decisions that bind the organisation beyond the financial year. The documentation produced remains the property of the company and continues to guide decisions even after the engagement ends.

The prerequisite for access, therefore, is decision-making authority. The table must include whoever has the authority to decide on brand architecture and on the allocation of the investments that follow from it. The size of the organisation is irrelevant.

The brand has a seat at the table where decisions are made

A brand governed at the wrong level generates activity without building enough value. The cost of that dispersion remains hard to see until it shows up as weaker pricing power, higher acquisition costs or more fragile value in an extraordinary transaction.

Method and tools accelerate the process. A brand’s direction comes from the people who lead the business and the culture they have built. That is why we work where that vision resides.