Brand and Leadership: Why Strategy Fails Without Action

Many organizations invest a great deal of energy in strategy documents, vision statements, and brand books. However, it often remains unclear whether these actually lead to any changes in day-to-day operations. This is precisely where Dominik Probst, founder and managing director of Jester Advisory, and Lukas Eiselin, CEO of MetaDesign Switzerland, come in: In this conversation, they explain how brand and leadership must work together to ensure that strategy actually translates into performance.

A translation problem rather than a problem of understanding

According to Dominik Probst, most organizations don’t have a problem with insight, but rather a problem with translation. While strategies, vision statements, and values are often articulated, they don’t find their way into day-to-day management. It is there that decisions are made about what is prioritized, tolerated, or demanded. «Strategy on slides is planning. Impact on the ground is leadership,» says Probst.

Lukas Eiselin views this as a branding issue: A brand is only relevant if it shapes behavior—both internally and externally. If a company makes a promise that isn’t reflected in its decisions, leadership style, or customer experience, not only does the strategy lose its impact, but the brand also loses its credibility.

Brand and leadership work together to provide direction

For Eiselin, a brand is, at its core, a tool that provides direction: it clarifies what an organization stands for, what priorities it sets, and by what standards it is measured. A brand only becomes strategic when it influences decisions—that is, when it helps shape leadership, behavior, and experiences. Probst adds that this clarity is central to leadership. Without a shared frame of reference, leadership quickly becomes contradictory when teams hear one thing but experience something else. That is why brand behavior must be firmly embedded in leadership principles, performance reviews, and KPIs.

According to Probst, however, leadership or cultural initiatives alone are not enough. You can train managers or change routines—but without a clear direction regarding what the organization stands for, cultural initiatives remain generic. Cultural guidelines only realize their full potential when they are consistently linked to business metrics. Eiselin sees this as the starting point for the brand: it provides not only a language but also a substantive framework. Without this framework, leadership efforts become interchangeable; without being anchored in leadership and culture, the brand remains nothing more than a claim.

How MetaDesign and Jester Advisory Are Closing the Activation Gap

Experts view the collaboration between the two consulting firms as a solution to a real problem: According to Eiselin, MetaDesign provides strategic clarity—positioning, brand logic, and direction. Jester Advisory picks up where direction turns into behavior, focusing on leadership, routines, and cultural embedding. According to Probst, many transformations have either a good idea without proper anchoring or processes without a clear direction in terms of content. Together, they close this gap—using behavioral levers ranging from decision-making rituals to integration into OKRs and KPIs.

According to Eiselin, for CEOs and CCOs, this means not delegating branding as a purely communications-related task, since external and internal impacts cannot be clearly separated. According to Probst, CHROs should not view culture as a mere «soft» side project. It emerges in day-to-day leadership, in expectations, in performance-based systems, and in what organizations reward or tolerate. “As CEO, you set the pace. Everything else follows,” says Probst.

Effectiveness is evident in behavior—not in a workshop

According to Probst, whether brand, leadership, and culture actually work together is evident in whether behavior changes—not just in workshops, but in everyday life, in meetings, in feedback, and in decisions made under pressure. In the short term, this can be observed through engagement scores, retention, and leadership feedback. In the long term, success becomes evident where it really counts: whether brand behavior drives customer satisfaction, the pace of innovation, and ultimately revenue and profit. Eiselin adds that this can be recognized by the fact that the brand is not only consistent externally but is also experienced internally.

According to the studies cited in the press release, low employee engagement, as reported by Gallup, results in annual costs of 8.8 trillion U.S. dollars worldwide, which corresponds to approximately nine percent of global gross domestic product. A study by EY and the Saïd Business School at the University of Oxford dated April 16, 2024, also shows that people-centered leadership increases the likelihood of exceed KPI targets by a factor of 1.9 and accelerates implementation by a factor of 2.1.

Contact at MetaDesign: Lukas Eiselin, CEO of MetaDesign Switzerland; Contact at Jester Advisory: Dominik Probst, Founder & Managing Director