When I look back on my early days as a brand manager at Unilever, I remember the exhilaration of bringing a single, purpose-driven idea to life across R&D, packaging, media and retail. I felt like a wannabe Steve Jobs [I wish], able to curate a brand world that disrupted the category, inspired the creation of iconic products, design and new functionality, leading to the cultivation of fans and the transformational shift from challenger to industry leader and pioneer.

Yes, back then we had the luxury of time and access to the industry’s best and brightest left brain and right brain thinkers, we were trained to build high-functioning cross-agency teams, and we spent time doing it. We lived the brand. We lived the consumer. Yes, in many ways the simplicity of ‘what shall we do above the line and below the line?’ is gone and, with it, the ability to create meaningful, effective and seamless experiences.

Before we bulldoze the relevance of that era, we’ve got to pause and reflect on what hasn’t changed. Brands are wonderful things.

A brand set free can steward everything it does from the inside out. In a world of little unification, brands can create consistent and coherent ecosystems of information, entertainment, satisfaction and social affirmation. Brands can speak to people and attach themselves to human causes. Brands are the things that command a premium and help charities pull heart strings and stand-out. Brands are the things that create visibility and accountability for businesses who need to commit to certain values and live up to consumer expectation and moral codes. Brands give direction to product innovation programmes and help give teams with common language and purpose. Without brands, we would be looking at a sea of sameness, products and services undifferentiated by anything else other than price, a programmatic campaign constantly running out of steam, or a shallow influencer testimonial.

Brands are the difference between business success and failure, and yet their value is the first thing to go in the face of any turbulence; one of the only variable costs in a company’s P&L, CFOs constantly pull the rug from under a brand to support a bumpy sales cycle.

This is the mother of ironies. You could work for a brand like “Subway”, which is a branded sandwich shop, and be in a conversation about why you can’t invest in building the brand, or why building a brand isn’t the same thing as driving footfall. It’s bizarre that we’ve found ways to separate the business from the brand, and that there is a catch-22 associated with the long and short of brand investment and returns, when the business is the brand.

Jack Welch, former CEO of General Electric once said, “Most people [in companies] have their face towards the CEO and their ass towards the consumer.” It’s hard though to do anything else. CMOs with ever-shorter tenures, private equity firms looking for a quick sale, internal re-organisation, data and technology complexities, channel fragmentation, internal re-organisations and agencies pumping their own agendas. How can brands liberate business, when they are so imprisoned themselves?

There are two queues forming. The first is a queue of brands lining up outside what will soon become an overcrowded graveyard. And the second made of up new brands, brilliantly naïve and entrepreneurial, unphased by conventions and able to move at speed to create new spaces for growth. These brands of the future are being built in new ways, and they show little respect for old wisdoms and intelligent naysayers; they won’t need massive budgets and sophisticated internal practises to fly, they’ll find smarter ways to break the system and deliver growth. And whilst they do, brands imprisoned in ‘mature’ businesses will follow the same old systems and processes, until they take their last breath.

If you’re a marketer, and your brand is in prison, where is the unnecessary friction that you can eliminate? What are you resigned to living with that you can no longer see? Where can you light fires and how can you build a team of the best left and right brain thinkers, differently skilled, unified by the opportunity to set yourself free, for the business of your brand.