That tension between aspiration and realism is how you build great growth cultures - Ivo van den Brand, Global CMO

Ivo van den Brand is a global Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) with 20 years of experience. He is a proven leader in driving growth and brand and business transformation for multi-market scale-ups and global consumer brands, including Too Good To Go, DiDi, Huawei and Philips.

Growth, alignment, and long-term sustainability

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To plan, lead and implement such transformational processes, Ivo says that it all comes down to three things: clarity, focus and inspiration.

“At the foundation is total strategic clarity: absolute alignment on who we serve, what problem we solve, and why we’re the right choice to solve it. 

That clarity should be built on outside-in perspectives from the market: customers, competitors and culture, so the strategy is forward-looking and robust, rather than internally convenient.

From there, marketing’s role is to translate that company strategy into:

• A cohesive brand narrative that expresses the mission in simple, memorable language;
• A data-led growth engine with disciplined experimentation and optimisation loops; and
• Clear functional priorities, so every team knows what matters most and how their work ladders up to the integrated strategy.

In practice, every team member should be able to answer these four questions:

• What does success look like for the business?
• What behaviour do we need to drive among our audiences to get there?
• Where should we focus our time, effort and budget to make that happen at scale?
• How do we strengthen our brand moat to sustain long-term value?

Finally, great strategy depends on context - the company’s lifestage, scale and core capabilities. 

I believe in setting ambitious yet balanced goals: pushing boundaries of what “good” looks like while preserving belief and optimism within the organisation. 

That tension between aspiration and realism is how you build great growth cultures.”

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As organisations scale, the problem of alignment tends to rise - how does marketing stay aligned with business strategy, outcomes and different stakeholders? 

The most important thing, Ivo says, is to realise that alignment shouldn’t be a one-time exercise, but an “ongoing leadership discipline built on shared goals, transparent data, and active collaboration between Operations, Finance, Marketing and Product.

In my experience, lasting alignment comes from cross-functional partnership and a shared data vocabulary that ensures leadership speaks with one consistent voice to the organisation.

To make alignment tangible, I use cross-functional OKRs, shared performance dashboards linking marketing inputs to commercial outputs, and deliberate over-communication with key adjacent functions - especially Operations and Product. Together, these help maintain an agile focus on business priorities, informed by ongoing insights from customers and the frontline.

In scale-ups, where the mantra “what got us here won’t get us there” holds true, priorities and expectations evolve quickly. That’s where internal storytelling becomes essential - explaining not just what changes, but why. That way, teams stay engaged, committed and focused as the company develops.”

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Expansion to other markets, developing new processes, raising money - everything that means growth should be looked at through the lens of long-term sustainability. To assess whether a certain growth action is healthy for the brand, Ivo explains that the focus should be placed on quality, causality and financial sustainability.

“While the exact metrics depend on the business model, I typically segment measurement across four dimensions: Effectiveness, Efficiency, Quality and Brand Health.

For Effectiveness, incrementality modelling is critical - understanding to what extent marketing demonstrably drives profitable growth through experimentation and econometric analysis.

For Efficiency, LTV/CAC is non-negotiable - clarifying the single metric that captures core customer value, and ensuring acquisition costs sit well below the lifetime contribution margin, typically measured over a 12-month period.

For Quality, cohort retention curves are invaluable. If newer cohorts flatten higher than older ones, it signals you’re acquiring customers with genuine product-market fit.

For Brand Health, tracking funnel metrics such as awareness, consideration and preference, complemented by proxies like Google Trends for short-term brand momentum, helps gauge organic interest, predict future demand, and track brand strength as a source of sustained competitive advantage.”

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What impact startups need to grow, how to build a strong brand and what mistakes to avoid

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Looking at impact-driven companies specifically, Ivo talks about the most frequent mistakes he has seen them making in terms of marketing and suggests a better approach:

“It’s understandable that impact-driven brands sometimes lean too heavily on the strength of their mission to attract customers and talent, while underinvesting in the product-market fit, brand differentiation, performance marketing and conversion optimisation needed to scale sustainably.

Purpose and impact can differentiate a brand, but customers still make decisions based on relevance, quality and value. High-performing teams treat purpose as a multiplier, not a substitute - holding themselves to the same standards of efficiency, effectiveness, quality and brand health as any other high-growth business.

I believe the strongest impact brands balance their messaging across three dimensions: the rational attributes that drive conversion, the emotional ones that nurture loyalty, and the ethical ones that reinforce both - building long-term brand power rooted in their mission.”

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To build a strong brand around a social cause, he adds, it’s critical to consider the following four elements:

“Relevance - bringing the cause and its benefits to life through powerful stories that engage both hearts and minds,  emotionally compelling, while remaining rationally sound.

Empowerment - enabling people to feel that their actions genuinely matter. When brands help individuals see and celebrate the tangible impact of their choices, they create a powerful foundation for loyalty and authentic proof points for advocacy.

Integrity -  builds trust,  through consistent transparency, honesty and openness in how the brand communicates progress, impact and, when needed, vulnerability about its challenges.

Co-creation - amplifies all three by openly involving customers, employees and partners in bringing the movement to life and embedding it within culture.”

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For such a startup to be able to grow, Ivo reiterates the importance of clarity and focus, complimented by storytelling discipline and a system that enables continuous feedback loops.

“When you know where you want to play and how you are going to win, a strong brand narrative and visual identity that simplify your story across channels become critical.

Invest early in a simple, effective communications and PR capability that drives storytelling across earned media and social sharing. 

Make sure your visual identity is equally disciplined - distinctive, flexible and instantly recognisable across formats and partner contexts. Even seemingly small design decisions determine how well your brand travels through earned and shared channels.

In a fragmented media landscape with micro-attention spans, simplicity and consistency matter more than ever. Even modest budgets can build meaningful awareness when every touchpoint reinforces the same clear story.

Finally, build a lean operational setup and a culture that relentlessly tests, learns and iterates - bringing marketing, experimentation and data analysis together to continuously refine what works and scale it with confidence.”

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The future role of a CMO

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Marketing tactics, tools and roles evolve, AI is changing the game, we will be able to measure more and more things - and Ivo expects all of these to grow.

“It will therefore remain essential for CMOs to be resourceful, open-minded and innovative in embracing technology, data and incrementality modelling to run a consistently tight ship.

I saw this insightful quote from Dan Hockenmaier, Chief Strategy Officer at Faire. It really resonates with me and perfectly encapsulates why curiosity for the customer and emotional connection will always remain essential:

“The problem with using only data to understand your business is that numbers can't make you FEEL anything. Your dashboard shows that you signed up 20,000 customers last month. But you have to talk to just one of them before you can feel how excited they are to try your product. … It turns out that this visceral feeling is a big part of what tunes our intuition about what to do next, and creates the motivation to keep doing it. Data is incredibly powerful, but it is never sufficient.”

The most effective CMOs will be those who can translate complexity into strategic clarity, rally teams around customer insight, and navigate creativity, marketing technology and analytics with equal fluency.”

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What’s next for “tech for good” 

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As new tech companies are launched and scaled, what role will “tech for good” play. Will we see more impact tech companies or more tech companies integrating impact practices? Ivo says that hopefully, we’ll see both:

“As both a professional and a dad, I hope we’ll see both: more impact-native companies built from the ground up with a social or environmental mission embedded in their core business model, and mainstream firms that integrate impact meaningfully into how they operate.

Companies like Too Good To Go have shown it’s possible to build scalable, profitable businesses that deliver tangible social and environmental impact.

No doubt, more established firms will continue to integrate responsible and sustainable practices to attract both talent and capital. When their actions are concrete, genuine and communicated transparently, impact can become a shared expectation - a non-negotiable factor in how employees choose where to work and consumers decide what to buy.

In my heart, I hope the next generation of leaders and entrepreneurs will go further - embedding impact into the core, shifting it from a CSR side project to a lasting source of business and societal advantage.”

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Finally, looking at what the future might hold personally for him, Ivo concludes:

“I always look for challenges that offer growth, learning, and the chance to work alongside people who inspire me. I also care deeply about the wellbeing of our planet and a sustainable future for society -  and if my work can contribute to that in any way, that’s a clear positive.

The challenges that excite me most are those centered on scale-up growth and transformation - building integrated, high-performing teams within a truly global context, and embracing the intersection of brand, data, creativity and curiosity.”

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Thank you, Ivo van den Brand!

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