Brand Rewired: Connecting Intellectual Property, Branding, and Creativity Strategy

Chapter 7. The Brand Maestro

The Brand Maestro is the intellectual property strategy, multi-disciplinary expert within an organization with the unique skill set to facilitate group communication and tap into the strength of various subject matter experts while cohesively executing an innovation or branding plan.

The Brand Maestro must be someone trained in intellectual property strategy, branding, consumer insights, and research and development, but also having skills as a strong process-oriented facilitator. The ability to lead discussion, bring in leadership at key times, be empowered by leadership to do so, be able to maintain and track progress and reinforce incentives for team-based success will be important skills for the Brand Maestro.

In most companies this function may be performed by many different executives: chief marketing officer, chief innovation officer, external business development, chief intellectual prop-erty officer, human resource director, or other executives in the company. Whatever the case, an executive must emerge with a unique skill set to cross over these many disciplines.

Additionally, the leadership of the company must recognize the cultural changes needed to embrace a multidisciplinary team and a collaboration approach that designs intellectual property strategy into every aspect of the innovation and branding process. Constant reinforcement of the message, incentives that reinforce this philosophy, and investment in the tools, resources, training, and ...