The Intersection of Brand and Supply Chain

In 2020, I had a conversation that reframed everything I thought I knew about brand strategy.

I was introduced to Jon Bostock, CEO and given zero context. Just that I needed to meet him. Jon was at the time CEO of a consumer products company called Truman’s. It was the pandemic, and my question to him was “What is most important to CEO’s right now, and is there a role design firms can play. His answer was “In the future, the Creatives will be the most important people in the room”.

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This stopped me in my tracks.

He went on to explain that “CEO’s care about producing quality products at a great price, and the best way to do this is to reduce friction in the supply chain. Then he said, “It’s a design problem.”

I had never heard this before.

Here’s how he explained it.Most household cleaning products are 90% water. Giant single-use plastic bottles of laundry detergent, cleaners, etc., that get loaded onto trucks and shipped hundreds of miles. Basically, to move water around.

Jon and his co-founder Alex Reed looked at that system and asked the question most companies never think to ask: Why is it being done this way?

There was no good answer. So they redesigned the model entirely, creating a compact five-inch box containing five concentrated vials, one for each area of the home. The consumer adds a few drops to a spray bottle, adds water, and that’s it. No shipping water. No single-use plastic. Five products in one tiny package.

The supply chain got simpler. The cost structure improved, and here’s the kicker: The environmental footprint shrank dramatically. And the brand story wrote itself.

This is what happens when you treat the supply chain as a part of brand strategy. It’s a new kind of brand strategy, and it’s the way to change the course of the future.

What brand strategy is missing

For decades, brand and design thinking and design studios have focused on message, positioning, audience definition, and differentiation and producing various outputs like packaging, etc.

But here’s what most companies still don’t see: the most powerful brand decisions happen long before the design studio gets involved.

They happen at conception, at the factory, in the materials sourcing conversation. In the decision about how a product ships, how it’s used, and what happens to it afterward.

Four components of all supply chains

Products: things in demand
Facilities: places where products are made, stored, sold or consumed
Vehicles: mechanisms to move products between facilities to meet demand
Routes: paths taken by vehicles to move products between facilities

When brand thinking only enters at the packaging and design stage, it’s decorating the end of a system. The brand is reacting to operational decisions that were made without it. And those decisions about format, weight, materials, concentration, delivery model, those are the brand, and it’s a missed opportunity for business leaders, designers and brand strategists.

A Competitive Advantage for Business Leaders and Brand Designers

Every category has its own version of the Truman’s water problem. A dominant format that exists not because it serves the consumer, the brand or the environment but because it’s just the way things are done.

The companies that will win the next decade are the ones that question how it’s been done before a competitor does.

This requires a different kind of thinking in the room. Not just operations or marketing expertise. It requires the ability to see the system as a whole, to map the entire path from raw material to the consumer's hands and ask “Where are the opportunities here?”

That’s Supply Chain Thinking™ as a part of brand strategy. And it changes everything: the cost structure, the environmental story, the consumer experience, and the brand differentiation all at once.

The future belongs to companies that build the brand story into the system

Jon told me that in the future, the creatives will be the most important people in the room. Not because they make things look good. But because they are trained to question systems, problem solve, find the friction, and imagine what’s possible.

I’d extend that further. The most important people in the room will be the ones who come from design, strategy, operations, or the C-suite who understand that brand and supply chain are not separate conversations.

They never were.

When Trumans redesigned their supply chain, they didn’t need to talk about sustainability in their marketing. They didn’t need to make claims or use jargon. They just showed you the box. The brand story was self-evident.

That’s what a brand built for the future looks like.

Rhonda Page is a brand strategist and the founder of Brands For the Future™, a framework that design firms and brand leaders can use to explore the conversations that matter most.