This year, I have the pleasure of facilitating a workshop at Colorado Ad Day, a day I’ve long admired for its community, creative energy, and real-talk approach to marketing. The theme this year is The Marathon Mindset, which couldn’t be more timely for brand builders.
In our industry’s day-to-day workflow, pitches and campaigns can feel like a sprint. But building a brand is endurance work. And as any marathoner will tell you, finishing strong takes more than passion. It takes strategy, stamina, and a deep understanding of why you’re running in the first place.
Brand vision, mission, and values, when treated as strategy and not sentiment, become the fuel that sustains long-term growth. These aren’t just “nice to have” ideas on a slide deck. They’re the directional tools that give a brand its reason to go the distance. (If you're curious about this framework, check out The Purpose Map, the tool we developed at Moxie Sozo to help brands clarify the kind of value they create and why it matters.)
But even the best vision, mission, and values don’t always sell themselves. Especially to the people holding the purse strings.
When Creativity Alone Can’t Close the Deal
Most of the folks joining Colorado Ad Day this year are creative professionals – designers, copywriters, strategists, and accounts managers – people who got into this business because we love the work. We love naming things. Moodboards. Type hierarchy. Key messaging. Workshop Post-Its. Storytelling arcs. Brand pillars that land.
That love of craft is our superpower, but it’s also our blind spot.
In moments when we’re trying to advocate for long-term, purpose-driven branding, we often default to talking about meaning, emotion, and identity. Our well-meaning metaphors and inspiration aren’t wrong, but they’re incomplete.
Because on the other side of the table we have CFOs, CEOs, and performance marketers asking questions like:
Same company. Different language.
Craft, Evolved
At Moxie Sozo, we realized that “craft” couldn’t just mean beautiful packaging or clever copy. Not in a world where retail buyers want proof, and CMOs want performance. That’s why we developed an approach we call Crafted for Confidence. To us, it means that while we create brands that delight, we put equal emphasis on performance.
Our creative is informed by the category, the aisle, and the business case. We make design decisions that excite and convert. We obsess over visual storytelling and how it plays out at retail.
It’s not about compromising creativity; it’s about extending its power. By pairing craft with strategy and business fluency, we give our clients the confidence to make bold moves and get buy-in from every corner of the organization.
From Brand Language to Business Language
Here’s the most surprising thing we’ve learned along the way: despite what LinkedIn’s thinkers might argue, performance isn’t the opposite of purpose. It’s what proves it. But proving it requires empathy for our internal stakeholders, something that brand professionals don’t practice enough.
Just like we map consumer personas to inform our creative, we need to consider the personas inside the business – the CFO who’s managing risk, the COO who’s optimizing operations, the performance marketer who’s tracking ROAS down to the decimal. Part of being Crafted for Confidence means learning how to describe our world in a way they understand.
In our workshop at Colorado Ad Day, we’ll practice this directly. Through a hands-on exercise, we’ll take a powerful brand idea and translate it into business terms a CFO would respect. We’ll explore how to connect the dots between brand and long-term performance, using language like LTV, CAC, churn, and ROI.
Spoiler: it’s easier than it sounds. And it’s a skill that will serve you long after the sticky notes come down.
But here’s the part I hope Colorado Ad Day attendees remember: performance isn’t the opposite of purpose. It’s how we bring it to life. When we learn to speak the language of business without losing our creative soul, we build work that doesn’t just move people. It moves numbers.
