Meaning Beyond Money
The strongest brands don't simply communicate differently. They operate differently.
New research shows that brands anchored in meaning — not messaging — consistently outperform markets, accelerate growth, and build long‑term enterprise value. Here’s why CEOs should treat brand as a strategic asset, not a communication function.
They align what the business does, what the brand means, and how the organization behaves around a shared idea of the future.
I call it Meaning Beyond Money.
For years, I debated a question with my former colleague and friend, Knud Birk Sørensen, author of Branding - Business or Pretty Face: Is branding cosmetic, or is it fundamentally commercial?
Knud had a rare ability to cut through noise and ask the uncomfortable questions. Together, we spent countless hours mapping frameworks, challenging assumptions, and exploring whether brand belonged inside marketing or at the center of the business.
Eventually, we reached a conclusion:
Brand is not decoration. Brand is direction.
I strongly believe brand is the meaning people attach to your company.
And when that meaning aligns business, brand and culture, it becomes something much more powerful than communication.
It becomes a structural performance advantage.
Meaning Creates Commercial Value
Strong brands create preference. They can strengthen pricing power, customer relationships and resilience. But the interesting question isn't whether brand creates value. It is why some brands become significantly more powerful than others. I believe part of the answer lies in coherence.
When what a company does, what it says and how its people behave reinforce the same underlying meaning, brand stops being a layer of communication around the business. Brand becomes part of the business.
That can influence strategic choices, product development, customer experience, talent and culture.
In other words: Brand is not soft power. It is margin power.
Meaning Beyond Money
The strongest brands tend to stand for something beyond the transaction.
Not necessarily a conventional purpose statement. And certainly not purpose as corporate decoration. Meaning Beyond Money is a larger idea about the future that gives the organization direction and makes choices more coherent. It can shape what the company builds. Where it competes. How it behaves.What customers experience. And what people believe the company represents.
Meaning Beyond Money is not idealism. It is strategy.
Four Danish companies illustrate four different manifestations of the idea.
Too Good To Go - Meaning built into the business model
Too Good To Go did not add purpose to an existing business. The purpose is embedded in the business itself. Its marketplace connects consumers with businesses that have surplus food, allowing customers to rescue unsold food from shops and restaurants rather than letting it go to waste. That creates an unusually direct connection between societal impact and commercial activity.
The more effectively the marketplace connects businesses and consumers, the more effectively it can address the problem it exists to solve. And the business continues to scale internationally, demonstrating that addressing a societal problem and building commercial relevance need not be opposing ambitions.
Purpose isn't something communicated after the product has been created. Purpose is built into the product. When meaning becomes part of the economic engine itself, purpose and growth can reinforce each other.
Grundfos - Meaning as strategic direction
For Grundfos, water sits at the center of both the commercial business and its wider relevance to society.
In 2025, the company reported that its solutions helped bring safe water access to 20 million people and enabled an estimated 1.6 billion cubic metres of water savings by end users. But the interesting part is how closely this meaning connects with the way Grundfos describes its business. In its 2025 annual report, the company combined financial and sustainability performance for the first time, explicitly connecting strategic priorities, performance and long-term value creation. At the same time, sales reached EUR 4.7 billion, with sales growth of 5.7%. The commercial and societal narratives aren't running on separate tracks.They increasingly become part of the same strategic direction.
Meaning becomes powerful when purpose and business become difficult to separate.
LEGO - Meaning as a platform for relevance
LEGO demonstrates something different. Meaning does not only give a company direction. It can give a company a center from which to evolve. The LEGO brand has built its world around play, creativity and imagination. That creates a remarkably flexible platform for products, partnerships and experiences while retaining a recognizable center. And that relevance is translating into exceptional commercial performance.
In the first half of 2026, LEGO increased revenue by 21% to a record DKK 41.9 billion. Consumer sales increased 22%, operating profit rose 22% to DKK 10.9 billion, and the company gained market share. Importantly, LEGO itself pointed to culturally relevant brand experiences as one of the factors continuing to drive demand globally. That distinction matters. Strong meaning does not require a company to remain static or repeat what made it successful yesterday. It provides something deeper to evolve around.
Meaning creates consistency without creating conformity.
JOE & THE JUICE - Meaning embodied through culture
JOE & THE JUICE illustrates the fourth dimension: what happens when organizational culture becomes part of the customer experience. The commercial product is food, coffee and juice. But part of the brand's differentiation has been created through the people delivering that experience and the distinctive culture surrounding it.The company itself has explicitly connected the two.
In reporting its 2024 performance, JOE & THE JUICE credited its employees with representing the unique culture of the brand and contributing to revenue growth through product quality and customer relationships. Revenue increased 17% to DKK 2.8 billion that year, while EBIT reached DKK 171.5 million. The momentum continued in 2025. Revenue increased another 16.5% to DKK 3.3 billion, EBIT grew 19% to DKK 204.6 million, and same-store sales increased 6%. Culture is often treated as an internal leadership or HR issue while brand is treated as external communication. But when employee behavior becomes part of the customer experience, that distinction starts to disappear.
When employees don't just work for the brand but embody it, culture becomes a growth engine.
Meaning as Competitive Advantage
These four companies are very different.
One fights food waste.
One moves water.
One creates play.
One creates a distinctive food and beverage experience.
But underneath those differences sits the same structural idea.
Meaning can create competitive advantage through five mechanisms:
1. Strategic Clarity
Meaning clarifies what the company stands for and what it refuses to do.
It becomes a filter for choices.
2. Cultural Coherence
Employees understand not only what to do, but what they are trying to create.
Meaning becomes an operating system for behavior.
3. Narrative Consistency
Customers encounter the same underlying meaning across product, experience and communication. What the company says resembles what the company actually does.
4. Competitive Differentiation
Products can be copied. Features can be copied. Communication can be imitated.
A coherent system of belief, behavior and experience is considerably harder to replicate.
5. Enterprise Value Creation
When meaning strengthens preference, differentiation and coherence, its effect can ultimately become commercial. Meaning is not a story. Meaning is a system.
Alignment is the Apex Advantage
This is where I believe the real opportunity lies. The strongest brands don't simply have compelling narratives.They align three things:
Business strategy
What they do.
Brand narrative
What they mean.
Organizational culture
How they behave.
When those three things contradict each other, marketing has to compensate. When they reinforce each other, something very different happens.The organization becomes coherent. And coherence is extraordinarily powerful.
Coherence creates trust.
Trust creates preference.
Preference creates performance.
That is why I believe:
Alignment is the apex advantage.
When business, brand and culture move in one direction, the organization becomes coherent. Customers understand it. Employees can act on it. Leaders can make decisions through it. And competitors find the complete system extraordinarily difficult to copy.
That is when brand stops being a communication function and becomes a strategic asset. Meaning is not a story. Meaning is a system. And yes, money follows.
Not because the brand is pretty.
But because the brand is powerful.
Sources
Too Good To Go, company website
Grundfos Annual Report 2025,
The LEGO Group H1 2026 Results
JOE & THE JUICE 2024 performance announcement & JOE & THE JUICE 2025 performance announcement.