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The Truth Behind Brand Building: What Marc Pritchard Knows That Others Forget
What is the truth behind brand building? Marc Pritchard doesn’t believe in brand lifecycles but in brand legacies. He stands firmly in the camp of enduring value. For Pritchard, building a brand isn't about chasing cultural noise but tuning into the consistent signal of human need. Find out what Marc Pritchard knows that others forget.
In any industry, brand building often sprints toward the next big thing, new platforms, trending hashtags, real-time reactions, but Marc Pritchard brings us back to an old, priceless truth: the human pulse behind a brand. His philosophy isn’t built on disruption for disruption’s sake. Instead, it’s rooted in a truth too many forget in the race for relevance: great brands serve people, consistently and meaningfully, over time. They earn trust, not just attention.
Pritchard doesn’t chase cycles; he builds equity. While others obsess over virality, he invests in value, measured not only in market share, but in the role a brand plays in someone’s daily life. That’s why, under his leadership, P&G brands haven’t just survived, they have become fixtures in the culture.
Marc Pritchard offers a quietly radical alternative: durability. Not headlines, not hacks, not growth-at-all-costs tactics that crash harder than they spike. The Chief Brand Officer of Procter & Gamble doesn’t just build brands, he builds institutions. If you listen closely, you’ll notice he’s not trying to reinvent the wheel. He’s reminding us the wheel works just fine. The problem is we keep forgetting how to use it.
There’s something powerful in the simplicity of Pritchard’s view: brand building, done right, isn’t a lifecycle, it is a legacy. You don’t scale a brand. You steward it. That means resisting the pull of quarterly quick wins in favour of consistency, clarity and courage. One of Pritchard’s core beliefs is that “it’s not that complicated.”
And in many ways, it isn’t, unless you make it so. In his keynotes and internal strategy sessions, he returns to the same essential truths: know who you are, make it matter and never stop earning trust. The rest is noise. He often invokes G & P brands as case studies, not for their campaigns, but for their constancy. These brands didn’t become household names because they chased trends; they became institutions because they delivered truth wrapped in relevance again and again. The creativity wasn’t performative, it was purposeful. Every message reinforced what the brand stood for and why it existed in the first place.
For entrepreneurs and business executives who live in a state of near-permanent volatility, that message may sound outdated but in reality, this is foundational. As Pritchard puts it, brands that last are built on human truths, not market trends. That means the work is slower. It demands restraint. But it scales in a way quarterly stunts never will.
In our obsession with performance metrics, we’ve started treating brands like software, always in need of another update, iterate, relaunch. A brand isn’t code; is the value you add to people’s life and it is earned through choices, repeated over time, under pressure.
Perhaps the most resonant lesson from Pritchard is that great brands aren’t built by algorithms, but by humans who care deeply about other humans. The P&G playbook is surprisingly human-centric. Not just in targeting or segmentation, but in spirit. What matters to your customer? What can you promise and actually deliver? What’s worth saying again tomorrow?
In the end, Pritchard doesn’t talk about brand lifecycles because he doesn’t believe in expiration dates on relevance. If a brand is rooted in truth, if it shows up with integrity and adapts without losing its soul, then it doesn’t need reinvention. It needs reaffirmation. In a time when most companies are chasing the algorithm, Marc Pritchard is attracting the human soul. That may be the most disruptive idea of all.
About Marc Pritchard, P&G’s Chief Brand Officer
Marc Pritchard, a cornerstone of P&G for over forty years, has shaped the company’s global brand-building philosophy and execution. As Chief Brand Officer, he directs P&G’s multi-billion-dollar marketing, media, and advertising strategy, championing a model where innovation is inseparable from purpose. Pritchard doesn’t just believe in building brands, he believes in building brands that matter: brands that earn trust by delivering exceptional performance and by acting as catalysts for social progress, environmental responsibility, and inclusive representation.
His industry influence has been recognized with honors that include induction into the American Advertising Federation Hall of Fame (2024), the American Marketing Association Hall of Fame (2022), and the Forbes CMO Hall of Fame (2022), as well as being named Global Marketer of the Year by the World Federation of Advertisers (2020) and the Cannes Lions #1 Brand Marketer of the Decade (2020).
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