Ask who’s responsible for something in a large company, and you’ll often be given the name of a department. “That sits with Customer Experience,” someone will say, as though Customer Experience were a dependable chap who could be found at his desk after lunch. Try getting hold of him when something goes wrong. “Everybody is more inclined to neglect the duty which he expects another to fulfill.” — Aristotle, Politics, Book II, Part III, Aristotle spotted this more than two thousand years ago, which suggests we’ve had ample time to sort out who’s calling the supplier. It’s a familiar problem, and in 1931 a young advertising man at Procter & Gamble, Neil McElroy, came up with a useful answer. He was working on Camay soap, which had the awkward distinction of competing with Ivory, another P&G brand. You can imagine the difficulty of fighting for attention when your rival is also the family favourite. McElroy’s proposal was to give each brand someone personally answerable for how well it did. This person would study sales, find out where things were going badly, and work out what to do about it, with dedicated help and figures showing whether any of it was working. He set this out in a three-page memo, despite P&G’s preference for one-page memos. Even an argument for taking responsibility apparently required a small act of disobedience. The company agreed, helping establish what we now call brand management. It seems an obvious arrangement once someone has suggested it, although you could say the same of putting wheels on a suitcase, and we spent years carrying those about. McElroy also gave the job a name: “brand man”. There’s a useful connection here to the labelling effect, the way a label can influence how we categorise something and what we expect of it. The title helped make brand responsibility a recognisable job within P&G. Here was the chap who was meant to worry about Camay. Ivory doing splendidly might please the company, but it wouldn’t let him off the hook. At Ogilvy, we understood the value of this too. Calling our approach “Fusion Strategy” gave clients something they could recognise as distinctly ours. “Strategy” sounds like something any agency ought to supply; “Fusion Strategy” sounds like something you come to Ogilvy for. A marvellous bit of branding in itself, because the name invites the client to put both the service and the agency in a different category, with different expectations of what the work is worth. And once you’ve given the work a name, someone still has to be responsible for delivering it. Provided, that is, you let them do something. There’s a certain managerial cheek in making someone responsible for a result while requiring six other people to approve every decision. You’ve given them all the anxiety of ownership with none of the pleasure of being able to fix things. So it’s worth looking around your business for something important that keeps being neglected and asking three things: 1. Pick one neglected thing, then agree who could properly take it on. 2. Make the next step clear. What needs to happen, and by when? Write one sentence. 3. Give them the time and authority to act, and make sure everyone else knows the arrangement. They’ll still need colleagues; McElroy proposed support for his brand managers, after all. You might get more out of that conversation than another reorganisation. And you could probably keep the paperwork to one page. Want to learn more about brands and growing your business? Learn how great brands are actually built? our Brand Building miniMBA, with Keith Weed, Piyush Pandey, Nils Leonard and more, it’s a brilliant place to start. And if your challenge is more on the leadership side of things, our Creative Leadership miniMBA with Sir John Hegarty and Cindy Gallop and co will help.