Your P&L is your brand
Your customers don’t read your financial statements. They experience them.
I keep coming back to two statements. In March 2024, Nike’s finance chief acknowledged that the company had become too focused on its sales-channel targets and paid too little attention to “serving consumer demand where the consumer is shopping.” Management preferred one arrangement for the business. Customers had their own shopping habits.
Ralph Lauren’s chief executive, Patrice Louvet, described a different decision: “We left about a billion dollars off the table.” The company had walked away from revenue because of places and ways it no longer wanted to sell.
Both were discussing decisions that affected the accounts. Which sales to encourage. Which relationships to protect. What the company would accept to reach its numbers. Those are brand decisions. They determine what customers can buy, where they find it, and what the experience teaches them to expect.
But there is a complication. Both companies pulled back from parts of distribution. We cannot turn either story into a general instruction to sell directly, close more doors, or refuse revenue. The same action can help one business and hurt another. We have to understand what the decision does to the reasons people choose the company. Which brings me to the meeting where this should be discussed.
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