01
Strategic Coherence
- A clear why
- Sharp positioning
- Explicit trade-offs
- A 3–5 year ambition
A management-team diagnostic
Your growth problem is probably not a marketing problem.
The Brand–Culture–Performance Engine measures the five forces that decide whether a strategy survives contact with the organisation that has to execute it. It is answered by your whole management team — not just by the person who wrote the strategy.
- 18+ yearsat the intersection of brand, culture and leadership
- Executive MBAWU Executive Academy, Vienna
- Best Brand BuildingConsultancy, Romania · Management Consulting Awards 2023
- 9 sectorsfrom electrical distribution to private healthcare
Why a fraction and not a checklist
Most diagnostics add points. This one multiplies and divides, because that is how organisations actually behave. A sharp strategy and a brilliant market position get divided by silos, conflicting KPIs, unclear decision rights and a leadership team that is not saying the same thing.
Friction is the hidden killer. It rarely appears in a strategy document, it never appears in a marketing plan, and it quietly consumes the returns on both.
Which is why, in most growth-stage companies, the highest-leverage move is not a campaign. It is alignment, friction reduction, and execution discipline. Marketing amplifies afterwards — and amplifying a misaligned company only makes the misalignment travel faster.
The five variables
What gets measured
Laid out the way the model calculates them: three forces on top, one underneath the line, one that multiplies the result.
02
Cultural Alignment
- Leadership behaviour matches the positioning
- Decision-making supports the strategy
- Incentives reinforce the brand promise
- Talent profile fits the archetype
03
Market Relevance
- A real customer pain is solved
- A clear value proposition
- The experience matches the promise
04
Organisational Friction
The denominator. The only variable that makes everything else worth less.
- Silos
- Conflicting KPIs
- Unclear roles
- Slow decision-making
- Leadership misalignment
05
Execution Discipline
- KPIs
- Cadence
- Feedback loops
- Consistency
- Learning cycles
Multiplies whatever is left
Why the whole team answers
The score tells you where you are. The disagreement tells you why.
When eight people from the same management team answer the same questions, the average is the least interesting output. The spread is where the money is.
A high average with a wide spread is the most common and most expensive pattern in growth-stage companies: a team that agrees on the words and disagrees on the reality. Everyone signs off on “solutions partner”. Nobody has the same picture of what that means on a Tuesday.
Answers are anonymous. That is not a legal footnote — it is the condition under which people tell you something you did not already know.
Illustrative — divergence on one variable
How it runs
Start with step one →-
STEP ONEFree
You invite your management team
Five to twelve people. Around ten minutes each, on a phone if that is easier. Behavioural questions, not self-ratings. Answers are anonymous and you see only who has responded, never what they said.
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STEP TWOFree
You get the company report
Your index, the five variables scored, the divergence map by group, your archetype, and the three moves with the highest leverage for a company shaped like yours. Yours to keep, free.
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STEP THREEPaid
We work through it together
A facilitated session with your leadership team, where the report is the agenda and the gaps are the discussion. This is the paid step — [YOUR PRICE] — and the point at which a diagnosis becomes a decision.
Applied — national electrical distribution, 25+ years in market
A strong market position, held back by everything underneath it
A distributor moving toward a solutions and service model. Real technical depth, real market demand, own brands with genuine margin potential — and growth that kept arriving harder than it should have.
At diagnosisAfter
Modelled index
260→1950
≈ 7.5× — with market relevance unchanged
Market Relevance never moved. It was already the strongest variable in the business. Everything in that jump came from identity clarity, sales behaviour, operational simplification and leadership cadence.
Marketing was never the growth lever here. It was the amplifier waiting for something worth amplifying.
What happened in the organisation
Employee retention
74.0% → 89.0%
2024 to the first half of 2025
Employee turnover
36.6% → 12.2%
Over the same period
“It was the starting point for rethinking how we organise our work, collaborate and lead our teams.”Commercial Director
at the close of a four-month leadership programme
These are client-reported organisational indicators following a broader management programme, not the output of a questionnaire. The diagnostic is what told us where to point the programme.
What the diagnosis actually changed
Identity
An explicit decision to stop describing the company as a distributor. A portfolio and a set of priorities that reflected it, and the discipline to kill the initiatives that did not.
Incentives
The brand claimed “solutions partner” while the commission plan rewarded transactional volume. Culture follows the incentive, not the claim.
Friction
Clear segment ownership, defined sales stages, escalation rules, and an answer to the question nobody had written down: who approves what.
Cadence
A monthly strategic dashboard, segment-level visibility, a KPI cascade by function, and one named owner per initiative.
The consultant
A model is only as good as the person in the room when the results land
I am Georgiana Iancu. For more than eighteen years I have worked at the intersection of brand, marketing, organisational culture and leadership — the four things this model refuses to treat separately.
I spent a decade inside a multicultural technology company, the last five years of it leading communications: three-to-five-year communication strategy, employer branding, a management communications framework, and budgets between €70k and €450k. I ran the communication through the company's acquisition by a German group listed in Frankfurt — which is where I learned what a strategy document is worth when the organisation underneath it has not caught up.
Since 2020 I have worked in independent practice — six years now — through InkingBrands and Brandocracy, with Romanian entrepreneurial companies in growth, repositioning or transformation. The work sits with owners, CEOs and management teams, and in the same week with the sales, HR, marketing and operations people who have to make the decision real.
My method is warm in the room and direct in the diagnosis. I ask uncomfortable questions gently, and I do not leave a session without decisions, owners and dates.
- Executive MBAWU Executive Academy, Vienna University of Economics and Business
- Strategic Governance & Board LeadershipColumbia Business School with UBB FSEGA
- Leading and Managing InnovationUNC Kenan-Flagler Business School with UBB FSEGA
- Best Brand Building Consultancy, RomaniaManagement Consulting Awards 2023, with the Brandocracy team
The same logic, elsewhere
Three more times the constraint was not the market
A Romanian engineering employer
eNPS −29 → +22
The employer promise described a company the employees did not recognise. HR, communication and leadership were each solving a different problem. The fix was one shared proposition and explicit leader responsibilities — not a recruitment campaign.
Higher education · A leading business school
Seven audiences, one idea
Students, parents, teachers, faculty, alumni and business partners all needed something different. “Own your perspective” became a decision filter rather than a campaign line — the institution could speak to each group without becoming seven brands.
Travel · 30+ years in market
A promise the operation could keep
“You are in good hands” was not invented for the brand — it described how the travel consultants already worked. In 2026 it evolved into a personalisation mechanism built around customers' own names, running across content, CRM, partners and events.
Where the model has been used
- National electrical distribution
- Industrial packaging solutions
- Landscaping and green space construction
- Premium hospitality
- Private healthcare, multi-site
- Business travel and MICE
- Food ingredients distribution
- Tertiary education and executive programmes
- AI technology, global market
What the people in the room say afterwards
I do not think I could have found a more suitable person with whom to analyse my work, challenges and development as a manager. With patience, consistency and clear procedures, I believe I can move from being the firefighter to becoming the fire brigade commander — building a system that solves problems instead of putting out every fire myself.
national electrical distribution · after a one-to-one advisory session
This leadership programme meant much more than a course or a series of workshops. It was the starting point for rethinking how we organise our work, collaborate and lead our teams — laying the foundations for a more structured, coherent and performance-oriented approach.
national electrical distribution · at the close of a four-month programme
The most hands-on workshop, with the clearest direction, that we have had since we started working together. I appreciated that we stayed focused, that you gave us concrete feedback and that the guidance was clear.
[SECTOR] · after a practical management workshop
Testimonials translated from Romanian and shortened for length. Client names withheld by choice; original messages and attribution available on request.
Find out what your management team actually disagrees about
Ten minutes each. Anonymous answers. A company report you keep whether or not we ever work together.
- 5–12 respondents
- Anonymous by design
- Report is yours, free
Start your team diagnostic
Or write to me directly at hello@georgianaiancu.com