I recently heard a CMO talk about how little control brands have in today’s consumer-driven world. Her point was that a brand now lives as much in the hands of consumers, creators and influencers as it does inside the company.  

That is true. But recent brand failures suggest we may be learning the wrong lesson. Less control does not mean less responsibility. 

Converse is the latest and perhaps most startling example. The company pulled social imagery after viewers said it evoked a Ku Klux Klan hood and lynching. Converse apologized, saying, “We understand why this image is deeply upsetting and recognize that we got this wrong.” 

The response acknowledged the harm, but it didn’t explain how the work made it through concepting, production review and approval without anyone stopping it. 

Good Good Golf and Callaway show what happens when two partners can’t agree on how something happened. A video promoting a co-branded driver showed Good Good co-founder Garrett Clark shoving a woman to the ground. Good Good CEO Matt Kendrick first said, “The buck stops with me” and later posted that Callaway had approved the ad and asked Good Good “to take the fall.” Kendrick resigned within a week. Callaway ended the partnership, publicly apologized and acknowledged its review process was inadequate.  

The fallout shows the cost of a failure no one caught early: angry consumers, severed partnerships, pulled merchandise, lost sponsorships and a severely damaged brand reputation. The goal cannot be to become excellent at apologies. It has to be to build organizations that are less likely to need them. 

Every campaign has a process, even when the work moves at lightning speed. The question is whether that process is designed to protect the audience and the brand. Four practices can make that process stronger without making it slower or less creative. 

1.    Establish Brand Guardrails 

Brand guidelines can no longer stop at logo use, typography and tone of voice. Teams need a shared understanding of the brand’s values, how the public sees it, the cultural spaces it has permission to enter and the lines it will not cross. 

Those guardrails must extend across the entire ecosystem: internal marketing teams, senior leaders, agencies, creators, influencers, legal and compliance. If a partner is using your name, product or platform, that work is part of your brand whether or not your team originated the idea. 

2.    Build Due Process Into Speed 

Fast work still needs a visible path from brief to concept to production to approval. The brief should identify cultural and reputational risks alongside the audience, business objective and creative opportunity. The team should know who is responsible for each decision, which work requires elevated review and who has final sign-off. 

This is especially important at the seams between a brand and its partners, where assumptions tend to multiply. Did the agency believe the creator had final authority? Did the client assume the agency had stress-tested the idea? Did a social team repost work because it had already appeared on a partner’s channel?  A simple responsibility map and a short, documented risk check can close those gaps without adding bureaucracy. 

The risk check can even start with a first pass on AI (recognizing AI has cultural blind spots). Run the concept against the brand's guardrails and ask what might jump out to an audience. It takes minutes and gives reviewers a place to start. 

3.    Empower People To Stop The Work 

I keep coming back to one question about Converse and Good Good among other similar stories of late. If so many consumers saw the problem immediately, is it really plausible that no one inside the process saw it too? Is it possible someone did notice and didn’t feel able or empowered to raise the flag? 

Creative cultures need productive dissent. Teams should be explicitly invited to ask, “What could we be missing?” and “Who might experience this differently?” People from underrepresented backgrounds, external partners, and junior employees need more than a seat in the room; they need a clear mechanism to challenge the work without being branded difficult or overly cautious. 

4.    Culturally Stress Test 

A few years ago, while reviewing a campaign, a client CEO raised a concern about how the work might be perceived by the Latino community. We debated the risk in earnest before recognizing the obvious: no one at the table was Latino. We needed a perspective the room did not have. 

Not every social post can undergo quantitative research, but every brand can ask for diverse lived experience before going live. At Hatch, our cultural advisory council brings together industry professionals across ages, ethnicities and backgrounds to review and stress-test ideas for bias, relevance and cultural context. The goal is not creativity by committee. It is to surface blind spots early, when the work can still be strengthened rather than defended. 

Accountability Starts Before Launch 

Consumers help shape brands, and culture moves faster than any approval process. None of that is an absolution. 

The brand still owns the partners it chooses, and the work it amplifies. “We got this wrong” is an important admission, but accountability has to exist before the post goes live: in the brief, in the room, at the handoffs, and at the moment when someone senses that something is not right. 

Brands can have speed and responsibility, cultural relevance and brand safety, if they build a process strong enough to support both.