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A brand is more than a marketing lever. It’s a leadership tool.

That means establishing brand leadership for your company doesn’t start with the marketing department. It doesn’t start in research or product development. It starts in the executive suite.

It starts with a clear-eyed and powerful vision for what you can and will be the best in the world at doing, making or delivering. This is why visionary company leaders make great brand leaders. Steve Jobs at Apple comes to mind.

Without a strong brand champion—a firm hand on the tiller—all brands get diffused and dissipated. Remember what happened to Apple Computer after Richard Sculley (former head of Pepsi brought in to run the company) kicked founder Steve Jobs out? Apple drifted downward—producing mediocre product evolutions and licensing its operating system to second-rate cloners. After Jobs was recruited back to rescue the gasping company, Apple produced the iMac, the iPod, iTunes and the iPhone—a string of one revolutionary category-rocking product after another.

It put naysayers to shame by executing a successful retail strategy. Its stock caught fire again. All because one brilliant guy in a black turtleneck has a crystal clear idea of what Apple is—a company that exists only to deliver the simplest, most elegant, easily used consumer electronics in the world. (The fewer buttons the better, and especially on my shirts, thank you.)

Howard Schultz at Starbucks comes to mind. Schultz was about elevating the U.S. coffee consumer to an idealized experience he had enjoyed while touring Italy and sampling its neighborhood espresso bars. The Inspector General of The Geek Squad comes to mind. Robert Stephens knew a spoonful of humor would make the virus medicine go down and launched a business on the philosophy that even the “boring” businesses could be made interesting—even entertaining.

Each of these CEOs had a unique and powerful vision for what their companies were in the world to do. They operate from a North Star that guides and informs every decision. For Jobs, it was creating simple, elegant, esthetically pleasing technologies. Getting the computer to compute was simply the cost of entry. If it couldn’t be done with élan, don’t do it.

None of these CEOs started out with, “I’m going to build an iconic brand.” They said, “I’m going to create the best damn [fill in the blank] the world has ever seen.”

And it’s this paradox exactly that makes the CEO the most important and influential brand steward any organization can have. Next post:  what’s required of the CEO to steward the brand?