CEO STORY: LDV United – how brand and culture go hand in hand
- Hans Smellinckx
- 2 days ago
- 3 min read
There are companies where the brand is mainly a communication layer. A story you tell the outside world.
And then there are companies where the brand feels more like an extension of the internal culture. Not because every employee can recite the positioning by heart, but because the way people work, think and collaborate clearly influences the work that reaches customers.
That is one of the reasons the LDV United story is interesting for CEOs.
LDV United presents itself as an Antwerp-based agency that creates “fans for brands,” and explicitly links that idea to the value of emotional relationships between people and companies. This is not just a catchy line. It suggests a deeper belief about how brands grow: not only through transactions, but through affinity, energy and meaning.
For a CEO, that raises a very relevant question: if your brand promise depends on a certain type of human connection, does your internal culture actually support that?
Why culture and brand drift apart so easily
Many companies treat brand and culture as separate conversations.
Brand is discussed in marketing meetings, agency sessions, sales decks and campaigns. Culture is discussed in HR, leadership workshops and internal initiatives. Both matter, but they evolve on parallel tracks. Over time, that creates a gap.
You start seeing companies that want to appear bold externally, while decision-making internally is slow and cautious. Or companies that want to feel close to customers, while internally they are deeply siloed. Or businesses that claim creativity and relevance in the market, while their people experience rigid hierarchy and low trust inside the walls.
At that point, the external story may still sound good for a while. But the internal mismatch eventually catches up.
What the LDV case reminds us of
In the LDV United case, the phrase “fans for brands” is a useful CEO lens because it points to something stronger than awareness or communication. Fans are created through repeated positive experiences, emotional consistency and a sense of relevance.
That kind of work usually cannot come from a culture that is emotionally flat.
If you want to build brands that make people feel something, you need teams that are alive enough to notice what matters, brave enough to propose something sharper, and connected enough internally to turn ideas into work without losing all the energy in the process.
That applies far beyond agencies.
If you lead a SME or scale-up in Belgium, the Netherlands or elsewhere in Europe, your business may not “make campaigns.” But the same logic still holds. If your company wants to be experienced as reliable, human, premium, fast-moving, daring or thoughtful, then at least some of that must be true in how the company feels on the inside.
Brand as the outside expression of internal truth
I have become increasingly convinced that brand is often the outside expression of repeated internal behaviour.
Culture influences:
how quickly people dare to bring ideas forward,
how conflict is handled,
whether quality standards are taken seriously,
how much ownership teams actually feel,
and how much emotional energy is left in the work after all the meetings are done.
That means culture is not just a “people topic.” It is part of how your company becomes visible in the market.
If internal behaviour consistently undermines external positioning, the market will eventually feel it. Maybe not in one dramatic moment, but in the cumulative quality of interactions, delivery, innovation and trust.
The CEO’s role in keeping those two aligned
This is where the CEO matters more than many people think.
You do not need to personally write the brand story or design the culture deck. But you do shape the conditions in which both either reinforce each other or drift apart.
That happens through very practical things:
what behaviour you reward,
what tensions you tolerate,
how leadership teams speak to each other,
whether you allow the brand promise to become operationally inconvenient,
and whether you keep asking: does the way we work support the story we want the market to believe?
If the answer is no, that is not only a communication issue. It is a leadership issue.
What this means in your next 100 days
A 100-day reset is a strong moment to test the relationship between your culture and your brand.
Ask yourself:
What do we want customers to feel when they experience us?
What do our people feel when they experience us internally?
Where do those two line up well?
Where is the gap painfully obvious?
The answers may reveal that your strongest growth move is not a new message, but a more honest alignment between the company you say you are and the one people actually live in every day.
That is where brand stops being a layer and starts becoming a consequence.
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