The atmosphere was electric. But some of the tournament’s most interesting moments were happening beyond the pitch. FIFA’s ‘clean stadium’ rules were designed to protect official sponsors’ visibility by covering or removing everyone else’s branding. In doing so, they inadvertently created a fascinating experiment: what happens when a brand’s most visible asset disappears? The answer revealed a fundamental difference between visibility and value.

Beyond the logo

Heinz turned the tape covering its iconic ketchup bottles into the activation itself. Levi’s concealed its wordmark while leaving the unmistakable silhouette of its batwing intact. Gillette covered its logo with shaving foam. Each execution was inventive, but the creativity wasn’t the most fascinating part. What mattered was this: all three brands remained instantly recognizable even when their most obvious identifiers were obscured.

This unintended experiment revealed something important. Removing a brand’s most visible asset doesn’t necessarily diminish its value. In many cases, it reveals it.

That isn’t simply a creative achievement. It’s a business achievement. Brand memory isn’t valuable because people remember you. It’s valuable because remembered brands become more resilient, more trusted and ultimately more valuable businesses.

That’s the difference between awareness and equity. Awareness can be bought through media investment. Equity is built over time through experiences that create familiarity, preference and trust.

I’ve come to think of it this way: Brand equity is accumulated memory with economic value. Brand equity doesn’t emerge because people recognize a logo. It emerges because recognition, reinforced over time, becomes trust, preference and habit.

Commodities compete on price and availability. Brands compete on meaning. That’s why the strongest brands command premiums, inspire loyalty and retain value long after individual campaigns have been forgotten.

Memory creates value

The Bed Bath & Beyond story makes that idea surprisingly tangible. When the retailer collapsed in 2023, its stores closed, its inventory was liquidated and its physical retail business effectively disappeared. Yet the Bed Bath & Beyond brand and related intellectual property still sold for more than US$21 million. No stores, no inventory and no real estate. Just the brand.

What remained wasn’t infrastructure or inventory. It was accumulated memory with economic value. That transaction is a powerful reminder that brand is not just a communications device. It is a genuine business asset, capable of retaining value even when much of the business around it has disappeared.

Most companies will never have such a clean valuation of their brand because, in healthy organizations, brand equity is woven into the fabric of the business. It shapes pricing power, drives customer loyalty, influences recruitment and partnerships and underpins investor confidence and long-term resilience. It shows up in what customers are willing to pay, how often they return and how confidently they recommend you to others.

The World Cup revealed the same principle from another angle. We may never know the precise monetary value of the Heinz keystone, the Levi’s batwing or the Gillette brand in that moment. But we could clearly see their qualitative value. When visibility was constrained, recognition remained. That’s brand equity in action.

The strongest brand assets are rarely individual logos, colors or taglines. They’re systems of meaning built over years of consistent experience. Shape, language, packaging, product design, service and behavior all contribute. Individually, these elements may seem modest. Together, they compound, creating recognition, reducing cognitive effort and making brands easier to trust, choose and remember.

Through my work at Conran Design Group, I’ve come to think of this as the sensory stack of branding, the layers of visual, verbal and experiential cues that build recognition over time. Consumers don’t encounter these cues in isolation. They experience them simultaneously, each interaction reinforcing the next.

For business leaders, the significance isn’t simply creative. A richer sensory stack reduces dependence on any single touchpoint. If one cue disappears, others continue carrying the brand. That’s resilience.

Every CEO understands the risk of overdependence. Businesses avoid relying on a single supplier, a single customer or a single product line because concentration creates vulnerability. Brands are no different.

If recognition depends entirely on a logo, a campaign or a paid media moment, the brand is fragile. If it’s distributed across a system of reinforcing brand assets, it becomes considerably stronger.

Brand as strategy

One of the biggest shifts I’ve observed over the past decade is that brand conversations increasingly begin with CEOs rather than CMOs. That’s hardly surprising. Brand now influences almost every driver of enterprise value, from customer acquisition and retention to pricing power, talent attraction, partnerships and investor confidence. It has become too important to sit solely within the marketing function.

A strong brand doesn’t make a business immune to failure. Bed Bath & Beyond reminds us of that. But even there, the brand itself retained measurable value after much of the business had disappeared.

The World Cup offered a more optimistic version of the same lesson. Heinz, Levi’s and Gillette didn’t become recognizable because FIFA covered their logos. They responded with confidence because decades of disciplined brand-building had already done the work. The constraint didn’t create strong brands. It simply revealed them. Looking back on the tournament from here in Mexico City, that’s the lesson I’ll remember most.

The question for CEOs isn’t whether their logo is visible enough. It’s whether their business has built enough memory, trust and meaning to remain valuable when visibility is constrained. Visibility can always be bought. Brand equity has to be built.

Opinions expressed by The CEO Magazine contributors are their own.