There is a role most companies have never filled. Not because it doesn't exist. But because most companies don't know it exists. And when they find out, it changes everything.
Most people are familiar with the role of a Creative Director. Or at least have an idea of what one does. These positions typically sit on the agency side or inside the marketing department. Brought in once the company direction is set. Asked to express a vision, not define one. To make the strategy look good. Turn it into campaigns people remember. Brands people recognise. Stories people feel.
Valuable work. But downstream work.
There is another role emerging. Different in level. Different in context. Different in what it shapes. The Chief Creative Officer. Not the one who designs campaigns or brand identities. The one who designs what the company becomes. Who gives form to the future itself, the products, the services, the retail, the brand, the total experience and every micro-moment within it. The visible layer and the invisible one underneath.
They don't design what a brand looks like.
They design what it does.
You find them in unexpected places. Experimental studios. Innovation labs. Multidisciplinary teams where ambiguity is part of the process. Their background is not the point. The way of seeing is. They see products as experiences. Brands as behaviour. Technology as material. Strategy as something that must become visible before it can become real. They think in long-term IP instead of campaign cycles. In creativity designed for generations, not demographics. In systems, culture and imagination rather than briefs and deliverables.
The problem in most modern companies is not a lack of experts. The best engineers, strategists, designers and product teams already exist inside most organisations. The problem is fragmentation. Different teams optimising for different futures. And that seam always shows.
In products that contradict the brand. In campaigns that promise what the service cannot deliver. In strategies that look coherent on a slide and fall apart in execution. Each part done well. The whole never adds up. Someone has to hold the whole. Not the one who optimises the parts. The one who connects them, translates between worlds, holds the direction, makes the future tangible enough for everyone to build toward it together.
Call it what you want. Creative Director. Chief Creative Officer. Chief Experience Officer. Chief Design Officer. The title is not the point. What matters is the thinking behind it. Someone who does not see design only as aesthetics, but as the architecture of the entire company. The shape of how it works, not just how it looks.
Think of the companies where the culture and the product were never separate decisions. That knew what they stood for so clearly that everything, the packaging, the store, the software, the service, the next product, followed naturally. Not because they planned every detail. Because someone held the direction.
That is the person most organisations are missing. Not just in marketing. Especially in the boardroom. In the innovation lab. In the room where companies decide what they are becoming. Because the world is moving too fast for fragmented thinking. Products, services, retail, technology, AI, brand and experience can no longer be designed in isolation and stitched together afterward. It always costs more, in time, in trust, in market position, than getting it right at the start would have.
The role isn't there to make the strategy look good.
It is there to make it real.
Jo Van Grinderbeek