Your company's (marketing, design?) leaders assume that users will notice (and appreciate) the exceptions (breaking of conventions) for your brand. 99% of your users time will most likely be spent on other sites, and will be used to those conventions.
You're right to point out the conventional use of red.
Jakob Nielsen (from the Nielsen Norman Group) has a short video about Jakob's Law of Internet User Experience:
Users spend most of their time on other sites. This means that users prefer your site to work the same way as all the other sites they already know. Design for patterns for which users are accustomed.
I'm not aware of the domain of your website, but if it's dealing with performance metrics, this would be in direct contrast to conventions.
Red as seen in performance indicators:
While red and green can be problematic with color alone (some users are color blind), when paired with an icon, it is a standard for performance indicators and to use red for down (negative).
From Google Analytics:
Yahoo Finance
Bloomberg
