Building a Brand in 2023 and Beyond

Back in the golden era, The MadMen era of advertisement, brands were born and developed differently. Back then the ecosystem wasn’t too complex. You would have a handful of stakeholders that would commission a singular designer to create your brand and then hand it off to the likes of Don Draper to advertise it to your audience. In turn, the customers would find your products on the shelves or in the newspaper ads or tv and make a purchase. Simple.

Fast forward to the present, and the landscape of branding has transformed significantly. Brands now operate in an entirely different manner. The operational environment within which a company functions has become far more complex involving a multitude of interactions among professionals hailing from diverse fields and specialized areas. Furthermore, the assemblage of assets in today's branding landscape surpasses those of brands originating in the 1970s and earlier periods.

Today if you were to start a brand you would need to find a designer or design agency to facilitate the branding workshop. You would need to develop your brand to live in the real world, print world, packaging world, social media world, influencer world and of course digital world, i.e. websites and apps. If you are a lucky enough you can partner up with a single entity that does it all. But the truth is, very few can do it, successfully. So chances are your brand will have many contributors and “parents” that will help you raise it.

The challenge will be to maintain visual and verbal communication consistency. Did you know that 3rd (33.4%) of people working in marketing and design spend around 3 weeks per year searching for the correct versions of design assets. 15% of them spend up to 6 weeks a year doing the same. 

In the summer of 2016 I was tasked with a redesign of a mobile app for one of the biggest media companies on the planet. When I arrived to their offices and met with their internal teams the first thing I asked for was their brand guide. Turns out they had a few. There was a dated version that was created in early 00s, then there was a brief addendum that loosely spoke about digital media assets and there was a weird marketing usage dating back to early 90s.  In looking at their vast landscape of digital products I found that outside of a logo there was no unification. Every product and asset looked different, behaved differently. So the first week with the client and the only thing they got billed for is for me looking for the guiding documentation…that is a huge waste.

Earlier in 2014 I partnered up with 2 NYU students and we launched a startup out of the NYU E-Lab. My job was CTO. Anyone who has every been a part of a startup can understand how chaotic it is. Especially in the early days, when funding is scarce, resources are limited, team is small and everyone is trying their best to survive and meet deadlines. When the time came for the launch of the product all we had was a logo. We quickly came up with some marketing assets and launched. As the company continued to develop the need for new assets arose. The website, the apparel, the marketing material etc….Again, everything but the logo looked different.

So how do we unify a brand, to ensure that it grows and develops properly, without investing too much time and money into building out the consistency? Especially if you are not a designer and can’t understand the repercussions of  lack of consistency in branding assets.

The answer is simple. Build your brands like an operating system (OS). In the realm of computing, an operating system (OS) functions  as a bridge between the hardware platform and the user. It oversees the inner workings, including processes and software, while also providing a foundation upon which applications like programs and apps can be developed. Moreover, it facilitates seamless collaboration among these applications. That is why anybody can create a mobile app and deploy it to be used in a mobile phone. That is how you are able to use Uber and check your bank balances right from your phone. It is not a creation of a single entity but rather an ecosystem that allows independent creations.

This is a great way of moving forward as a business owner or a stakeholder. I can’t tell you how many beautiful brands we create and hand off to our clients only to find it all fall apart there after because very few know how to properly gate-keep their branding assets. We can’t blame the stakeholders but we can help them instead.

I first heard of the concept of brand as an OS from an article by Tom Morton, a chief strategy officer at R/GA and it immediately sparked a series of revelations and moments of clarity. The A-HA moment if you will. I instantly remembered my days at the mobile engineering bootcamp and having to learn the developers documents from Apple. 

You see just like Apple and Google your brand can have a developers document. A set of guiding principles that help independent parties do their work ensuring them that it would be accepted by google or apple to live within their environments. For Google it looks something like this: https://m2.material.io/design/foundation-overview

Consider this: When you create your brand your starting point, typically, consists of a logo, color scheme, typography. If you are a bit bigger and working at a higher level then it may also include your customer profile, unique value proposition, taglines, internal philosophy and principles. All of these assets should come with a style guide, use guide, rule book etc…But this is a dated approach.

First of all rule book or brand bible demands unquestioned loyalty to a single brand. But what if this brand will reside in the ecosystem of other entities?

What if your next step is not a digital marketing effort but rather a build out of a physical space? Will the use of typography, colors and logo be enough for an architect to demonstrate the user experience and essence of your brand?

Unlikely.

This is where operating system comes in. A guiding document that demonstrates expected behavior of your brand in any given circumstance. While giving the freedom for the collaborators to do what they do best and relieving you from the burden of guiding this confusing process. Your brand should be modular. Consisting of many lego-like building blocks that can be assembled into any entity while still remaining, undeniably, Lego! 

Another aspect to consider is consumer behavior and relationship with brands. People now care more for communities and so should the brands. You are no longer solving a need of just one consumer you are addressing the needs of a larger group of people. Your brand should be strong enough yet dynamic enough to withstand the changes, buying behavior and social needs.

We need to grasp the concept of brands as works in progress, akin to how your iPhone necessitates numerous updates and patches for deployment. Similarly, your brand will undergo such changes. It functions as a developing entity that is profoundly impacted not only by its creators but also by its consumers. Rather than fixating on creating something that will remain untouched for the upcoming decade, direct your attention towards constructing a foundation robust enough to endure these modifications and open to collaboration from contributors who will aid in its expansion.