Brand is Product and Product is Brand
In many companies, brand and marketing are often one department; as such, they are often spoken about in the same breath. For a long time, I also thought of brand only in conjunction with marketing. If I’m being honest, during the early stages of my product career, brand was often an afterthought. Even as I progressed in my career, I still never really saw brand and marketing as integral to product. To me and many in product development, Brand/Marketing folks were the ones who did the fancy things, ate the expensive dinners, spent the company’s money on frivolous things while the rest of us were left to grind…I promise I’m no longer bitter 😂
Anyway, for most of my life, the meaning of brand often wavered between something elusive and something more along the lines of design. Interestingly, when asked to list great brands, like most people, I can easily rattle off a long list of companies with strong brands. Brand has always felt both familiar and foreign to me. It wasn’t until I became a founder that I appreciated the importance of Brand.
As I embarked on my entrepreneurship journey, I like most founders dove right into building the product without considering much else. Thankfully, I gained some advice along the way and was recommended a fantastic book on brand building. Reading this book forced me to take a step back and clarify what I want the companies I’m building to stand for going forward.
If you are thinking of becoming an entrepreneur, I highly recommend you take the time to establish what your company’s brand is first and then build your business based on that.
What is Brand?
To start, I highly recommend you check out Forging an Iron Clad Brand by Lindsay Pedersen. From my perspective, it is the best book on Brand Building thus far. The best definition of Brand is denoted in the book and attributed to Don Knauss, a former CEO of Clorox:
Brand is the promise of performance. Any transaction between two parties requires a promise of performance. To sustain your business over time, you’ve got to, first, be very focused on defining your promise of performance and, second, be diligent about delivering consistently. If you can’t do these two things, you are not a sustainable business.”
Don Knauss – former CEO of Clorox & former Head of North American Operations for Coca Cola
Essentially, Brand is the value your company brings that gives it the right to exist. Lindsay Pedersen then goes on to describe various attributes that constitute a Brand. According to Pedersen,
- Brand is what you stand for: Brand is the place you occupy in the mind of your users and customers. It is what you mean to your customers. For your customer to understand the value of your company, your brand has to be solid, strong, and clear. There should be no ambiguities. Everything your business does should reinforce that meaning and solidify your value in the customer’s mind.
- Brand is a relationship: It is the relationship between you and your customer. A relationship is give-and-take. Businesses can no longer see customers as just an avenue to hawk their goods. As a business, you should be providing more than your product to your customers. It is important to understand your customers, their values, the job your product or service does for them. Today, a customer has so many other choices that companies have to work hard to foster brand loyalty. Even when you have your customer’s loyalty, you must work harder to keep it. Your company should occupy a distinct position in your customer’s mind in the context of alternative options.
- Brand is your promise and fulfillment of that promise: Any transaction between two parties requires a promise of performance. To sustain a business over time, you must define your promise of performance and be diligent about delivering consistently.
- Brand serves a filter: It is a filter for how customers perceive your business. This shapes how they see and believe you. Brand ties a business to something familiar in the customer’s mind, which makes it easier for the customer to engage with your business. As a filter, your brand helps with internal decision making and prioritization efforts.
- Brand strategy is the deliberate articulation of your business’ meaning: It distills the story of your business. Brand Strategy is a tool that guides the choices you make and the priorities you set to reinforce what you mean in your customer’s mind. A brand strategy that creates value is one that meets the following criteria:
- Big: Your brand positioning is the space you occupy in your customer’s head. You want to make sure it’s a big space. Your business must provide a big benefit that brings your customer closer to the lives they want to live. When your benefit is big, your customer’s willingness to pay is also big, thus allowing you to incur some nice margins. This elevates your pricing power.
- Narrow: Your brand must be big enough to matter, and narrow enough to own. Be narrow enough that you alone can own your position. Narrowing allows you to differentiate and double down on what makes you loved by your target customers.
- Asymmetrical: Your business must be significantly better than the customer’s other options. Your differentiator must be phenomenal and your strengths must grow in such a manner that you can dominate your given market.
- Empathetic: Your brand must understand what your customer’s life was before, during, and after encounter with your business. You must always be curious about the problem your brand solves for your customers.
- Optimally Distinct: Your brand must feel familiar yet new and refreshing. It is important to be new enough but not too different that customers can’t relate or understand the value.
- Functional and Emotional: Functional benefits bring credibility and a foot in the door while Emotional benefits lead to competitive differentiation and a more attractive financials.
- Sharp-edged: You must choose what falls inside and outside your brand to sharpen the edge. Sometimes, Simplicity is the best way to sharpen the edges in that it allows you to subtract the obvious and add the meaningful.
- Brand fuels differentiation: In an undifferentiated category, where your products are the same as your competitors, your brand becomes the ultimate differentiator.
- Brand is your North Star: This guides every decision you and your team makes. Every decision made and resources available should reinforce your brand promise. Having a clear North Star aligns your entire company around a single brand strategy making it easier to grow in a gratifying manner.
Brand is the crystallization of the value your business delivers to your customers.
What does this mean for Product teams?
Brand is Product and Product is Brand. It’s time to stop thinking of Brand as this disparate and obscure entity. Brand is everyone’s job. Hopefully, you work at a place with a clearly articulated brand. Your company’s brand should not only be codified via your Creatives and Brand Style Guidelines.
As a product team, your responsibility is to deliver the right solution to your customers. Brand is integral to the delivery of that solution. The products you build should incorporate brand from inception through delivery.
Your company’s brand should serve as a North Star and should be a critical input into product prioritization and decision-making frameworks. In fact, incorporating brand not only makes for clearer decisions but is also a great way to bring stakeholders along.
Creating value is essential
The value you bring your customer translates to value for the rest of your company’s stakeholders. Brand is the articulation of that value and is a force multiplier. If you’re starting out as an entrepreneur, work on your brand first and then build your company accordingly. Slapping on brand as an advertising tactic is going to have detrimental effects to your longevity as a business as your customers will see right through the inconsistencies. Having an iron clad brand deepens the love between your company and your customers and users. Brand is the only thing that your company alone can provide to your customers who need that thing. It is the value you provide and the story you tell, with your customer as the hero of the story. Brand makes for value-creating companies, more fearless leadership, more inspired employees, and more delighted customers.
Thanks for reading. I hope you enjoyed the article and found it useful for you on your journey. As for what I’m working on, I’m building a couple of companies:
- Mink: A place for creatives to do business efficiently. Becoming your own brand is tough. From proposals to contracts to invoicing and project planning — it’s a lot. So we made it easy with our all-in-one document. Get work, track work, and get paid all in the Mink Doc. Check it out. No sign-up required – https://m.ink
- Pickytarian: Pickytarian creates dinnerware products to help you spend more time together and less time on cleanup. Our tableware products are beautifully-designed, elegant, sturdy, and compostable.
If I can be helpful to you, don’t hesitate to connect with me on here or via LinkedIn or Twitter
