Brand designers (like me) need to get in line
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I should start by acknowledging that I build brands for a living. I’m a huge proponent of both the trackable and intangible power of a well-positioned and well-crafted brand on the back of compelling strategy. This is a branding post, but the kind of branding post that puts branding at the back of the line, at least at first. All brands are in service of business. And sometimes that means they need to take a step back and let resources go to other initiatives.

Brand development work takes many forms - strategy, design, language, imagination, analysis, all on behalf of the marketers who need help breathing life into something massively important to the future of their business. It’s so important, and so complicated, and so integral, and so compelling to focus on for clients and agencies alike (shiny squirrels). When it’s done well, it has major impact.

But it’s totally premature in the early days, especially for B2B, and extra-especially in B2B digital tech. Like, SaaS, digital tools, all the AI maniacal must-haves. There is one giant precursor to brand that often gets sidelined for brand work, and that’s the product itself. The product has to come first, and it has to be dialed in before brand can have a chance to matter. If you stop here, you’ve already got the takeaway: product first, brand later. Get your house in order, and build a product worth branding.

I’m finding that two ideas are surfacing as I write this. The first is this ^ - Product first, always. The second idea wades into how and why product and brand design teams are often misaligned. I’m going to let them both coexist in this post, because I think they’ll both get your gears turning, and will give you a few things to examine within your own company that are worth some focused consideration.

Theme 1: Product first, always

So before I get into what it looks like for product and brand to play along nicely (properly) together, let’s get clear on the most important idea here - your product has to be dialed in before brand design enters the building. This is true especially for startups, but also for established and even massive companies trying to adapt in increasingly fast-changing business and tech climates.

For startups, we’ve seen this a hundred times: a product idea shows some potential in theory, and a company is born. Maybe even funded. The product team is working on bringing it to life, marketing and senior leadership are pursuing market fit and then validation, investor meetings abound. And then things start to drag. Adoption is slow, interest is hard to capture, the problem you wanted to solve is not being solved particularly well, or well enough, to acquire the momentum you need to fund your next push. And this is where the product problem gets confused with a marketing or branding problem. Or at least, marketing and branding are tasked with marketing or branding a way out of the slow down. We get this call often, and although the client team probably doesn’t see that they’re in a product-drag situation, it becomes clear to us pretty quickly.

This is the wrong time for brand building. Our work requires a strong product foundation in order to have the chance to succeed. Real benefits, features that add value, not just extra clickability, real problems solved or value created by your product - those things give us legs to stand on with messaging strategy, creative, campaign execution, digital experiences, design and visual identity. We can do the best creative work of our lives (on the surface) for a weak product, and the results will be weak. Branding never made a bad product successful. Not really, not for long. The cracks in the product and product experience always show through, and that disappointment means lost customers and a major reputational hit.

For big companies that have been profitable for decades with the product or products that built their business, the same risk is lurking. These days, whatever you sold 2 years ago is no longer competitive. Your product development needs to be the primary focus of your business. Ad campaigns on old-school media cycles do not make up for stagnant product experiences. Brand refreshes to signal evolution, when the product hasn’t also evolved, are disingenuous and distracting, especially internally.

You know when that brand refresh should happen? When there’s been a major forward stride in the way your products solve the problems of your customers. That’s when compounding momentum can be put to work across product and brand disciplines. That’s where the magic happens, and the magic is amplified when product and brand design play in the same sandbox. That takes me to my second line of thinking here - the potential for product and brand collaboration to drive impressive and unexpected growth for a company’s bottom line.

Theme 2: Merging product and brand

Let’s start this off with my take on how I, as a brand designer, think about product. “Product” is the thing you sell. In B2B, it might be a digital tool (software), it could be a customized specialized consulting service, it could be hardware in the field. In clean tech, where many of our clients compete, it’s often a hybrid of real-world physical things with complex digital interfaces. But these are all the ways in which product people, product designers, marketers and founders talk about what they make. The ‘thing’.

Their customers, however, are buying a solution to a problem. They’re buying a journey from A to B, with a desired future state, and an experience along the way that’ll either lead to more business, or confirm the end of the relationship. The experience of using your product - whatever ‘use’ means, and whatever your product ‘is’ - is the core of your brand, and it it is the core of your potential as a business.

If we agree that product experience is the core, then we should also agree that inherently, this suggests that there are layers and spheres of branding to be managed around and on top of that core experience. Usually this is where marketing leaders take ownership, and brand designers are brought in. It’s great to get hired at this stage, especially when the product is strong - we can do impactful work, we can move the needle, we can help you to own the space where you compete. But unless we’re given access to the product design itself, there will be a structural disconnect between the core and everything that follows.

Ideally, your brand agency, or in-house marketing team if that’s your jam, will have the opportunity to collaborate with the product team. In digital products especially, there are many direct overlaps in use of color, typography, visual density, pacing, animation, messaging - all things that should feel congruous to customers across marketing efforts and product experience, but are often silo’d and awkwardly incongruous.

For physical products as well, there are designed and branded experiences all across the customer journey, which is often loopy and multi-directional, rather than linear. From the first ad to the 20th, to the website then the packaging, the shipping duration, through to the first time they reach out and touch whatever it is you make. This is either one orchestrated overall experience, or it’s a mashup of disparate and misaligned experiences - and your customers can tell the difference.

Let’s get together

The obvious goal here is to align around a cohesive and 360º brand experience that’s intentional and consistently crafted at every experiential touchpoint. Assuming the product is strong, and solves a real problem for real customers with real money to spend, brand is now critically important to capturing and then protecting competitive advantage.

In the most competitive markets, where the most money can be made, everyone has a product that solves the customer problem. Maybe in slightly different ways, or through slightly different methods, but if five companies can all get a customer to that desired future state, and can demonstrate ROI or real value in the outcomes, then brand, and really brand experience, become the only differentiator you’re competing on. If your brand team and your product team are aligned and collaborating, your overall brand experience will be maximized and pristine, and if you can show that alignment in sales conversations, you’re more likely to win. This is one of the most tangible intangibles to branding and brand design. When all other comparative business realities are equal, brand becomes the differentiator, and often the deciding factor in a competitive sale.

So, let’s all agree that product design and brand design (and sales! But that’s another post…) should be working closely together to craft an overall brand experience that’s undeniably superior to competitors with similar solutions. Right? Easy to agree? But we rarely see it. Hardly ever. The walls are up.

Maybe there’s a perceived wall from our side because we operate in the brand design space, and we haven’t pushed this cross-pollination advice on our tech clients in a convincing-enough way. We tend to have client counterparts who sit in marketing, and we regularly observe that they are not given the authority to merge the design teams they manage with the product design teams that are responsible for the thing they’re trying to market. The walls are often institutional, even in startups - legacy silos transferred mindlessly from the big companies where they built their careers before going out on their own.

Why do these walls exist?

Well, there isn’t always a wall up. The brands out in front of the pack have probably allowed these two creative disciplines to overlap and multiply each other’s impact already. But for most companies, from what we’ve seen - from Fortune 100’s to startups in their first 100 days - the walls are up, and the opportunity is being missed. Here are a few reasons why:

The founder is a product designer
They deeply understand the product, and probably created it themselves. They don’t understand branding or marketing, however. Different beasts, different experts. They hire a marketing leader to just show them the results in the marketplace, and a sales leader to just sell the awesome thing they made. In this scenario, the product design may be woefully un-designed, maybe without a creative team in the mix at all. It’s function-first, function-only, even. The cross-discipline thinking just isn’t present, and the founder is the boss. This is a hard wall to breach, unless you can show them that their product is less useful (less sellable) because its design is poor. This is probably a situation where a product design leader is needed first, before cross-pollination is even worth considering, to get the product up to fully competitive.

Departmental Divide
Some companies are just set up with big walls between big departments. Or big walls between little startup departments, because leaders think more departments means a more impressive structure. We’ve seen companies with one product designer, and one in-house designer, and those two people either can’t or don’t want to play together. That’s for them, this is for us, and we just don’t do that here. This one is so strange, but so common.

Ego
Designers on the product side know UX so much better than the brand designers. And brand designers could fix so many things that the product designers are doing wrong. Everybody knows better. Taking a wall down just to allow egos to collide is not good for business. Know your people, hire for a collaborative mindset, and make cross-discipline collaboration a core pillar in your culture. Leaders need to push for it, but the teams (and outside agencies) need to put egos and creative ownership aside to give you the chance at achieving your best results across product and brand.

Budget silos
It could be as simple as budget and cost center silos. Product has its own budget, and marketing has its own budget. Funding collaborative work, when you’re not sure how the collaboration will shake out, is complicated and feels like giving up some control over the way you spend your departmental money. How can a marketing director get budget approval on creative work on the product team’s deliverables, when they have their own budget that’s supposed to cover product design work streams? Budgets are protected and kept firmly under departmental structures because it’s easier and cleaner. But this just puts more bricks in that wall, and keeps the best customer experience results stifled.

So what do we do?

There isn’t any brilliance needed here. All of the solutions are clear, if your eyes are open to the problems existing in the first place. In order to set a path towards profitability, the product needs to solve a real problem. Once it’s cleared that milestone, brand needs to take it a full head and shoulders above your competitors in order to capture a dominant position in a crowded marketplace. The best way to enable the brand and marketing leaders to do great work with the thing you’re selling is to insist on cross-pollination and collaboration between your product and design teams. Easier said than done, but this is the only path forward if you’re not content sitting in the middle of the pack.