A Brand is an Operating System
It’s a startup’s beliefs, values — and very reason to exist
The term “brand” is often misunderstood in business. Many attach it to your company aesthetic — logos, fonts, colors, and website design. But thoughtful and strategic brand represents so much more. Few people in the world understand building and maintaining brands better than Heidi Hackemer, the founder of Wolf & Wilhelmine — a New York-based brand strategy shop that has worked with clients ranging from small startups to the White House to iconic companies like Google and Nike.
In our latest Greymatter podcast, Marketing Partner Elisa Schreiber sits down with Heidi to discuss how to empower your team to be more creative, define a brand strategy, and why external brand and internal culture are interrelated.
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Below are a few of our favorite excerpts from their conversation. The transcript has been edited for brevity.
How do you define brand?
Heidi: At its most macro sense, brand is the narrative that you have around your company and the reason that your company exists. You should be able to tell that story and coalesce that around a singular idea of why you exist in the world.
What are some mistakes you see companies make when they first start going through a brand strategy process?
Heidi: The most common mistake I see, especially in the tech and startup industry, is mistaking a brand identity — a logo — for a brand. Brand is your belief system. It’s the story. It’s what you’re all about and why you exist. A lot of times people skip ahead to the logo. Brands that get attention are the ones that are willing to get out there and have a point of view, and be unafraid of who they are. In this landscape, it’s so crowded and it’s so crazy. If you’re not willing to get out there and be like, “This is who we are, this is why we exist, and this is why we do the things we do,” you’re going to get ignored.
You mentioned a phrase. You said, “Your brand is your operating system.” Can we unpack that a little bit?
Heidi: What I mean by brand as an operating system is that, well, we’ve been talking about the brand as a narrative, it’s the reason you exist. It’s taking that narrative and the reason you exist and codifying it into a set of beliefs and decision-making framework so that everyone that works in your company and makes decisions, any kind of decisions — finance decisions, HR decisions, product decisions, marketing decisions — knows how to think. You know how to make a decision in the Hulu way or the Airbnb way or the Nike way.
It’s almost like getting it in people’s bones, right? When I worked for Google, we called it “Google-y.” When we working especially with the Creative Lab and Andy Berndt over there, it was, “Is this Google-y or not?” It was pretty extreme. I don’t know if I could have ever written out what is “Google-y,” but when you worked on the brand for awhile, you really understood in your bones whether that was a Google thing to do or it wasn’t a Google thing to do. That’s what I think this is about.
What guidance would you give to a CEO who’s just starting their company in terms of the impact that a strong brand story can have on their likelihood of success?
Heidi: In some ways, I think brand building starts from day one. Brand building is really a reflection of the way you run your company and the values that you run your company with. The faster you can understand that as a CEO, I think there’s a lot less pain for you down the line.
What we’ve seen in a lot of startups is when the company starts to get a little bit bigger, they’re like, “These new people came in, they don’t understand how to make decisions our way and all of a sudden, we’re starting to see fractured decision-making.” If you don’t have your brand sorted out when you do that kind of jump, your company internally is going to get really inefficient. Not only is it going to get inefficient, you’re going to start to have factions. Tribes will develop inside of a company. When there’s actually the values-based decision-making framework, politics are always going to exist, but they tend to get a little less powerful when you have that framework in place.
Brands are like religions?
Heidi: It’s weird, but there is a theory of brands that brands are like religions. As someone who is leading a brand, you need to think about the way that religions are led. Religions just keep hammering the same stuff in, over and over again. It’s a weird feeling as a founder when you keep repeating yourself and especially most founders have pretty active brains where they just want to keep moving forward. A lot of times, your company can’t move forward as quickly as you can and so you just have to get comfortable with repeating yourself.
