Joy Howard

A brand is the culture of your product. There is the internal culture of your firm, which your brand should shape (how you do things, the kind of products/experiences you develop), and the external culture (the role your product plays in the world and how it shapes/influences culture).

You have to understand the business/market you’re in. You can not limit your understanding to only your own brand because you’re usually working on something that already has a product and audience.

You have to be in tune with what’s happening culturally and figure out where things will go next so you can champion an ideology that will help people with their identity project in this time of cultural disruption.

Your strategy should determine the way you measure brand success. Revenue is always the first thing people think about, but there can be more. Example: Lyft vs. Uber -> steal shares, reduce price elasticity.

You want a brand to be very upstream of everything. You must be very deliberate in building it. Your brand should shape your culture and policy, from customer service to retail. Brand sits right before the commercial and product side of the organization so that everyone “lives the brand”.

The importance of a distinct, deliberately constructed brand is a constant regardless of verticals (CPG, apps, retail, etc.) unless you want to be in the business of commodities.

You should always see more efficiency in your CAC and down-funnel metrics as a result of what you’re doing with brand.

You can have commercial success without a strong brand, but it will be fleeting. The law of competition means that even if you create a great technology, someone is going to see it, create an alternative to it, and someone is going to fund that alternative. It can evaporate very quickly.