At our CEO summit in Vail last month, we talked a lot about building direct traffic and the importance of brand within that. I’ve been thinking a lot about this and how product is such a central element to our brand strategy. 

In some ways your brand is your logo, your look and feel. It’s your personality, how recognisable it is. One CEO in Vail told me they are trying to wean off search and social, and were surprised to find that the majority of traffic coming through search is actually people searching for their brand. 

It seems it’s easier to type the name in Google than the url box. Now that’s brand. (It’s also fascinating how consumer habits that are totally out of our control drive so much of the behaviour around our actual products, but that’s a whole other post). 

Your brand is what differentiates you from others. Yes, content too, but brand is that first look. The same content can be packaged in different ways that give the user a totally different brand experience. How easy it is to find what they are looking for? Ease of navigation and content packaging are vitally important to the overall brand experience. 

As Riske Betten, B2C/product director at Mediahuis Netherlands, told us at a recent summit: Your brand is whatever consumers experience it as.

I would add engagement to that. How does your audience engage with your brand and content? Is it purely a lean-back experience? Or do we actually want people to lean forward and interact? If the latter, how? What is the feedback loop? 

We need to think about these experiences on and off platform. Der Speigel spent a long time thinking about how they could foster civil online debate on their own platforms. And we should think about brand off platform such as social media: What is being placed around our content? Are the comments reflective of what we want our community to look like? How can we shape that to protect our brands? 

Brand is habit, as I have talked about before. 

And for all of this, you need consistency. You need to be clear on your brand personality, on your style, and have every member of your teams living and breathing it. Because if you aren’t clear, how can your consumers be? 

Who leads brand at your organisation? Design, messaging, and experience sit with — or adjacent to — product. So while brand as a specific function may not be a written product job, it should be high on everyone’s list of considerations for every iteration and new product and feature. 

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