One Brand, many Silos (1/4)

I published this article on Medium too.

Imagine you’re a UX designer sitting in a product team meeting, showing to your colleagues the latest screen designs you created, featuring design system components designed by your predecessor and that logo commissioned five years ago to an external designer. You last had a look at the Brand Guidelines document six months ago to pick an accent color. Meanwhile, somewhere in another building (or country), your marketing colleague is crafting brand messages you’ll never see, let alone influence. Does this sound familiar?

I personally find this disconnect intriguing. My field, UX is by definition tasked with creating positive experiences of a human across time with the company’s output, usually a product. But UX designers are only responsible for a tiny part of this. The other part is handled by the marketing (hello newsletters!), call centers, teams behind all the different touchpoints, but also business analysts (think of misleading “sales” tactics that cause lack of trust) and other decision makers.

It seems to me that we are not fully aware that we are all together shaping one unified Brand Experience.

We’re too busy with the nitty gritty details of our own pursuits, barely managing to connect even within our immediate teams. The Brand, the connective glue of our work, becomes a bunch of colors and typefaces we all refer to, but we never discuss or draw inspiration from. I believe that it’s not just our design output that suffers from our segregation, but we ourselves who bear the greatest loss.

By working in isolation, we’re missing the opportunity to work with the Muse — to let the very Brand we’re creating become a beam of daily inspiration and creativity.

I explored this divide in my last lecture at Webinale last spring. I focused specifically on how Product and Marketing (and in a broader sense, everyone involved on the creation of the touch points) must talk more about the Brand Experience and why. I also gave examples from design history and discussed a more hands-on approach. As it would become a long essay, I’m breaking it down into shorter pieces.

Happy to continue the discussion — how do you keep a unified sense of Brand across your teams and in your daily work?

[…to be continued]