Brand is behavior
A brand is not just your logo, website, or typeface. Brands today are viewed as people. Companies that believe—and invest in—branding must see a new philosophy: brand is behavior.
Most rebrands fail because they are just superficial makeovers—updating logos and website without changing how the company makes decisions. This approach has the shelf life of a banana. It's a Gucci tracksuit: you appear intriguing without actually being interesting.
In B2B especially, companies fall into destructive feature wars—frantically copying competitors only to be outpaced months later. This race to mediocrity isn't a winning strategy.
The only sustainable advantage is building a brand that stands for something. A brand with a clear perspective on where the world is heading. A brand that delivers experiences so irresistible that features become secondary to feeling.
Brand Strategy as an Operating System
A brand strategy functions as an operating system—a decision-making framework that establishes clear boundaries for what you will and won't do, regardless of profit potential. Like philosophy shapes human behavior through principles, brand strategy guides organizational behavior through values.
When brand truly influences product roadmaps, you invest in advancing your mission rather than chasing competitors. You develop your distinctive edge instead of diluting it.
This is why competitors who try to copy your brand ultimately fail—what they're building lacks authenticity to their purpose and promise.
A brand must answer two fundamental questions: What do you believe? How will you behave?
From Logo to Behavior
Historically, brands were simply logos signifying quality standards. This evolved during the Industrial Revolution and post-WWII era, when brand expression expanded to static media—posters, billboards, and print.
Television transformed branding by democratizing culture and enabling emotional connections at scale. Stories spread faster, aspirations grew bigger, and brands became vehicles for identity and belonging. This is when Apple's "Think Different" campaign brilliantly positioned the company within a lineage of visionaries, despite many featured innovators never having used their products. People still understood the message, and the separation between Apple and others began.
Today, people choose brands primarily as expressions of identity. A way of belonging and self-identification.
Wally Olins noted: "Fundamentally, branding is a profound manifestation of the human condition. It is about belonging."
This human need for tribal connection explains Supreme's transformation from a skating brand to a status symbol, where teenagers and middle-aged collectors experience the same anxiety-driven desire for belonging.
This is especially true in tech companies: Builders and designers do not want to use inadequate tools. They want to use Linear, Vercel, and all the hot startup names because those brands and products reflect quality, craft, and taste.
The Reality Today
The branding industry is plagued by fugazis selling oversimplified frameworks to those who don't know better. Seven-step processes and instant logo generators proliferate while actual brand building—the hard, integrated work of aligning behavior with belief—remains largely misunderstood.
Companies struggle because executives—often lacking real expertise and experience—are made the “decision-makers”. Especially in marketing, many still view branding as merely aesthetics rather than transforming a company’s mission and behavior.
Brand is not your logo.
Brand is not your illustrations.
Brand is not your typeface.
Brand is not your website.
Brand is behavior.
How you behave reflects what you believe. Your actions arise not from whims but from values, strategy, and purpose.
Building an iconic brand is not about producing a hit song. It is about the emergence, over time, of making music together. When that music pierces and becomes ingrained in culture, your brand/product becomes a leader. It is welcomed by the community you are trying to change. Customers become advocates and sing your songs to others.
Living Brands in Action
Today's brands function as living entities. People discuss them as bearers of human qualities—describing how brands make them feel seen, supported, and inspired. This explains why people defend beloved brands so vigorously online; criticizing the brand feels like an attack on personal identity.
Cash App vs. Competitors
Financial service companies like Cash App, Venmo, and Zelle offer similar core functions. What distinguishes Cash App is its distinctive behavior:
Sponsoring hip-hop events and collaborating with artists
Creating unconventional visual identity
Pioneering Bitcoin payments to athletes
Building cultural partnerships that resonate with their audience
Designing merchandise people genuinely want to wear
Cash App succeeded by having a clear point of view on money and crypto, specifically building for underserved communities lacking banking access. Their behaviors—from sponsorships to product features like early payment—consistently deliver on this promise.
Venmo took a bet on a live feed, thinking that would somehow make the product more social or enjoyable. No one likes this feature or cares for it.
Patagonia's Leadership
In the outdoor industry, Patagonia stands apart not because its products are necessarily superior to North Face or Backcountry's but because it has an unmistakable perspective on environmental issues.
Patagonia wasn't merely first to take bold stands—they've maintained remarkable consistency over decades, influencing competitors to follow their lead. Their behaviors—closing on Black Friday, opposing harmful political agendas, and eventually giving the company away to fight climate change—all stem directly from their core beliefs.
Building Today's Brands
Modern brands operate fundamentally differently from their predecessors.
They're…
Open and collaborative rather than closed and controlling
Built with networked communities rather than top-down messaging
Adapting continuously rather than every decade
Responsible for uplifting the communities they engage
Judged by decisions and actions, not just communications
Customers actively defend brands they love and publicly challenge those causing harm.
Unlike the Coca-Cola era, you can't simply advertise your way to brand dominance. The world in which brands rise or fall is now shaped by distributed cultural forces beyond any organization's control.
Great brands, like sound philosophies, don't claim outcomes—they enable them. They don't dictate paths but illuminate possibilities. They inspire rather than prescribe.
In today's marketplace of endless options and feature parity, the brands that consistently align their actions with their beliefs are the ones that endure. Like the philosopher who matches principles with practice, these brands build trust and community not through what they say, but through what they do.
Building a brand isn't creating a hit song—it's orchestrating music together with your community. The brands that master this create the most engaged audiences, shaping the future while bringing everyone along.
Brand is behavior.