Nobody Cares About Your Brand

I don’t mean brand in the sense of visual identity—a good logo, wordmark, or tagline is a great idea. I mean brand in the modern sense—a woolly definition that’s come to be commonplace over the past 10 years or so.

The word brand has come to allude to the company or to stand for the entire personality of a corporation or product . It is seen as the “feeling” of interacting with products and services, and inevitably the core interactions of those products.

The problem with this approach, developed for over a decade by multinational branding corporations and advertising agencies, is that we already have a discipline for this: UX. By crafting a product to adhere to a brand (in the modern sense of the word), we defer control of the UX to the marketing and branding teams, not the UX professionals.

I’m not talking either about the megabrands with a billion customers; Apple, Google, Coca-Cola, Microsoft, Nike, and so on are so big and their brands so powerful that it does and should make a difference when it comes to how their products are designed.

What about your brand, with a few thousand or tens of thousands of customers, or your small company, product, or newly launched start-up? Nobody cares. Harsh, but true. None of your users care about your brand. They care about what your product or service lets them do. They care about how your product improves their lives and enhances their productivity, and so on.

The experience of your product is your brand and it shouldn’t be designed by a marketing team, but by UX people. This is also your competitive advantage against the big, lumbering dinosaurs that have to adhere rigidly to brand guides.

Don’t let the brand guide ruin your product with:

• Unreadable brand typefaces: Just use the native system font stack.
• Branded splash screens: Just show me the damn app.
• Build-your-own nightmarish UI controls: Oh, the things I’ve seen…
• Awful, unreadable contrast ratios : Don’t stick to the brand palette if it doesn’t work in your product.
• Unnecessarily quirky copy: The wacky humor on the side of a smoothie bottle—just get to the point!

A brand can help to enforce consistency, but, if you’re a decent designer, you shouldn’t need a brand guide to tell you how to build a consistent UI. Brands are bullshit, so focus on the UX and the experience becomes the brand.

Learning points

• Nobody cares about your brand, only about what your product lets them do
• A good UX is better than a good brand
• Fight for the user, not the brand guide