Brand and product were never two things.

Every few years a company decides its brand is the problem. The logo gets redrawn and the voice gets a deck. Six months later the product looks the way it did before, with a new logo in the corner, and nobody wants to be the one to say the rebrand didn’t take.

I don’t think it could have. Brand and product get run as two departments, but the customer only ever meets one thing.

Where’s the seam supposed to be?

The usual story is that brand makes the promise and product keeps it, and somewhere between the two there’s a handoff. I’ve been doing this since 2008 and I’ve never found the handoff.

What I find is that the brand is whatever the product does on a Tuesday afternoon when nobody from marketing is watching. An error message that blames the user is the brand. So is a settings page that treats you like an adult. If a rebrand stops at the logo, the introduction changed and the conversation didn’t.

It goes the other way too. A product team can ship forty careful screens without knowing what the company is for, and the screens won’t agree with each other. Every one of them passes review, and the product still feels like it was made by a committee that never met.

What does an acquisition teach you about this?

I helped build four companies that got bought while I was still in the building: ClearScholar, Civitas Learning, MomentPath and LineLeader. I came in as the founding designer and ended up running design and product.

A new owner doesn’t get a brand and a product as two line items. They get what a customer sees after logging in, and by then it’s too late to explain which department made which part.

So what was the work?

When I say I do brand and product, people hear logo plus app. The work was never the forty screens. It was knowing which ones not to build.

Deciding what not to build is deciding what the company is for, and that can’t be done from one side. Brand doesn’t know what the product can carry. Product doesn’t know what’s been promised. Somebody has to hold both, and in most companies that somebody is a meeting.

What would you do instead?

I’d skip the rebrand and start in the product. Open every screen and ask whether it sounds like something the company would say out loud. The screens where the answer is no are the brand work, and there are usually more of them than anyone budgeted for.

Once enough screens agree with each other you’ll notice you already have a brand, and the logo gets easy because you know what it’s for. Draw it last.

This is slower for the first month. I’ve still never been able to find the seam.

Want to argue about it? Write to me. Or read the full interview.