Brand debt.
Is brand debt a real thing? It is, and nobody’s job is to pay it down.
Some of the best restaurants I know are in sketchy strip malls, and I love them for it. I’ll walk into any of them, any night of the week. Then I pick up a sticky menu and I’m not coming back, and the owner will never know why. They were busy working out tomorrow’s order. Nobody was ever going to put “the menus” on a list.
That’s brand debt. Software has it too, and it’s harder to pay off than technical debt.
Why harder?
Technical debt has a lobby. It gets a slide in the board meeting and a line in sprint planning, and there’s an engineer whose whole job is to keep bringing it up. Brand debt has nobody. It’s the loader that spins for a minute after you type your banking password. It’s a homepage that sounds like a person, and then onboarding that reads like government paperwork.
Neither one will ever beat a feature in a prioritization meeting. The backlog isn’t getting any smaller, so they wait, and the bill grows. You find out what you owe six months in, when you still can’t explain what you do. Or on your third rebrand, because the first two didn’t stick.
Who’s supposed to own it?
The marketing site makes the promise and the product is the proof. The person who wrote the promise usually isn’t in the room when the proof gets built.
One of our clients fixed that in the least glamorous way I’ve seen. Their SVP of marketing sits in every design review. Every one. They’re a real partner in that room, because they know what’s up on the screen is the brand, moving.
How do I know I have it?
Confusion and churn are the late signals. There’s an earlier one, and it’s cheap. Hand your mom the product. Or your partner. Mine teaches third grade. You’re too close to it, and they won’t miss what you’ve stopped seeing.
I also check the 404 page. Nobody’s forced to care about it, so it tells you who was paying attention. If somebody thought about that page, imagine what they did with onboarding.
Where would you start?
I’d stop bolting brand on at the end and build it in, which mostly means putting it where engineers already look. My first payment would be a design system that lives in the codebase, built by the brand people and the engineers at the same table.
Then I’d go find the sticky menu. Every product has one. Everybody on the team has touched it, and nobody owns it.
Got a sticky menu? Write to me.
What came before? Brand and product were never two things