Building your brand as an operating system

The worlds of brand design and technology are moving closer to each other. Now we need a shared language to enable the two worlds to work and play together.

For years, they spoke past each other. Interaction designers had to figure out the user experience of websites from brand bibles created for print layouts.

Wired editor Chris Anderson freaked out advertising audiences when he told them that a brand is only what Google search says it is.

Now the centre of gravity has shifted. Consultancies swallow design firms because they need their expertise on the digital side. The world’s most valuable brands are primarily digital: they manifest through screens and connected services.

Digital channels took the majority of the world’s ad spend since 2018; McKinsey estimated that most customer services had digitised by 2020.

If you’re designing a brand today, you’re designing a digital entity.

You’re also designing a shared entity. Brands today aren’t the work of lone geniuses. They are intentional (and unintentional) collaborations between marketers, product people, partners and customers.

To adapt to the changing context, brands should function more like iterative works in progress that need updating than finished works of art that need guarding. Terms like brand bibles and pyramids sound immoveable when brands are always under construction. It’s time to update the model.

Luckily, there’s already a model for an underlying code that makes everything work in a digital world: an operating system.

The analogy comes from our company’s tech team. Nike is R/GA’s founding client. Years ago, the team spoke about Nike’s operating system: common elements that enabled us to design and build new features and new content for Nike’s sites and apps more easily.

When you broaden the analogy, it works for brand building. We see it as a new model for designing brands in the digital world, and introduced it on stage at last month’s Cannes Lions.

In computing, an OS is the core program that serves as the interface between the platform and the user. It guides the internal operations, like the processes and software.

It enables applications such as programs and apps to build on it. And it enables those applications to work together.

We can switch out the word platform and think of a brand as the interface between a business and its users. The core program is the brand definition, the foundational design elements, and the basic technology underpinning everything.

The internal operations are the company decisions. The applications are all the things built on it: products and services, membership and experiences, communications.

Now apply the analogy to the job of designing brands.

The OS should guide all functions. It needs to inspire innovation, experience and what the company does. This requires more than a lofty purpose: it needs a crisp definition of the brand’s role in the world, and how it helps people.

Nike’s mission to bring inspiration and innovation to every athlete in the world (and if you have a body, you’re an athlete) powers the brand. It’s natural to build services like Nike Running Club, and Nike Sync, which adapts training programs to women’s menstrual cycles, on this foundation.

Brand OS assumes that the brand manifests in interfaces. The first use case is the experience: the task complete screen before the TV screen. Telcos are a good example. O2 has 24 million subscribers. Users typically look at their phone 96 times a day. That’s 840 billion customer interactions a year before any marketing.

Brand OS is an open system that allows others to build applications on it. That’s why at R/GA we see design and tech stacks as foundational elements: they are building blocks for employees, partners, agencies and customers to work with.

That will be more critical where DAOs and autonomous AI will deliver brand expressions on your company’s behalf. Borrowing another term from technology, the goal is Permissionless Innovation. It should be possible to build a new piece of the brand without top-to-top meetings.

Guardrails are there to encourage you to build in the right way, not to restrict who can do what. This enables brand owners to achieve scale. Android serves three billion users, because so many people can build for the brand.

Finally, operating system assumes that brands will iterate and update over time. Consultants’ charts show big digitised brands supporting entire service ecosystems, but in reality, none are fully formed at birth.

iTunes launched in 2001, months before the iPod. Apple Health launched in 2014, shortly before the debut of Apple watch. An ecosystem incorporates more elements as technology changes. That’s why a brand model needs to be modular, rather than a rigid frame. 

Technology operating systems are both drivers of the economy and works in progress. So are brands. As the frontiers for brand building become more collaborative, and span more surfaces, the structure needs to be less of a rule book and more of a tool kit.

Treating brands like operating systems will help their builders and, ultimately, their users.

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Tom Morton is global chief strategy officer, RGA and Tiff Rolfe is chair and global chief creative officer, RGA.