Product Branding, Who Cares?
Let's be honest: your customers don't care about the branding of your product. But product branding isn't for your customers; it's for you and your business. While customers may not consciously obsess over your branding and brand identity, your company absolutely should. Branding ties your product to something bigger—the reason your products stand out in a crowded market. Without it, your great product won't contribute to the big, audacious, and hopefulyl transformative mission your company is on.
Too often, I observe product teams dismissing product branding as something unnecessary or secondary. "Users don't really care about the logo," is the usual statement I hear. But that's missing the point. Branding is about the bigger picture—it's what makes your product recognizable, trustworthy, and memorable. And it's not just about aesthetics or logos. It's about ensuring that when your product delivers value, your company's brand gets the credit it deserves.
It comes down to one question: Is your company recognized for the value it creates through its products?
Branding is about recognizability first, and enhancing this recognizability through a consistent branding. It originally comes from the practice of farmers marking (or branding) their cattle to ensure their high-quality (and premium priced) life stock is not confused with the subpar product of the neighbouring farmer.
In the end, the true benefit of branding comes from consistent application of the recognizable branding across mall products.. Everyone knows that learning comes from repetition. And you want your customers experience and associate the value you create for them with your brand repeatedly.
Building Your Monopoly: the True Purpose of Branding
Imagine you have no competition. You are the only company meeting the needs of your customers with your unique product or service. Picture the unlimited growth and profitability of your employer, the progress of your career, your bonuses, and your personal fulfilment coming along with this. Product branding is a key stepping stone to achieving this. Think of branding as creating a monopoly in the minds of your customers. Once you have this monopoly, the customer lifetime value increases drastically.
Why do customers buy Coca-Cola instead of Pepsi? Why are you driving a BMW and not an Audi? Same value, but different brands that have managed to create a monopoly in the minds of their customers. You might be thinking, "These are not monopolies!" But they actually are, because customers aren't just choosing Coca-Cola over Pepsi; they're buying Coca-Cola over a store-brand cola at half the price. Yes, Coca-Cola invests vast resources into branding and marketing, but in the end, they are considered one of the most valuable companies in the world despite only selling flavoured sugar water. This is the power of branding.
The psychology behind it is this: human beings are careful and fearful by nature. This trait helped our ancestors survive in hunter-gatherer times because we avoided dangers and the unknown. The unknown means risk, and risk needs to be avoided. This is where successful branding comes in. It makes your company known through recognizable and consistent marking of your products. It reduces risk, creates familiarity and trust, and fosters loyalty. In the best case, you even create brand promoters who evangelize for you and refer your products. Through referrals and loyalty, your company leverages another fundamental human driver—the need to belong to a tribe.
This is how product-led growth works.
If you did not unlock monopoly-mode yet with your products, you need to think about differentiation, because brand similarity means brand death. And brand death means - in most cases - business death. In a world of margin pressure, fast product lifecycles, and copy-paste products from the Far East, a company can't really survive anymore without providing the emotional benefits of good branding.
Bridging the Disconnect Between Branders and Product Teams
When we talk about implementing product branding practices successfully in organizations, there are a few caveats. I've observed that branding and product development often don't align because there's a philosophical and structural gap between branders and product delivery people. Branders spend considerable time shaping a brand's identity, ensuring it's memorable, recognizable, and resonates with the audience. On the other side, product delivery teams—engineers, product managers, and designers—can sometimes see it as a minor detail, something to be minimized in favor of functionality or profit margin.
The reality is this: your product is the most important touchpoint of your brand. If your product doesn't fulfill the promises that branding makes, everything else—from marketing to design—falls flat. If you realize the product itself is the living expression of your brand, you also need to prioritize connecting marketing, branding, and product to provide one consistent, recognizable, and differentiating brand experience.
The Role of CI/CD Projects
I've seen vast amounts of resources and time spent on branding and corporate identity projects. Marketers and branders work hard to create corporate design guidelines that define how a brand should look and feel. These manuals are valuable tools, helping ensure consistency across all touch points. But here's the challenge: product delivery teams are often left out of this process. This creates a gap between the people driving the brand conceptually and the product people who actually have the biggest leverage in driving the brand impact in reality.
For a brand to truly resonate, the product must embody the values set forth by marketing. It's not enough to follow design rules or apply logos correctly—the product itself has to fulfill the promises that your brand makes. This collaboration between marketing and product development shouldn't be a last-minute fix but a key part of company strategy and product development processes from the start.
3 Truths for Good Branding
Let's break down three fundamental truths that can help businesses align branding and product development more effectively:
Your brand identity and product are inseparable. Branding isn't a separate task to check off once the product is done. The product is your brand. It's the most tangible and impactful representation of what your company stands for. Ensuring that branding is fully integrated into product development is essential for delivering on the promises your brand makes.
Product branding isn't just about customer attention—it's about long-term recognition. While customers may not always consciously notice your logo, branding makes your product recognizable. It's the reason customers remember, come back, and even recommend you. Ultimately, branding ensures your business benefits from the value your product creates.
Product branding is more than the logo. While the logo is essential, it's just one part of successful product branding. A cohesive brand identity also relies on graphics, colors, materials, shapes, and usability patterns. Together, these elements create a consistent and recognizable design language that enhances your product's appeal and makes it instantly identifiable to customers.
Who's Responsible for Your Brand?
In many companies, the responsibility for the brand falls largely on marketing or brand management teams. But it's just as important that product teams understand their role in bringing the brand to life because the product is where your brand is shaped in the minds of the customer. By working together more closely, the marketing, brand, and product teams can ensure that your product not only fulfills the brand promise but elevates it, making the products more memorable and impactful in the long term.
In a Nutshell
Branding your products is never optional. It's about ensuring your product is recognized for the value it delivers. When branding is done right, it connects your product's success with your company, turning customer loyalty into brand loyalty. To unlock the power of the brand, build bridges between branders and product delivery teams and ensure that your products are branded in a recognisable and consistent across all your products. Ideally, you have mutliple product branding elements, like shapes or colors, not only the logo.
