https://news.greylock.com/a-brand-is-an-operating-system-8f85f49c7d17

“How do you define brand?

Heidi: At its most macro sense, brand is the narrative that you have around your company and the reason that your company exists. You should be able to tell that story and coalesce that around a singular idea of why you exist in the world.”

“What are some mistakes you see companies make when they first start going through a brand strategy process?”

“Brand is your belief system. It’s the story. It’s what you’re all about and why you exist.”

“Brands that get attention are the ones that are willing to get out there and have a point of view, and be unafraid of who they are.”

“You mentioned a phrase. You said, “Your brand is your operating system.” Can we unpack that a little bit?”

“It’s taking that narrative and the reason you exist and codifying it into a set of beliefs and decision-making framework so that everyone that works in your company and makes decisions, any kind of decisions — finance decisions, HR decisions, product decisions, marketing decisions — knows how to think.”

“What guidance would you give to a CEO who’s just starting their company in terms of the impact that a strong brand story can have on their likelihood of success?”

“In some ways, I think brand building starts from day one. Brand building is really a reflection of the way you run your company and the values that you run your company with.”

“What we’ve seen in a lot of startups is when the company starts to get a little bit bigger, they’re like, “These new people came in, they don’t understand how to make decisions our way and all of a sudden, we’re starting to see fractured decision-making.” If you don’t have your brand sorted out when you do that kind of jump, your company internally is going to get really inefficient”

“Brands are like religions?”

“Religions just keep hammering the same stuff in, over and over again. It’s a weird feeling as a founder when you keep repeating yourself and especially most founders have pretty active brains where they just want to keep moving forward. A lot of times, your company can’t move forward as quickly as you can and so you just have to get comfortable with repeating yourself.”