The Brand Age isn't what you think

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I'm a big fan of Paul Graham's essays. His most recent essay, The Brand Age, was of particular interest to me. It covers the role of brand and marketing through the lens of the wristwatch category. It's well worth a read if you're a marketer.

The crux of the article is that over time, good product design converges on an optimal solution, and at that point brand becomes the primary way to differentiate a product. As Graham puts it:

That likely sounds familiar. Like many others, I've been observing the commoditization of software and the increasingly important role that brand and narrative plays in differentiation.

But there are a couple of points in Graham's essay that diverge from my thinking, and they have been nagging at me.

Branding vs design

Firstly, he describes the shift from design-led differentiation to brand-led differentiation as something close to a natural law. Technology makes the substantive differences between products disappear, and brand fills the vacuum. He frames this as an inevitability, and he frames it in negative terms. In his words:

He argues that branding is structurally opposed to good design, because good design converges on right answers while branding must diverge to be distinctive.

On this point, I think good marketing and powerful branding adds more colour and life to a category. I won't pretend marketing is art, but it can make us feel certain things and connect us to products in a way that design alone can't. I'm not just talking about consumer or B2C products either. It applies to community, events, nonprofit services and more.

The wristwatch is the outlier

Secondly, he treats this convergence as though it applies broadly, not just to watches.

I'd imagine product designers everywhere are shaking their fists. Graham conveniently uses the wristwatch to argue his case, when the wristwatch is truly an outlier category. Wristwatches tell the time. Time is a physical property that is immutable. Ironically, the wristwatch category might be the most timeless and static category that one could conceive.

Software is different. The optimal product design is the opposite of static. The user problems are constantly evolving, and designs must evolve with them. The problem itself is a moving target, which means design never converges long enough for brand to fully take over.

An example from the category I work in: social media management software.

The user wants to schedule posts to multiple social media platforms. There is an optimal design for the product today. But tomorrow, the social media platforms will introduce a new post format. Or another platform will launch. There are dozens of ways this problem might change in a short period of time.

This is what renders his underlying mechanism incomplete. The gravitational pull he describes, where design converges and brand takes over, simply doesn't have time to play out in software. The problem keeps moving before the design can settle.

Both Ages at once

Good branding and good design run in parallel and they have to, because the product is never finished. There quite simply isn’t a hand-off point.

I do think we're in a Brand Age and Graham is right about that. But we're also in a Design Age and I’d argue that design matters more now than it ever has. When two products have the exact same feature set but feel completely different to use — that feeling is usually design. And it's much harder to replicate than a feature list. If anything, the commoditization Graham describes should make us more invested in design, not less.

The hand-off Graham describes never actually arrives in software. Design doesn't get to retire and brand doesn't get to take the wheel. The companies that differentiate most effectively are the ones where both are working at the same time, on the same problems.

Thanks for reading.

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