I recently read a fascinating interview with Phil Libin, the CEO of Evernote, a provider of note-taking and archiving technology, about how he’s sculpted his company’s unorthodox culture. Libin hasstructured Evernote’s two offices and employee benefits around the idea of facilitating achievement, and he holistically considers the factors that may further or inhibit that goal in and out of the office.
From providing his employees housecleaning twice monthly (to get his employees’ partners on Evernote’s side) to offering unlimited vacation (and $1000 if people actually take a week off), Libin ensures his type-A employees are refreshed and happy enough to do their best work. Libin has successfully created benefits that affect people outside of the office so they can do their best when they’re at work—and feel proud of, and loyal to, the company they’re building together.
Libin has also made choices about Evernote’s physical offices that demonstrate smart, on-brand thinking. He is constantly looking for unnecessary technologies to dispense with and recently got rid of employees’ desk phones. Most offices just have desk phones by default. By asking what purpose they served for Evernote’s business, given that they’re not a sales organization, and by considering existing redundancies (like paid employee cell phones) Libin realized the landlines were extraneous and detracted from the purpose of being at a desk—getting work done. This technological subtraction helped Libin’s ultimate goal of achievement by removing barriers to it.
Libin also took steps to ensure his employees, and his two offices, one in Mountain View and one in Austin, were well connected and equally valued. He created a flat hierarchy for employees by removing any obvious markers of status (aside from compensation), and having all employees sit together. He encourages people to stay connected and to communicate in-person where possible to avoid a confusing and infuriating email (ball and) chain culture.
Libin also tries to create parity between the offices by using a giant digital screen that functions as a “window,” showing each office to the other and enabling employees to see and talk to each other—not for meetings but for the creation of a broader one-firm culture. These decisions about how to structure the offices and working environment create connections that help people achieve, therefore ensuring that every element is purposeful and in service of Evernote’s goals and brand.
Libin’s holistic thinking about the factors in and outside the office that affect employees’ work demonstrates incredibly savvy managerial and brand thinking. He constantly re-evaluates old norms, asking what purpose they serve, and whether they obstruct rather than create the clearest path to getting work done. This critical re-evaluation, this re-connecting of the dots, is also what Evernote as a product, and as a brand, seeks to do—eliminate barriers to creative achievement.
A few months ago, we attended a class called “Making Something People Love” taught by Alexis Ohanian, co-founder of Reddit and director of marketing at Hipmunk. In his intro, Alexis admitted that the class was like a Branding 101 class, but he didn’t want to use the word “brand.”
Brand is a dirty word to many entrepreneurs, but their skepticism comes from a fundamental misunderstanding of what brand is.
Brand is a lot more than just your name, logo or visual identity.
A strong brand should crisply encapsulate the role your organization plays in the world, and it should act as a filter to guide your business decisions. While a clever name and logo can set you apart from some competitors, a strong brand is what gets you your funding, builds your engaged community of users, and creates a focused vision for the future.
Brand is a platform for action, not a marketing afterthought.
Too often we hear of startups who are so busy getting their products out the door, they don’t have time to develop a purposeful brand. A recent Fast Company piece points out that in the past, “brands were simply too hard and too expensive to create.” Today, expectations for startups have changed and there’s growing acknowledgement that brand creation can no longer be considered an afterthought.
If we look at some of the most successful startups that have emerged in the past ten years, a strong, purposeful brand is the common link that drives their success. In a world saturated with ecommerce sites, Etsy has set itself apart from the competition by building a brand that stands for craft, creativity and community.
Similarly, Zappos has differentiated itself by cultivating a brand that delivers happiness to itsemployees and customers. Mint crafted a brand around the idea of simplicity—an idea that guided its name, UX, visual identity, and voice. In all of these cases, a clear and focused brand maximizes the potential of a great productidea by creating a coherent universe around it.
In today’s increasingly crowded startup space, a single product is no longer enough tomake you stand out. Your product, UI, look and voice need to be unified with a common purpose that resonates with your users. Brand is that strategic glue. It should guide your every venture and help it stand out to funders and to the world.
Join Wolff Olins for the Brand Strategy Lab, a four-part workshop series at General Assembly in NYC this March. This series is an in-depth introduction to the fundamentals and tools of brand strategy, developed specifically for a startup audience. We’ll teach you the tenets of brand strategy and facilitate workshops to guide you as you create your own brand. The series will culminate in presentations and critiques so you can test drive your new brand and refine the direction it will take in the world.
It’s too soon to know if Kodak’s Chapter 11 filing is the final death knell for the iconic brand, but the news is a timely reminder of the link between innovation and brand longevity.
Kodak’s heritage is rooted in innovation, and their best products became part of our lives in a deeply emotional way. However, Kodak’s failure to innovate goes beyond their inability to recognize the rise of digital imaging and their ill-fated foray into printers.
Their failure was one of imagination. An inability to understand that product, like brand itself, is a living idea. When you buy a product, what you’re really buying is the ability to do something. The brand is both a projection and a reflection of what that ability is and what it means in your world. Product, construed as ability, is form agnostic, and should not just adapt to, but also anticipate changes in how people will want to access and use that ability.
Kodak, like Blockbuster, Borders and others, failed to imagine product beyond product.
Now Kodak is forced to pursue ever more desperate measures to raise cash, like selling its patents, which will take it even farther away from the pioneering spirit that built the brand.
At its core, Kodak helped us see—and remember—our world. It helped us tell the story of ourselves. This is a remarkable and timeless role for a brand to play, but with Kodak’s growing gap between brand and product, the company itself may soon be a memory.
The ironies of Kodak’s bankruptcy are kind of limitless: Kodak is a classic example of a one-time giant getting outpaced by the technologies it helped invent (in this case, the digital camera).
Kodak hasn’t been profitable since 2007, having switched its focus from photography to printers (making the world-historical mistake of picking the physical over the virtual). The rest of Kodak’s value rests in the patents it owns related to digital imaging, which the company says are used in virtually every modern digital camera, smartphone and tablet.
But the demise of Kodak is also a brand tragedy.
Kodak invented a new kind of memory. It was a brand capable of freezing the present and reprinting the past.
The memories Kodak stood for were both personal – as immortalized in the famous Paul Simon song– and national – Neil Armstrong used Kodak to take the first pictures from the moon, and 80 films shot on Kodak film have won Oscars for Best Picture.
When it invented the handheld camera, Kodak created a sweet new strain of independence.
Now, that brand equity has become a soup of chemicalsand patents. Still, Polaroid bounced back after its 2001 bankruptcy, and Kodak might also find new ways to develop.
Do you have a hard time defining the vision behind your visionary idea—to VCs, or even to your mom? Is your elevator pitch standing a bit too awkwardly in the elevator?
Your startup needs a stronger brand to stand out, and well, start up.
Join Wolff Olins for the Brand Strategy Lab, a four-part workshop series at 
