From Hashtags to Handoffs: Rethinking Brand Building

Your brand is not your ad film. It is not your hashtag. It is not your carefully colour-graded reel. Your brand is what your system does repeatedly when nobody important is watching.

Imagine this. The brand film is trending. The media plan is pristine. The social team is posting like it is a World Cup final. Then a customer tries to return a product, cannot find a human, receives a templated apology, and rage-posts the screenshot. In that moment, your brand stops being cinematic and starts being operational.

Welcome to the most expensive lesson in modern marketing.

We still organize marketing around campaigns. They have beginnings, middles, and heroic endings. But the brands that are winning do not run like campaigns. They run like products. They are always on, always learning, always smoothing friction. They are less premiere nights and more software updates.

Design thinking has been whispering this to us for years. Start with human needs. Prototype. Learn. Iterate. Repeat. Not one grand unveiling followed by applause and silence.

So, what if we built brands the way we build products? This would mean treating the brand as a system, and not a stunt.

Start with a North Star promise that behaves like a product specification, not a poetic line. If your promise cannot guide a refund policy, a customer support script, and a product screen, it is not a promise. It is decoration. Airbnb does not just say belong anywhere and move on. That idea shapes how it designs homes, community rules, and service recovery. It is a constraint, not a caption

Then build an experience design language. Product teams do not reinvent buttons every sprint. They build systems. Brands should too. Tone of voice, microcopy, notifications, packaging, store rituals, support interactions should feel like they were born in the same room. PhonePe treats design consistency like infrastructure, not garnish. CRED’s NeoPOP is not a mood board, it is a repeatable visual and motion system that shows up everywhere

Distinctiveness scales only when it is systematized

Next comes the uncomfortable part. Journey operations. This is where marketing has to stop pretending operations is someone else’s department. If delivery is unreliable, your brand becomes untrustworthy. If returns are painful, your brand becomes dishonest. If support feels robotic, your brand becomes cold no matter how warm your film. Service blueprinting exists for a reason. It forces you to look at the frontstage and the backstage together. Swiggy’s use of regional language and idioms across touchpoints is not a cute trick, it is a systemic choice that makes people feel seen

When you think in systems, you stop asking what should we post and start asking where trust leaks.

Then there is measurement. Product teams instrument everything. Marketing teams still debate brand impact like it is astrology. A real brand system runs on signals. Where do people drop off? How long does resolution take? How often do they come back? Spotify Wrapped looks like a campaign but behaves like a product loop built on personal data, designed storytelling, sharing, and anticipation. That is not a burst. That is a system doing what it does best.

Finally, governance. Campaigns run in seasons. Products run in sprints. Duolingo adapts at cultural speed by listening to its community in real time

Zerodha grew because customers talked about a product worth talking about. When the experience is strong, distribution follows. When the system works, the story travels.

On Monday morning this changes how you plan. Instead of asking what big things do we say this month, ask what frictions do we remove. Instead of polishing brand guidelines, design behaviour. Instead of reviewing only creative, review the experience.

Campaigns will not disappear. They will simply sit on top of something sturdier. The future of marketing is not louder storytelling. It is better designed systems. So, stop running campaigns and start shipping brands.

(The writer is professor of marketing at SP Jain Institute of Management & Research. The views expressed are personal)