Why a Brand is an Operating System featuring Heidi Hackemer | Greymatter

Hello. Thanks for joining us today. My name is Elisa Schreiber and I am the marketing partner at Greylock Partners. And I am so excited to have Heidi Hackemer here. Heidi is the founder of Wolf and Wilhelmina, a brand strategy company based out of New York. She's worked with dozens of clients, including the Obama White House, Nike, Google, and a ton of startups. So, Heidi, thank you so much for spending some time with us. We, I think brand building and brand strategy is really one of those topics that our listeners don't get a bunch of exposure to. So hopefully today we can demystify brand building for some of our listeners.

I love that.

Yeah. So to get started, I thought it would be interesting to take a quick step back at your very unique background. If you don't mind walking us through this. Oh, of course.

I'm happy.

I know you did the global launch of Google Chrome.

Yes.

And you created six items or less, which was a closing consumption experiment, which I'd love to dig into a little bit. And then you travel around the country for two years working on an American dream project. So you have a really unique understanding based on your background about what makes Americans tick. So maybe you can just jump in and get started on your background and how that led you to think about building brands.

That's a great question. I grew up in Wisconsin, very proudly grew up in Wisconsin. It's nice to be on a coast and have a Midwest background. And I think because of my background, I've always been quite sensitive to what's been going on and in the middle of the country. And a lot of the early clients I worked on were like craft and brands that were really geared towards more of middle America. So I've had a bit of a love affair with middle America my entire career. And really what brands come down to, it's about building a story. And you have to build a story that gets people excited and gets people motivated to want to interact with you. Consumption is really an act of creation. And as we go around and we interact with these other brands and we start to build our identity, it is our job as people that create brands to put forth an idea that people want to assimilate into their identity. So it really says something if you wear Nike shoes versus Adidas in some context. And so our job is to create those really interesting stories. And what I am personally quite interested in is making sure that, yes, I absolutely get assignments where it's get the coastal millennials to do certain things, but it's also equally important that we understand that on the coast, we're not the only people that exist in the world, and that we're being really sensitive to the entire country as well.

So tell me a little bit about your experience traveling the country for the two years.

So I had a very big, important, amazing career, and I say that with a huge grain of salt. And I was just finishing the launch of Google Chrome. I had been traveling all over the world, going to Google's office to disseminate the campaign through the organization, and a voice popped into my head one day and it said, buy a truck and drive around America. And it was very strange, and it wasn't anything that I had been planning to do or ever even dreamed of. And a month later, I had quit my job, packed up my apartment, totally kitted out a Ford F150 so I could sleep in it, had my cook kit, had everything I needed, and I just started driving west. And I had a National Parks pass, and I had an app that would tell me where the rain was coming. Because when you're living in a truck, rain is really difficult. You want to stay away from rain as much as possible. And, you know, I hadn't planned on it to do this. So there were times that I would run out of money, and I would park the truck and I would fly back to New York, and I would do some freelance work in a company, and then I would go back out to the truck. But over the course of the two years, I put on about 30,000 miles, visited tons of national parks. I slept mostly in national parks and state parks, and just took a break. Like, everyone's like, oh, are you gonna do a documentary? Are you gonna write a book? And there was something really nice about not having anything to produce and just being able to listen and absorb. It was a tremendous two years of my life that I'm really grateful for. And I don't know what it was that allowed that crazy thought to come into my head and then allow the even crazier action of letting it manifest. But sometimes I think the soul bucks, and you just have to pay attention to it.

How quickly after you took that time off did you then found Wolf and Wilhelmina?

So Wolf and Wilhelmina started officially, two and a half years afterwards. I had been freelancing with a company called Anomaly. Anomaly was doing work with Motorola's Advanced Technology and Projects group, which then got absorbed into Google. And I was working with Regina Dugan in that freelance gig. Regina and I hit it off. I decided then to go work with Atap Directly. And W and W got incorporated on the back end just to deal with some financial junk that needed to be dealt with. And so that was really the start of W and W. So it was about two and a half years. There was kind of like a muddling freelance thing right before it. And. Yeah, and then we started it.

The reason that I ask is because I know a big part of. And we're going to get into this actually how brand interacts with culture. And I think you're an example of somebody who lives what you preach in terms of how much your brand should be a reflection of the culture and vice versa. And I know with your firm, when you started it, you talked a lot about doing great work and living great lives. And so I do wonder if you can tell me a little bit about how your experiences prior to founding your company led to the culture that you started from day one and then how that's like kind of impacted your work.

So this is going to be very unpopular with your audience because we love contrarians. Because I'm actually very much in the belief system that you should not be working crazy hours. You should not. You need to step away from your business and you need to step away from the work that you do. So what happened was I had, I was like total full on in my 20s, right? You could not work me hard enough, you could not put me on enough planes, you could not put me in enough meetings. It was just go, go, go, totally burned out. I realized. And that's probably why it took me two years to go through the recovery process. And so I'm hiking in a field in Wyoming one day and I realized that despite the fact that I had technically been working in creative industries for 10 years, I could not remember the last time that I felt creative. And it was this real sad moment because I remember when I was a kid in school, you get a project and you'd get like so absorbed and you'd be in flow and it was just like, why am I not feeling that way anymore? And also why am I so tired? Why does my brain always feel like it's functioning at 60 to 70% and I'm caffeinating the hell out of it to make it work. Like, what is going on? So what I started doing was I would hike during the day and I would drive during the day and charge my phone. So what I started doing was at night I would be lying in my truck and I would be researching academia and what their studies have been on creativity. And the crazy thing is, is that academia does so much research on what we need to be productive and be creative. There's reams of research and in my industry, and I'm also guesting in the industry that you deal with a lot, we completely ignore everything that the research says. Academia says 40 hours a week is a real thing. Like Henry Ford did not make that up. Like that was real studies about how productivity goes down. Academia says to be creative and productive, you need to rest, your mind needs time to be bored, you need to be exposed to nature and you really need moments of time where your brain shuts down and you step away from work completely. Which is totally, totally like antithesis of what we consider the norms in our culture to be. Who's the power people and who's actually going to be successful. So when I started W and W, the question of WW is can you create a company that is truly built around creativity? And if you truly are going to do that, you're going to do things that other people are going to say are foolish or you're not serious about running the business. So, for example, we have a couple rules at WW. One is that email shuts down at 7 o' clock at night. We do not work with emails.

Is that east coast time or west coast time?

East coast time. And our west coast clients are actually pretty good about it. It's pretty rare that a West coast client asks us to violate that rule, which has been really cool. So some of our rules are no email after 7 o'. Clock. No weekend work is built into our project plans. You cannot send emails on Saturdays and if you send an internal email on Sunday, that email, no one has to answer it. It might be you're just getting ahead of your week, that's okay. But there's no obligation to answer a Sunday email and you cannot send client emails on Sundays because we don't want to train our clients that it's okay to interact with us on the weekends. We also have a rule at W and W, we have unlimited vacation policy. I realized that no one was taking vacations because we have it in our mind if we take vacations, somehow we're failing as a worker. So I had to make a rule at WW that for full time employees to be eligible for an annual bonus, they have to take two weeks of blackout vacation a year minimum. And if they don't take their blackout vacation, and by blackout we do blackout, you cannot answer an email. You are not on a conference call, you are out of the office. And, and if you violate that on your vacation, those days don't count. And if you don't get it up to two weeks, then you don't get a bonus at the end of the year.

So where should people send their resumes?

But here's the crazy thing about it. I've worked in the industry for years now. I'm starting to age myself 15 years now. I am doing the best work of my career at the most consistent level. It used to be when I was working in the industry, you get one good project out a year, maybe two. Now. Every single project I look at, it's killer. I would put that against anyone else's work in the industry.

Well, okay, so that's a really good segue, actually. Let's talk about the work that you do. You do brand strategy. And I think that the word brand is often misunderstood. So maybe we can start there. Can you help? How do you define brand and how.

Do you define brand strategy at its most macro sense? Brand, to me, is the narrative that you have around your company and the reason that your company exists and being able to tell that story and coalesce that around a singular idea of why you exist in the world.

You're defining brand as the story that a company tells and their reason for existing. Is there a common. Is there a couple common ingredients that go into telling a great brand story?

Yes, I think there's four areas that we make sure every brand story ticks off on. One is you have to make sure that the brand story is true to that company. You can't just slap a brand on top of a company anymore. Like, you got to figure out what's really true about that company. Secondly, it's really important that a brand and a company understands the cultural context that they operate in and what role they play in the world at large. Yes. The other component of this is you have to understand where you sit in the competitive set, which is super important, especially when you're, you know, taking down other businesses. But if you don't understand where you sit in culture, increasingly audiences just won't care about you because there's a higher bar for audiences now about the type of brands that they want to interact with. They want to understand, like, what are you doing in the world? And then the fourth thing that you have to make sure that's in every brand story is a total sensitivity and awareness of the audiences that you're talking to and really getting to know them quite well. And getting to know them quite well. And I think this is something on the west coast that I Sometimes get frustrated with west coast clients because they think getting to know an audience well is just knowing all the data about them. Data is super important. You need all the data, but you also have to go talk to people and you have to understand them as human beings because there are so many things in human beings that data just can't capture yet.

So I've heard you talk in the past. I've heard you talk about the four ingredients that every brand needs in order to tell a really complete and credible story. You mentioned love, pain, tension, and truth. Maybe we can unpack those a little bit and you can explain for the folks that are listening what it means to use pain in your brand story. Use love, use tension, and use truth in a really effective way.

At the end of the day, you want to set up your brand to be the hero you are, the one that is coming in and making the world better for whoever is interacting with you. And so when you go through as a brand and investigate and understand what's true about you, where you sit in culture, what, what's going on in the competitive landscape and what's going on with the people around you, there's things that we are really dogged about looking for in those investigations. Love is one of those. So there's nothing like it when you walk in and you talk to a founder and their face just lights up, right? Like, and then I figured out this problem and I got really excited about it and I decided to solve it. Like, that's love, right? And you know, we do a lot of work with Nike, and you find this with basketball kids, right? So Nike basketball shoes have 95% of the market. And so just about any kid that plays basketball in the world is going to wax on about Nike basketball shoes or even wax on about Jordans, right? And so when you find that love, you gotta grip it, because that is, there's something powerful there. And you really need to understand that and respect that. Now, in the same way, you also, when there's pain, you need to have the balls to say, I accept that pain. And so when someone says, I hate this company, or you know what? I really hate this category because it's a really painful category. I mean, look at what's happened with a master. The great startup mattress explosion of the last five years, right? Someone at Harvard identified that mattress shopping was painful, and now we have a thousand mattress startups, right? But there was a pain in that category. And if you can really be honest about pain, that's a really good thing. Which leads to Tension. So as you're articulating these brand stories, when you find the love and you find the pain, figure out the way that they're diametrically opposed to each other and. And figure out how the truth of your company can get in there and become the hero. And being truthful is also something that's really important. Like, you cannot lie to customers anymore. When I first started in my career, you could lie to people. Like, there was a disconnect. The Internet was not a thing. Right. And so it was like, oh, there's, you know, here's the company over here, and then we're gonna slap the lipstick on the pig and everything's gonna be okay. And all that bad stuff about the company just doesn't matter. You can't do that anymore. You can't. You really have to lean into the truth of what makes you powerful, but also the truth about the things that you might need to improve.

Do you think that brands need an enemy?

Yes. Enemies are great. Enemies are great. And this isn't just Apple versus Microsoft. It's not just a competitive enemy. Although sometimes in the beginning, the competitive enemy is really important. But actually, what's more interesting, I think for organizations where they're really trying to rally the people that work for them around the idea of the brand and also rally their audiences, is an idea of, like, a spiritual enemy. So when we were working on this menswear brand that really wants to lead the idea of modern masculinity, the enemy we set up for them was not J. Crew or another menswear brand. It was actually this cultural phenomenon we saw of masculine retreat, where a lot of men, when faced with a wildly changing world and the rise of women, retreat into the perceptual man caves. They retreat into bro culture. And so we're like, that's not where we want to be. And so it was really important for that company to understand. Let's stay away from that retreat, and let's make sure that the energy that we put out in the world is always about progressing the idea of masculinity and giving men almost a template of what they could be moving forward. And let's be really careful that we avoid this bro culture over here, because actually, that's a regressive culture.

So you identified that as the enemy.

That was the enemy brand. Yeah.

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

The most common mistake I see, especially in the tech and startup industry, is mistaking a brand identity, a logo for a Brand. Brand is your belief system. It's the story, it's what you're all about and why you exist. And a lot of times people skip ahead to the logo. Now don't get me wrong, like I understand the total need to whip up a site with a nice logo so you can get funding. I get it. Like we did it ourselves, right? Like WW was on a squarespace with a little wolf on the edge before we had any of this figured out. So it's totally cool to do that. But then also understanding that brand is something way more powerful and than just a visual identity. So that's a mistake that people make. People are less making this mistake that you can lie, but sometimes you still get that. It's more the mistake of letting your brand get tinged with compromise. The 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. Ten years ago you could kind of have a milquetoast brand. You could kind of round out the edges and oh, it's fine, it's fine. We don't want to offend too many people or whatever, whatever. But now with this landscape, it's so crowded and it's so crazy. If you're not willing to get out there and be like, this is who we are, this is why we exist and this is why we do the things we do, you're going to get ignored. And that is just accelerating.

It's funny, as you are describing this, I keep thinking about the intersection of brand and culture and how it's really two sides of the same coin. Do you do kind of cultural explorations with the companies that you work with? And is that a way that you arrive at what the overall brand story is?

Culture is so important in building a brand and a lot of times when we're working with our clients, we will even take a really big step back to do a cultural analysis.

What about internal culture? How much do you invest in brand building early on versus frankly, shipping product, getting your tech stable, making sure that you're solving and addressing a pain point for the your core customers and finding product market fit. But what I'm hearing from you is, and I think if I'm, you know, if I'm following the path here, it's that so much of your brand and who you are actually gets build before even the first line of code is written. It's who are you? Why do you exist in the world? What's the problem that you're trying to solve. And that I think is there's definitely cultural inputs from the outside, right. Which you talked about a lot of. But how much does the internal culture drive the brand?

Internal culture is everything. It is everything. We have a saying at WW that internal culture and external brand are just two sides of the same coin. They are completely related to one another. Now when you're first starting and you're just trying to ship product, yeah, you're not going to go do a big global exploration on the stage. You're just not. But if I had any advice to, to a founder that's starting out and wants to at least get that on the right track. So if they bring in someone like me later on down the road, we have some good raw material to work with. Spend a day with the key people in your company, figure out in one sentence why you exist in the world, what kind of relationship you want to have with the world, and jot down five to 10 beliefs. And those beliefs will change as you go on, but at least you're starting to jot these things down saying, this is what we believe. Nike started with 10 maxims, they now have 11. And the original maxims of Nike, I think five of them are still intact and five of them changed. And that's okay, that's totally fine. But at least from the very beginning, everyone that was busting their butt to make that business work in the beginning knew why they were doing it and how they should behave. So if you do anything, just get those a good sense of those beliefs. Even if they change, print them out, put them on the wall, make sure people see them, and also be open to the fact that, you know what, we might need to reevaluate this in six months or a year and rewrite them. And that's totally okay too.

I ran communications for Hulu for four years before joining Greylock. And we had this document called what defines Hulu? And it was basically a both present state. What are our values? What do we believe? What behavior are we going to reward? What behavior is not acceptable in our culture? Who are we? And we're okay saying we're not these other things. And we found it to be the most powerful document that was ever produced for the company. We actually had it up on the wall when you walk in. It was just, you know, it's, we don't believe in flashy titles. For some people, they think that's really important and that's great, but Hulu is not the place for you, things like that, you know, or we're no one's above qa. You know, we've, we've. And we had very specific examples of what that meant. Really specific examples of what matters to us and what doesn't and what I found, like, even when I was interviewing. So I reported to our CEO at the time and when he interviewed me, we spent two hours. In my first interview, he didn't ask me one question about comms or marketing. It was 100% about culture. We talked a lot about that document. What I thought about the document, like what my belief system was, and I think that was like people were opting in and opting out because they either believed or believe in what that was. And that was so much a part of our brand. But also it was like very much the fabric of the culture of the company. When I asked Jason, so Jason Keiler was a CEO that I reported to. When I asked him, like, why was it important for you to write this document? He mentioned, he said, listen, at the end of the day, I'm not going to like, we're going to have hundreds of people working at Hulu that are going to need to make decisions on behalf of all of our customers, which are advertisers, content owners and users. And those people are going to make thousands of decisions every day that I'm not going to be a part of. And so I need to have, we need to have a guy like a North Star for folks to be able to make informed, high judgment decisions about our business without having the CEO have to be involved in all of those. And it's a way to democratize the value system. I think founders that have the foresight to really codify what they stand for that impacts everything from brand to culture to recruiting to how you think about product decisions.

It's actually really good to hear that because in my industry, that deck that I wrote is slightly controversial because it is saying that brand is more than just your advertising. It's actually, it's not a campaign. It's not a campaign, it's the operating system of the company. It's how you make decisions. And I don't know how companies can scale without a cohesive decision making framework in place so that the founder doesn't either have to be on top of every decision or one of the units just goes rogue. Right. And then you have to fix that a year later, which is terrible for the business.

Yeah.

So this is, it's about efficiency and it's about attracting the right kind of talent and it's about making sure that everyone's empowered because we're just moving too damn fast. Like, you can't. It's, it's not how, you know, it's not how it used to be. I sound like the old lady. It's not how it used to be.

Well, you mentioned a phrase. You said your brand is your operating system. Can we unpack that a little bit? Can you explain what you mean by that?

So what I mean by brand is an operating system. Is that what we've been talking about? The brand is a narrative. It's the reason you exist. 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. You know how to make a decision in the Hulu way or the Airbnb way, or the Nike way. And when a company is infected with that, when the operating system of the company is totally saturated with the same beliefs, the company is so much more efficient, the work is more powerful, the brand is more cohesive, audiences know what they're interacting with. And so this isn't just like a nice, oh, we're gonna put a brand on there that's shiny so we can get a couple more conversions. It's more of a, this is a smarter way to run a business because people know how to make decisions.

I've heard you make the distinction in the past between knowledge and knowing. Is that what you mean by codifying the operating system?

It's almost like getting it in people's bones, right? When I worked for Google, we called it googly. When we were working, I know when we were working, especially with the Creative Lab and Andy Burnt over there, it was, is this googly or not? It was pretty extreme. I don't know if I could have ever written out like, what is googly. But when you worked on the brand for a while, you really understood in your bones whether that was a Google thing to do or it wasn't a Google thing to do. And that's what I think this is about.

So, as we've talked about, a lot of the folks that listen to our podcast are early stage founders and they're really focused, especially in the early days, on shipping product and recruiting technical teams and some of the technical challenges that they are facing. Oftentimes, brand building is something that they don't really think about until the company matures. I'm wondering, 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.

So in some ways, I think brand building starts from day one. Because brand building is really a reflection of the way you run your company and the values that you run your company with. So the faster you can understand that as a CEO, I think there's a lot less pain for you down the line. I always think there's a step in brand building where you have to get the site up quickly and you have at least a decent name and an okay logo. So that's okay. That's an interim step. But I think when you're getting to the point where you've captured most of your natural user base, the geeks that are going to love it are going to love it. If we go to dev world, you got those people captured. Now it's time to penetrate new markets. Or the other time that I see that really coming in and making brand a little more structured is powerful, is when your company's growing to a certain size. Because 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 I don't understand. They don't understand how to make decisions our way. And all of a sudden we're starting to see fractured decision making. When you're.

That happens in hyper growth phase a lot. Like you go from 30 employees to 300 in the course of a year and a half.

Yeah. And 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. And not only is it going to get inefficient and you're going to start to have factions, tribes will develop inside of a company. We've come in to companies before and we've had to untribe them. We actually went in and did like an internal analysis of one of the startups we worked with and we're like, there are four tribes in here who have different belief systems who are making decisions differently in your company. And we have to tone down this tribe here, do this with this other one, and we're going to put them all underneath this umbrella of brands so they're all working together. Because the other thing that brand really helps with is internal politics. Because when you actually have a decision making framework as opposed to the loudest voice in the room or what. We've seen some issues lately. The highest performer in the room Right, Yeah, right. When there's actually a values based decision making framework, politics are always going to exist, but they tend to get a little less powerful when you have that framework in place.

Thank you so much, by the way. I think this has been just a hugely important conversation for founders to hear and to start thinking about from day one. What kind of company do you aspire to be? What kind of team do you want to build? And what kind of impact do you want to make in the world? And what do you want your story to be in terms of kind of really practical brass tacks knowledge that we can leave folks with? What are some immediate things that founders can be doing today? If after listening to this, they have kind of a holy shit moment and say, oh, my God, I haven't been thinking about this the right way. What's something that someone can do literally today when they go into their teams to start improving the way they're thinking about their brand strategy?

So we've already talked about the fact of getting those values written down and those beliefs. Something that I found that was really awkward as a founder, but I had to get used to it, is the fact that you need to repeat yourself over and over again. So we kind of have a joke inside of W and W that no one in my company actually absorbs anything that I say unless I say it three times. Like, I will literally be sitting in a meeting being like, so this is how we're going to handle the vacation policy. And I will spend an hour going through it. And then someone asks the most basic page one question. I'm just like, oh, my God. Right? But okay, but so what I would say to founders, by the way, that's.

Backed up by research. I think, like, people have to see messages like 3 times or 7 times or 15 times.

So as a founder, you start to feel kind of crazy because you've gotten these values written down and you feel like you are saying them over and over and over again. And then maybe it's a woman thing. I don't know if male founders go through this, but sometimes as a woman, I'm like, am I, like, turning to this nag that, like, just keeps saying it over and over again? No. Like, you cannot reinforce this stuff enough.

I don't know that it's a gendered thing, but I do think that what happens is, and I've seen this on the PR side where founders will, you know, actually nail the story and then not want to continue to say it over and over again because they get bored.

It's Fatigue. Yeah, absolutely. I go through fatigue. Like, if I have to give a couple of talks in a row or a couple of company meetings, I get tired of myself, and I just have to remind myself, like, your job, like, you're a cult leader. Okay. And, I mean, it's weird, but, like, a lot. There is this theory of brand, that brands are like religions. And as someone who is leading a brand, you need to think about the way that religions are led. And you know, religions, they just keep hammering the same stuff in over and over again. And so 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. But 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.

Well, they can probably move forward a lot quicker if everybody is singing from the same hymnbook.

Exactly. To use your religion. I'm sorry to bring your religion into it, but no, it's great.

We've talked about hippie dropout plan for two years.

Totally.

We've talked about God and we talked about brands. I think that this has been a very robust conversation. I'm super thrilled that you are here with us. Thank you so much for taking some time out of your day to spend with our founders and our listeners and just can't thank you enough.

Oh, it was so cool. Thanks for having me.