The Values-Encoded Brand System
Build the brand as a system whose elements each encode a company value, so every touchpoint stays on-brand without training
- Difficulty
- Advanced
- Time to result
- ~months to results
- Steps
- 5
- Confidence
- 91%
Gago's answer to 'what actually is a brand' is a system, not a logo. The elements — logo, colors, fonts, photography vs. illustration, voice, how people talk to customers — must be an extension of the company's values, because values are what govern how people behave with each other and with customers. Encode the values into the brand system and every touchpoint manifests the brand automatically; you never have to train employees on a touchpoint matrix. The goal is a 'love mark' rather than a trademark: a brand people feel committed to.
Origin
Barbra Gago at Miro, where each letter of the wordmark was a distinct shape encoding a company value (e.g. agility) with its own behavior. The 'love mark rather than trademark' concept is a widely-used brand idea (popularized by Kevin Roberts of Saatchi & Saatchi) that Gago applies here, citing Airbnb as an exemplar.
Core principles
- 01Brand and product are the two things that get customers, keep them, and keep them loyal — a great brand cannot save a bad product, but a great product with a thoughtless brand leaves value on the table.
- 02The more the brand is interchangeable with the people at the company, the stronger and more authentic it is (Google/Googlers).
- 03Values are foundational to behavior, so encoding values into the brand makes every customer interaction on-brand by default.
- 04Think brand system, not brand assets — elements should recombine across contexts.
- 05Brand must be authentic to work; a system bolted on top of values nobody lives is theatre.
How to run it
- 1
Treat brand as a day-one concern, not an afterthought
Start thinking about the brand as early as possible. Product and brand together are what acquire, retain, and create loyalty; neglecting either caps the other.
- 2
Fix the values first
Settle the company values, because they determine how people behave internally, with each other, and with customers — which is the substrate the brand will run on.
Watch out Values that are too long or contain too many ideas are unmemorable and therefore unusable as brand inputs.
- 3
Inventory the brand elements
Define the full element set: logo, color palette, fonts, general aesthetic, whether you use photography or illustration or graphics, and — equally — the voice: how the brand sounds when you write, market, and talk.
Pro tip Voice is as much a brand element as the logo, and it's the one that shows up in every sales email and support reply.
- 4
Map each value onto a system element
Assign values to concrete visual or verbal components so the system carries meaning. At Miro each character of the wordmark was a different shape with distinct characteristics, each tied to a value — agility, for instance, mapped to a shape that visibly moved and behaved differently.
Pro tip This also gives the brand a cross-cultural visual language — Miro's system was designed so people from different parts of the world could understand each other without sharing a spoken language.
- 5
Let the system extend, don't police touchpoints
Because the values are in the DNA, the brand manifests in decks, product, support, and partner conversations without a central team enforcing it. Build the system so it can be recombined for anything you do visually or verbally.
Pro tip Test: could a new employee who knows the values produce on-brand work without a brand-police review? If not, the values aren't encoded deeply enough.
In the wild
Each letter in M-I-R-O was rendered as a different shape with its own characteristics and behavior, and each was tied back to one of Miro's values — agility, for example, was expressed as a shape that moved. The system doubled as a visual language so distributed teams across the world could understand each other without a shared spoken language.
→ Agility as a value flowed through to the product itself (flexibility in how people use it) and to how the team built and talked about the product, making the brand an extension of the values rather than a veneer.
Miro's mission was to be the platform that helps companies build the next big thing — which meant Miro itself had to be a big thing and had to show what big things look like. Values shaped how big and how deep the brand went, and how authentic it felt in people's experience.
→ The brand became a 'love mark' rather than a trademark — something customers felt committed to and invested in, which Gago frames as a powerful source of defensibility in the market.
Common mistakes
Treating brand as a logo and a color palette
Elements without a system don't scale. A scalable brand is a recombinable system whose parts carry meaning, covering voice as much as visuals.
Making values too long and too numerous
Miro's own values were too long, with too many ideas in each, so nobody could remember them — including people who worked there. Unmemorable values cannot inform behavior or brand.
Making values so short they become generic
The opposite failure. Values must be simple and easy to remember without collapsing into interchangeable platitudes that could belong to any company.
Is it for you?
Best for
Founders and marketing leaders building a brand from scratch or a brand system during a rebrand, who want brand consistency without a policing function
Not ideal for
Companies without genuine, lived values, or without a product strong enough to support the brand — brand can only carry a weak product so far
From the transcript
“what I've found is that the more the brand is interchangeable with the people at the company and the company itself the stronger it is…”
“the best way to kind of incorporate your brand and how people are interacting with people that you are selling to customers or whoever Partners…”
“if you want to build a brand that's really like scalable you think about it more as a system like a brand system”
“it's because they were too long it was something that we were constantly working on because they were like too long and there were too…”
From the episode
Category creation and brand building
Barbra Gago (Pando, Miro, Greenhouse, Culture Amp)