The distributed brand era

This was already true in sales decks, press articles, anywhere brand codes were used without consulting the brand book. What is different now is the scale: AI has drastically accelerated the distribution of brands. Today, everyone has the ability to broadcast the brand, everywhere, at all times. No time to write a post? Run the press release through your favorite LLM, publish with standardized syntax, 5 minutes and you're done. This isn't necessarily a problem... if the brand holds on values and attributes that are strong and distinctive enough to withstand this dilution.

At Alan, we've built our brand based on how we operate our culture. Our principles of distributed ownership and context over control are essential here. The brand becomes a living entity, distributed at scale, even and especially without perfect uniformity. It needs to resonate with those who carry it, more than it needs to be rigidly captured in a brand book that no one actually reads.

We operate with context over control. Context here means: strategy, metrics, objectives, priorities... Control - which we actively avoid - means top-down decision making, approval committees, and process valued more than results.

And this approach is everything when it comes to brand building: we empower people to use it, by giving them context and practical tools, and not by controlling the outcome. As Brand people, this represents a shift: moving from control to enablement. And this is a mental gymnastics that can be challenging at first: what if people do it wrong? Well, it’s then on you to provide even more context: what was misunderstood, and why? How will you course-correct for next time? Should we build a tool to automate what they wanted to achieve? Starting from the assumption that everyone will do it right if they have enough information is key. 

Brand distribution in this approach can become a joyful chaos, valuable precisely because it's distributed and embodied. This uncontrolled approach might seem risky, even hurtful to brand consistency, but it's actually more resilient: when the core values and attributes are strong enough, the brand can withstand variation. In fact, it grows stronger through it. It skims everything that is not needed, and goes straight to the core essence of the brand: its values. 

At Alan, the work on brand coherence is based on two core cultural systems: 

This is a core principle that structures how we operate more broadly at Alan: distributed ownership. For Brand, the goal isn't to anticipate every use case or prescribe every expression. Our job is now about helping people have a shared understanding of its essence, what it values, and how it behaves. We want Alaners to think: "I see what we stand for, I see what I can carry forward.", with enough trust to express it without seeking permission every time.

We removed everything that slows this down: long validation circuits, useless slides, sacred totems that no one dares question. 

Because building a strong brand today has little to do about protecting rigid guidelines, and way more about creating an environment where people feel empowered to activate it, adapt it, make it their own. Just as we have a "Yes and..." culture at Alan, where every member can and should push for new ideas, feeling comfortable and valued to do so. 

This value match starts with recruitment and onboarding. 

At Alan, we look for people who will excel in our specific culture, which isn't, purposely, for everyone. We're transparent about this: many people love our culture and stay long-term, thriving on excellence and continuous growth. Others might not fit, which is perfectly acceptable. We don't claim our approach is the only one that works - just that it's ours.

When this culture speaks to you, you'll carry the brand attributes and codes naturally, with values already resonating internally with your own operating systems. And ultimately, you will bring the brand to life with true sincerity. It's resonance, not conformity, that creates radiance.

And this is exactly what makes someone able to express the brand without needing to think about it. When this match is there, the brand gets picked up and passed on naturally, not because people have memorised the tone of voice, but because they already speak their version of it. 

This enables powerful employee advocacy, because people have strong conviction and alignment between themselves, the brand, the culture, and the outside world.

In that sense, the risk is rarely a branding misstep, and more about the silence of not using it. The brand that doesn't show up in people's work because it doesn't seem like it's their place to use it. The brand that waits for permission and ends up sitting in a folder. The one that no one dares to adapt, so it stays abstract.

What actually makes a brand durable today is not surface-level consistency, but something more robust: a capacity to hold through variation. Different people, moments, formats, tools. If we slightly miss the exact body shape of our mascot, because an AI generation went a bit off, it doesn't matter. The benefit of having it posted is greater than the risk of having it slightly varying.

A brand today needs to be embodied, rather than controlled. What we're trying to transmit is energy, a vibe, a force. That kind of brand can live distributed, even when it's stretched, when it evolves, and especially then.