Articles

The Power Of Brands With Lifang He – This Week’s Thinking With Mitch Joel Conversation

Episode #1052 of Thinking With Mitch Joel is now live.

This conversation with Lifang He gets into a tension that many technology companies still misunderstand: brand is not what you add after the product is built. Brand is part of how the product becomes meaningful in the first place. That distinction matters more now than ever. In a world where AI can accelerate development, compress timelines and make competing products look and feel increasingly similar, the question becomes less about who can build something first and more about who can make people care. Functionality may get you noticed. Brand is what creates trust, memory, preference and emotional connection. Lifang has spent more than two decades helping some of the world’s most influential technology companies build products that people do not just use… they love. She is a global brand strategist and product marketing leader who has led branding, go-to-market and growth initiatives for companies including Apple, Amazon and Ring. During her time at Apple’s longtime creative agency, TBWA\Media Arts Lab, she helped shape global iPhone launches, giving her a front-row seat to one of the most successful product introductions in history.

Her new book, Brand Power Built In – How Tech Products Really Win Hearts And Minds, challenges the idea that branding is a layer of marketing applied at the end.

Lifang argues that the strongest technology companies embed brand thinking into product design from the beginning. The product, the story, the education, the customer experience and the emotional promise all have to work together. In this conversation, we talk about category creation, customer adoption, product education and why successful innovation requires both functional excellence and a compelling human story. We also get into the leadership challenge of maintaining a clear product vision, why companies often lose sight of their original “why” through endless trade-offs, and how every customer interaction either strengthens or weakens the brand. Mostly, this is a conversation about differentiation in an age of convergence. As AI makes it easier to build, copy and iterate, technology alone may become a less durable advantage. The companies that win may be the ones that understand brand not as decoration, but as strategy built into the product itself.

Listen to my conversation with Lifang He here: The Power Of Brands With Lifang He – TWMJ #1052.

Before you go… ThinkersOne is a new way for organizations to buy bite-sized and personalized thought leadership video content (live and recorded) from the best Thinkers in the world. If you’re looking to add excitement and big smarts to your meetings, corporate events, company off-sites, “lunch & learns” and beyond, check it out.

Mitch Joel

Mitch Joel lives at the intersection of technology, business transformation and consumer culture. He is the Executive Director of Next Era Institute, a strategic intelligence platform helping leaders understand the forces reshaping business, technology, culture and society. The Institute identifies which shifts matter, explores their wider significance and translates them into strategic direction and momentum. Mitch is also a globally recognized keynote speaker. He has delivered thousands of presentations across both B2B and B2C industries to organizations including Google, Walmart, LEGO, Shopify, Microsoft, Procter & Gamble and Unilever. Strategy Magazine has called him “one of North America’s leading visionaries.” Mitch built his career by working directly inside the waves of change that reshaped modern business. He founded and built a digital marketing agency that worked with some of the world’s largest brands and was later acquired by WPP, where he served as President of a firm operating in 25 countries with almost 3,000 employees. Mitch is the bestselling author of Six Pixels of Separation and CTRL ALT Delete, and the host of Thinking With Mitch Joel, one of the longest-running business podcasts in the world. His writing and commentary appear in outlets including Harvard Business Review, Fast Company and Inc. Magazine. He is a member of Dr. Marshall Goldsmith’s 100 Coaches and was named to the Thinkers50 Radar. Mitch also hosts Groove – The No Treble Podcast, documenting the oral history of electric bass players. Mitch is also Co-Founder of ThinkersOne, a platform that enables companies to bring personalized thought leadership from world-class experts into meetings, events and off-sites in focused 15-minute bursts.