Scaling Brand Experience: From Zero to Maturity with One OS

An exploration into creating the first brand experience operating system that scales with the business.

---

By Vanessa Mouledous, Brand-built growth expert, mentor & advisor to startups

---

“CX is dead. It’s time for BX — and we brand experts have known this for ages.”That’s how I opened a talk to a major consulting firm in Southeast Asia.

That’s how I opened a talk to a major consulting firm in Southeast Asia.

A year earlier, Accenture Interactive (Song) had released The Business of Experience — a call to move from customer experience as a marketing silo to experience as a company-wide capability. As they put it:

“Companies that focus their entire organization around delivering exceptional experiences for their customers, employees and society grow their profitability year on year at rates at least six times that of their industry peers.” (Accenture Interactive, The Business of Experience, 2021)

Exceptional means coherent, consistent, unified — across time and touchpoints.

I used that study to argue that brand experience is the experience of the business — and therefore everyone’s business. It doesn’t happen by chance or through campaigns. It’s designed, systemic, and embedded into everyday actions and decisions.

This isn’t new thinking. Jean-Michel Kapferer’s Brand Identity Prism and Denise Lee Yohn’s Brand-as-Business both offer robust branding operating systems. Other partial frameworks weave brand into specific areas such as design, marketing, performance.

Yet most organisations never apply brand this way — and many leaders have never heard the term “OS – Operating System”, even less “branding OS”. No surprise then that 65% of customers report inconsistent experiences across channels and departments (Salesforce State of the Connected Customer Report, 2023).

Making brand experience a true operating system is an organisational transformation. It demands bold leadership. And here’s the barrier I see daily, living 24/7 alongside startup founders as consultant, mentor, and judge in entrepreneurship and investment programs: existing models are built for mature organisations. Startups rarely have the time, resources, history, or organisational sophistication to implement them.

Could there be a brand experience operating system (BXOS) designed for universality and scalability — one that starts small and grows with the business?

I’ve been testing what such a system could look like, from early-stage startups to mature public organisations — and I’ve found a promising approach inspired by how business operating systems are built.

Why treat brand experience as an operating system?

Brand experience directly drives business performance. McKinsey found that customer journeys were 30% more correlated to business outcomes than individual touchpoints. In other words, the sum of interactions matters more than each single one in shaping a person’s experience.

But that global experience is influenced by factors far beyond a company’s control — media, peers, culture. There will always be a gap between the perceived image and the projected image the company is shaping through daily actions. Behind every touchpoint are human beings interpreting the brand through their own understanding, personality, and way of thinking. Without active, systematic management, the gap widens.

When it does, the brand fragments. Fragmentation signals internal misalignment — and erodes trust. Coherence sends the opposite signal: that every part of the organisation is moving in the same direction. Consistent, reinforcing decisions build credibility and accelerate growth.

How to deliver a consistent brand experience?

Engineer it like a business operating system.

Over the years, I’ve operationalised brand experience through culture, design, and messaging — always pushing leadership teams and staff to avoid siloing brand within the “branding” function.

Case: City of Parramatta, Australia.

The federal mandate to transform this 250,000-resident city into the future centre of Global Sydney by 2056 put brand at the heart of action.

To attract residents, businesses, investors, and tourists, we created a new city brand. That vision became the internal compass:

• The umbrella for all strategic and operational plans — from the 20-year plan down to yearly operational plans an    d individual KPIs.

• The guardian of the 2056 vision, guiding collective decisions.

We embedded brand into the organisation’s core structure and communicated it regularly to staff and partners.

At the time, I wouldn’t have called it a “brand experience operating system.” But in effect, that’s what we were building.

Startups, however, are different.

They can’t replicate that model. For them, brand must be embedded lightly, evolving with scale. Often, it starts as small as writing down “the founder’s way” for early hires to copy like for one of my mentees, a Hong Kong-based chef launching a sauce line needed to carry what customers valued in her as a chef into the product brand. Or to add brand-vision-fit questions into recruitment to ensure hires aligned with the mission as I advised another one of my mentees, a Malaysian EV charger startup. 

These were organic, sometimes ad-hoc decisions. And while they worked in the moment, they lacked the systemic structure of an OS.

Existing branding OS frameworks aren’t quite right for startups, and partial systems leave too many gaps. I have just begun searching for a universal brand experience operating system that would:

• Scale from zero to maturity.

• Be continuous and agile, not staged.

• Work for both startups and large organisations.

Which operating system to use?

Recently, I found a structure that might adapt well: six core components that are the basis to any business operating model as Quantitative’s (WorkBoard) states it (in What is an Operating Model?).

It offers:

• A holistic picture in which every function plays a role.

• Scalability alongside business growth.

• A structure that, in my testing, mapped pretty cleanly to both City of Parramatta and early-stage startup cases (see Table 1).

The six components are: Guiding Principles; Organisational Structure; Processes; Technology; People; Culture. 

A solid skeleton — but not a perfect fit. Brand experience requires adjustments.

First, brand experience is also delivered by partners — franchises, retail, creative agencies, service providers. A business OS assumes only the organisation and its staff deliver outcomes. In Table 1/City of Parramatta test, stakeholders and creative partners are slotted under “Organisational Structure” and “People” by default. A better way to integrate them — perhaps as a Brand Ecosystem Orchestration component — is needed.

Second, because brand is perceptual, a BXOS must maintain meaning across contexts — cultural, emotional, geographical, political. A Brand Coherence component would be essential.

Lastly, building a successful brand experience is a long game — the brand will grow and change. Because of the organisation’s efforts. Because of external factors. While business OSs often seek stability, a BXOS must be adaptive to evolving perception as monitoring provides insight. This adaptability should be built into the BXOS’s DNA.

Conclusion

Business strategy has long used operating systems to systemise efficiency and outcomes. The same approach is overdue for brand experience — to ensure coherence and consistency across time and touchpoints.

Current branding OSs are excellent but skew toward mature organisations or specific areas. Quantitative’s six-component approach offers a strong base but needs adjustment to the specificities of brand experience in order to create a BXOS that would scale from zero to maturity, be continuous and agile, not staged, and work for both startups and large organisations.

As challenges around usual branding methodologies arise through my daily immersion within the startup ecosystem, my practice of branding is deepening towards on-the-field research. This column is a work-in-progress. If my early exploration of a universal and agile Brand Experience Operating System resonates with fellow brand strategists, business leaders or startup founders, I am calling you to share your real-life case studies to put them at test. 

The goal: a new way to engineer brand experience that is structural, collective, scalable, and adaptable — across industries and growth stages.