Episode Summary 

What if brand wasn’t a guideline or a campaign—but an operating system?

Eric Alberts is helping reinvent a 190-year-old company by treating brand like a product—complete with documentation, demos, and internal adoption strategies. As Design Director at Wolters Kluwer, he’s drawing on a decade of UX and product design experience to build scalable systems that make brand feel more like infrastructure than identity theater.

In this episode, Eric shares how he's operationalizing brand across a decentralized, 22,000-person org—creating internal education programs, vetting agency partnerships, and empowering teams with self-service tools.

We talk brand architecture, creative ops as connective tissue, and how to evolve brand from aesthetics to an engine for business alignment.

Key Takeaways

• Brand is more than visual identity—it’s infrastructure for business and storytelling.
• Creative ops becomes powerful when it connects internal teams and external partners.
• Documentation, measurement, and system design aren’t just for product teams—they're essential for scaling brand.
• The in-house team can be a Trojan horse for embedding brand strategy—starting with service, growing into influence.
• AI won’t replace creativity, but it can supercharge consistency, scale, and speed—if the system is sound.

Passive Listening to Active Thinking Use these prompts to reflect solo—or spark deep conversations with your team:

1. Are you building brand like a story—or like a system?
2. What would change if your in-house team treated brand like a product with documentation, adoption, and iteration?
3. If your brand were a product, how would you measure adoption?
4. What’s stopping your external agencies from becoming true extensions of your internal brand system?
5. Where is creative ops acting like connective tissue—and where is it still a service desk?

🔗 Links & Resources 

Eric Alberts on LinkedIn 

Wolters Kluwer