What 18,000 People Never Had to Ask
Pearson — Brand Systems Director, Global Brand
Most case studies end.
This one doesn't.
I am currently leading the global visual brand system at a $4B company operating in nearly 200 countries, with roughly 18,000 employees who all need to represent the same organization without a designer in every room to guide them.
My team leads brand governance for the entire company, the guides, the elements, the system, working within our internal studio and partnering with our external agencies to bring it to life.
Most people think brand governance means writing a style guide and sending a PDF. A PDF doesn't stop someone in Singapore from using the wrong typeface. It doesn't help a product team in London decide which photography feels right.
The Real Job
The job is building something so clearly usable and so embedded in how the organization actually works that people make the right call without needing to ask first. Guided enough to protect the brand. Flexible enough that creative teams can actually use it. That balance takes more than design skill. It takes understanding people, politics, process, and the difference between a standard that holds and one that quietly gets ignored.
The Work
Brand architecture.
Pearson has hundreds of products, each with its own identity, its own history, and its own stakeholders who built careers around it. The challenge was never design. It was bringing all of that into one coherent structure without erasing what made each product meaningful, which meant research first, always, understanding what customers actually perceived and what the organization could realistically sustain. This was already in motion when I stepped in. My role has been carrying it forward, earning the trust of stakeholders with real and legitimate concerns about change, and building something the whole organization can stand behind.
Brand photography.
Research across countless customers in several countries revealed a real perception gap, measurably affecting consideration before a single sales conversation happened. The insight that unlocked a pivot. Learning as a vital force for life isn't visible in the act itself. It's visible in what that act makes possible. I built the system around two lenses,
Life, brand-level imagery showing human possibility with no domain context,
Domain, specific imagery for each area Pearson operates in.
The evaluative layer is what makes it sustainable, a four-part scoring framework, Agency, Competence, Authenticity, and Emotional Truth, giving anyone reviewing an image a consistent, shared way to make the call.
Book publishing.
Pearson holds 40% market share among US academic publishers. That scale means the brand lives inside an enormous volume of educational material across every subject and market. The work brought real brand presence into that output without disrupting production workflows already running at that volume.
The AI Layer
Most brand directors are still writing PDFs. We're building the tools that make PDFs obsolete. Across photography, publishing, and brand decision-making broadly, we're developing AI agents in Microsoft Copilot Studio that put brand guidance into someone's hands the moment they need it, not a document to find or a person to track down. A system that takes a question, understands the context, and returns a defensible brand answer, with time saved and decisions made without escalation tracked from day one.
This is what brand systems leadership looks like now. Not more guidelines. Smarter infrastructure.
Currently Building
A photography evaluation agent returning a brand compliance score with real reasoning behind it.
A publishing brand agent bringing that same defensible judgment to editorial and production teams.
An analytics layer tracking what all of it actually saves. A full architecture rollout heading into its final phase.
And so much more.
Why It Works
None of this happens because a system just gets decided. You're working with teams who have their own priorities, their own timelines, and their own deeply held opinions about what their brand means to them. You're balancing a global standard against local realities. You're earning trust with people who have real reasons to be cautious about change. None of that is in a job description. All of it is the job.
It works because it's built with the people who use it, not handed down to them. Collaboration isn't a soft skill here. It's the only way a small studio governs a brand at global scale without losing the room.
One brand. Nearly 200 countries. We're not done yet.