To build a great brand, you must own a great concept. It’s that simple, clear, desirable thing consumers want or crave. McDonald’s owns “fast.” Volvo owns “safe.” FedEx owns “overnight.”

Insomnia Cookies owns “warm.”

It sounds simple, but it’s not. Seth Berkowitz, CEO and founder of the cookie chain, has spent 23 years learning this: To truly own a concept, you must do more than just claim it. You must commit to it, engineer your entire operation around delivering it, and protect it as you scale.

“The founding craving was something warm and delicious,” Berkowitz explains. “And every decision I’ve made up was in service of that craving. There wasn’t a single compromise.”

That level of commitment has built Insomnia Cookies from a college dorm room operation into a national chain with 350 stores, 6,000 employees, and a $350 million valuation (established in 2024, when Krispy Kreme sold its majority stake in the business).

But the real lesson isn’t about cookies — it’s about what happens when you pick one differentiator and refuse to compromise on it, no matter how complicated or expensive that becomes.

Here’s what Berkowitz learned about building a brand around a single, non-negotiable promise.

Start With a Real Consumer Insight

Berkowitz didn’t choose “warm” because it tested well in focus groups. He chose it because he experienced the need firsthand — and recognized its deeper emotional significance.

The insight came during a late night in his college house in 2002. He and his friends ordered a lot of pizza, which arrived warm and appetizing — but he couldn’t think of a way to order something sweet that delivered that same emotional payoff.

“I want something sweet and delicious and warm and delivered to me,” he said.

Then he reflected on why. He was 21 and living with friends, at “a very vulnerable spot” between childhood and adulthood. “A warm cookie for that moment was a little spark of joy,” he says — evoking childhood, while also being a late-night adult(ish) snack.

That insight — that a warm cookie could provide comfort at all stages of life — became the foundation for everything that followed. “We took that inflection point and we bottled it up,” Berkowitz says.

The lesson: the best differentiators aren’t invented in conference rooms. They’re discovered by founders who experience a real need and understand its emotional significance. Berkowitz didn’t just want a cookie — he wanted the feeling that a warm cookie could provide.

Your Differentiator Must Be Systemizable

Most entrepreneurs think differentiation is about marketing messages. Berkowitz learned it’s about operations.

“When I bake cookies, I actually look at temperatures,” he says. “We will test what temperature the consumer will love. No, it’s more than love — that they will find unforgettable.”

To do this, Berkowitz works backwards from the customer experience, then engineers every step to support it: “The baking time, the cooling time, the holding time, the packaging, the warming bag that it goes in. How long does it take to get in their car? What does the logistics look like?”

Think about what this means for your business. If your differentiator can’t be systematized and measured, it’s not really a differentiator — it’s just a marketing claim.

“Every step that you get wrong in that chain is an opportunity to fail,” Berkowitz says. “You engineer the business to perfection.”

True Differentiation Is Hard (And That’s the Point)

Here’s what separates real differentiation from marketing fluff: It costs money to maintain, and competitors can’t easily copy it because they’d have to rebuild their operations.

Most food businesses optimize for cost, shelf life, and convenience. Insomnia Cookies optimizes for temperature. Their packaging is designed to retain heat during delivery. Their logistics are optimized for speed.

“We engineered the recipe, the production, the supply chain, the fulfillment,” Berkowitz explains. “Every element of the brand is in service of warmth.”

This creates what strategists call a sustainable competitive advantage. Anyone can claim their cookies are “fresh” or “delicious.” But very few companies can consistently deliver warm cookies, because it requires rebuilding your entire supply chain around that goal.

Your Positioning Must Grow With You

The real test of differentiation comes during growth: Can you maintain consistency, and deliver the same value, as you scale across markets?

It’s something Berkowitz focuses on a lot.

“I spend most waking hours thinking about this,” Berkowitz says. “Making sure that I have 5,000-6,000 people around the world making the right decisions to support” the brand promise.

The answer, to start: Extensive training, clear systems, and a culture where everyone understands that warmth isn’t optional — it’s the reason the business exists.

It’s also how the company evaluates new sales channels. For example, when Insomnia Cookies wanted to expand into daytime catering, it faced a problem: Office orders might sit for hours before being served, making cookies cold.

But instead of abandoning catering or accepting cold cookies, Berkowitz wanted to innovate around this constraint. “How do I innovate my packaging to make sure that the cookies aren’t cold?” he asked. Now it’s developing new packaging solutions to solve this problem.

How to Find Your “Warm”

So how do you identify your own version of “warm”? Berkowitz’s approach started with a personal frustration, then grew into a data-driven system.

The key questions to ask yourself:

• What do customers consistently say about your product or service?
• What do they tell their friends when they recommend you?
• What would they miss most if you were gone?
• What’s the one thing you do that competitors struggle to replicate?

The answer should be something you can measure, systematize, and build your operations around. It should be difficult enough that competitors can’t easily copy it. And it should be specific enough that customers can immediately understand and remember it.

“You try to engineer the business to be operationally excellent in every step to make sure that the consumer is top of mind,” Berkowitz says.