Hubertus Bessau
Partner & CMO
Sessions (2)
Sessions featuring Hubertus Bessau at Bits & Pretzels 2026 | Founders Festival in Munich
Golden Pretzel Award - Pre-Round II
The available transcript captures the opening of the second pre-round for the Bits & Pretzels Golden Pretzel Award, where the core value proposition is a curated startup competition built around investor-founder teams rather than a standard open-call pitch format. Host Flo Akinbiyi explains that 11 hand-picked startups have been reviewed for the chance to pitch on the big stage the following day. Each team receives six minutes to pitch and three minutes for jury questions, with the audience explicitly asked to help create energy by cheering for every startup. The jury is introduced as Anna Fidulo of Crotan Capital, Inge from UnternehmerTUM, Jan Reichhelt of 10x Founders, and Philip Dames from the Zalando founding team and Jerry Ventures.
Branding when the buyer might be a machine: When everything can be cloned, what is actually left to defend?
Hubertus Bessau’s core message is that in an environment where websites, product features, and visual identities can be copied quickly, the defensible part of a brand is not the artifact itself but the associations stored in people’s minds. The session opens with host Aditi framing AI as increasingly agent-like: it already books meetings and replies to emails, and may soon make purchasing decisions. That shift raises the central question of whether brands still matter when machines participate in buying decisions. Bessau sets up two opposing claims — “AI agents don’t care about brand” and “brand is the last mode” — and argues that both are wrong, promising to examine the history of branding, how brands work, what changes when agents enter the field, and what builders should do now. He begins with copyability. A website can be reproduced over a weekend or even within hours using capable people and agents; many core features can be reverse engineered in days unless deep tech is involved; even visual identity can be closely imitated by asking tools such as Claude Design to make something look like Apple. To show what remains after copying, he uses Coca-Cola. Even if someone were given the formula, the trademark, the font, and distribution, something would still be missing: the emotions, stories, trust, situations, and memories held in people’s heads. He points to research showing that the same cola creates different brain responses when accompanied by the Coca-Cola label, arguing that “the label changes the taste” and that brand can create part of the experience itself. Bessau then traces branding back to cattle marks: a visible cue connected to remembered experiences, such as the quality of milk, meat, breeding, or the farmer’s reputation. He defines a brand as a stored association between a cue and an experience. A cue retrieves memory, forms an expectation, leads into a real experience, and then updates memory. For startups, this means brand does not begin as a logo, color palette, font, or name alone. Founders can borrow familiar cues — for example, black and gold to suggest luxury or blue to suggest safety — but borrowing too much can create interference or trigger the wrong associations. Copying a famous identity may retrieve memories, but not necessarily the ones the startup wants. The talk also explores less obvious cues, including physical and oral associations. Bessau offers an unproven reflection on myMuesli: saying the name makes the mouth and jaw move in ways that resemble chewing and swallowing, and it ends with a smiling sound. He then explains how cues strengthen through frequency, similarity, and interference, adding his own view that intensity also matters. Intense emotional gaps between expectation and perception make memories stick. For marketers, that means creating happiness by having perception exceed expectation — though he notes the tension that founders often need to over-promise just to stand out. He closes the provided portion by describing three brand layers: what you show, what people say about you, and the actual experience people have, all feeding a loop that updates memory and word of mouth.
“What you can't copy is in the heads of the people”