Vanja Rais RGD

Van is a Design Scientist and authority on Behavioural Branding—a new frontier in brand strategy where behavioural science meets creative process. With a career spanning Fortune 500s and scale-ups, Van has led business-defining work for GE HealthCare, Starbucks, Microsoft, Hoover, Virgin and Bank of America. As the pioneer of Behavioural Branding, Van is defining a new category: Behavioural Brands—organizations designed around human psychology rather than surface-level business storytelling. He applies behavioural science to shift branding investments from hopeful to helpful, transforming creative work into a measurable, revenue-generating system. By uncovering hidden behavioural drivers, Van helps businesses reduce marketing waste, unlock underused resources and solve complex challenges at their psychological root. Van is a trusted advisor to Bescy, the global behavioural science community and a guest lecturer at Parsons School of Design and SVA. His work has earned recognition from Communication Arts, Good Design, ReBrand and more. Van’s mission is to evolve the role of design—from aesthetics to behaviour, from experience to expectation. Whether working with executives, investors, or creative leaders, he empowers teams to design not just for beauty or emotion, but for behavioural action, adoption and long-term business impact. He’s not just challenging how we think about brands—he’s redefining what they are.