A Method to Madness.
In the term “branding” people use it interchangeably with logo design, identity design, and even sometimes typography and maybe we need to set the record straight.
So let’s start with what branding isn’t.
it’s not a lot of things people say it is. It’s not a logo. A logo is a very useful tool for a business, but it’s not the brand. It’s a symbol of the brand.
A brand is not a product.
When people talk about this brand buying this brand or that brand they’re really talking about buying one product or another product.
People say the brand is a promise the company makes to customers and there’s some truth in that. I mean it does end up acting as a promise, but that’s not what it is either.
Advertising people like to say “well it’s the sum of all the impressions that a company makes on an audience.” Well you know if you’re trying to sell a lot of impressions I can see where that might be useful to you.
But from a business point of view why do, they want that? How does that help creative people understand what they’re doing? None of those things are really what branding is.
A brand is a result. It’s a customer’s gut feeling about a product, service, or company. It ends up in their heads in their hearts. They take whatever raw materials you throw at them and they make something out of it, but they’re making it. They’re creating it.
And so in a sense when you create a brand you’re not creating one brand, you’re creating millions of brands like however many customers or people in your audience. Each one has a different brand reflection of you. So a brand has like a reputation.
It’s your business reputation and everyone’s gonna be a little bit different about what that reputation is. And that’s OK as long as you have got it corralled mostly where you want it and that it’s beneficial to the company. So we tend to look at companies and designers tend to look at branding as, from our point of view, like this is something we’re doing. We’re telling a story. We’re making a claim. We’re you know making a pitch and that’s what we do. But that’s not what a brand is. The brand is the result of that. And if you don’t start there, you don’t know what you’re doing. You actually don’t know. You think you know what you’re doing but you don’t.
How it’s been is from a designer’s point of view it’s a gut feeling. About whether this is going to work or not. And they would sell it as hard as they could to get the client to sign off on it. From the client’s point of view, they’re going off the checklist. I got the logo, I got the tag line, I got the ad campaigns. Check! And they think they’re done. None of that’s right. Do you know? What’s right is what happens in people’s heads. Like what have we achieved? What’s the reputation that we’ve created through the products we’re putting out, and the design of the products, the messaging we’re putting out, the look and feel of them, our culture. How does that affect people? How our employees behave, you know, how is that affecting our reputation? All that stuff counts.
So it’s a big world. And it actually takes in almost all of the business. Not so much finance but finances involved too because finance has to greenlight all these things. But almost everybody in a company is affecting the brand, doing something with the brand, doing it for the brand, or hurting the brand.
This is where we start.
Inspiration: Marty Neumeier via thefutur.com
