The 4 “i”s of Digital Branding
The practice of building and managing a brand in 2020 has radically changed. From a construction model informed by semiotics, and a management style based on the strict observance of “corporate guidelines”, we head now to the principles of usability and digital product management.
Until 2007, Branding was a highly speculative* business based on semiotics.
As JR Little puts it in “Listening Brands”:
(…) Clients were paying a lot of money for our intuition. They were put on hefty retainers and paid a fortune for not much more than a piece of paper, some imagery, templates and a logo. Always a logo.
Besides those intuitive “brand models” that we still use today (see Aaker and Kapferer for further reference), our job was to manage all the possible relationships between the brand imagery, its key communication messages and the overall style and rhetorics that glued everything together, also known as the Tone of Voice.
That triplet of IMAGE+CONCEPT+TEXT has a very cool name in Communication Theory, a Semantic System:
To keep using the “scientific” terminology of the communication theory, we could say that the main task of branding agencies was to create the relationships of that semantic system and then try (in vain, obviously) to control the resulting meanings during its fabulous trip, from the sender (our own team) and its crafted formalization as a message (the deliverables), to the different contexts where it would appear (the media), the permanent noise on those media (competitors) and finally the desired group of receivers.
That was our raw material in scientific terms. The bricks of our house, or the pencil and papers of those novels we thought we were writing.
But the digital economy changed our raw materials forever.
Although they are still essential, the success of our job does not depend exclusively on a good logo and a cool slogan transmitting a given set of cultural values.
Our new working materials now include, among others, what we, in Jam’on digital, call “The 4 i’s of Digital Branding”:
Here’s a quick description of this new “semiotic system” we work with, less speculative and far more technical if you will:
1. INTERACTION
The user interactions between user and brand, and among users mentioning the brand, which for internal matters is what brand managers monitor through Brand Metrics Dashboards, and at the exterior is the real experience (use value) perceived by them.
2. INTERFACES
The interfaces we create between the brand and and the user, which internally constitute what’s known as UX, and externally is the perceived or imagined value, and it’s also known as a set of persuasive technologies.
3. INFORMATION
And finally the sheer information we manage, internally as data, and externally as content. What all the different types of structured and unstructured data that branders manage to feed the brand and inform the customer, to the main “content” (in its most general definition, from textual to performative) the users seek in the brand platform.
4. ITERATION
All those elements should inform our internal teams and clients to face the next iteration of the brand. Without iteration, or more precisely, without a plan to iterate according the knowledge we extracted from the 3 previous elements, it will be difficult to keep the brand alive. From the brand positioning, to the last detail about the optimal functioning of its logistic and operational processes, everything about the brand can, and should, be iterated according the knowledge we obtain through its internal and external elements.
This new “way of branding” in the digital age has been explained in many different forms through dozens of interesting books. Personally, I think that what matters the most is to truly understand that branding is not anymore about art directors doing cool logos and PR guys sending emails to specialized media.
To understand this phenomenon in depth I always recommend the already classic “The innovator’s dilemma”.
It basically demonstrates in terms of business strategy how the demand-based digital economy and the creation of disruptive services and products, what really demands in reality is the abandonment of any type of rock-solid brand strategy.
In other words, what Branding professionals must interiorize is that the brand won’t be 100% right at its first iteration, and that only the metrics of the interactions and the interfaces will give you the clue about the real whereabouts of the value creation.
As everybody knows by now, Silicon Valley’s mantra is precisely “fail faster”. And learn.
So much so, that the modern discipline of branding is based on the strategy of failure. On this there are several books. I recommend you start with a very simple but very good one entitled: “strategize: Product Strategies and Product Roadmap: practices for the digital age”. Or “UX Strategy” by O’Reilly Media.
By the way, the O’Reilly brand is also a typical case of of digital brand management.
Pau Todó is Creative Director and Partner of Jam’on digital and Associate Professor of ESADE Business School of Brand Management.
