Brand is everything
Originally featured on Blacksmith
Nowadays a brand is not just a logo, catchphrase, business card or a website, it is an important and integral holistic system representing the entirety of any entity transmitting, producing and doing something in the world. Any CEO, CMO, CTO — hell, any employee worth their salt should know and understand this; advertising agencies (should) live and die by the maxim that *brand is everything*. But perhaps the depth of what brand is — how it is constructed, formed and managed in real and digital spaces — isn’t so clear cut and obvious.
Let me attempt to breakdown what I think are the most important concepts of branding are and how they can be considered and applied.
Four primary components (that form like Voltron)
To understand the importance of brand and how it is everything, I’ve broken it down into four primary components to be considered in a brand’s strategy:
- Aesthetics: how your brand looks through colour and imagery, but also how it sounds from written voice to tone of language
- Experience: how others interface and interact with your brand
- Perception: how others judge and react to your brand
- Awareness: how others find and recall your brand from a sea of others
These four primary components are the cornerstones of anything to do with your brand. You could be an independent freelancer, a bike delivery startup in Paris, a local government body in Timbuktu, or a multinational IT consulting firm located in 80 countries across the world — they would all still apply equally.
It’s important to consider all individual components as part of an inter-related other whole, like the classically misquoted quote by Gestalt psychologist, Kurt Koffka:
“The whole is other than the sum of the parts. Also, Voltron is really cool.*”
If one concept is of utmost importance throughout all brand components, it would have to be consistency. This is how you drive your brand’s values and message, and how you forge and condition a quicker and more immediate response to get your audience to remember and act — to be “on brand”, as we say in the biz.
*He may or may not have said that part
Brand aesthetics
Most often people consider this the most important, or even the sole aspect of branding, but I’d say it’s equally as important as the other components. There is absolute importance in your brand’s visual style as it relates directly to all the other components, but equally it is the language you use in any brand communications, the tone of voice, the ambience of an environment, be it physical or digital. Partnerships and commercial relationships should also adhere to a brand’s aesthetics. Even the brand’s smell should be thoroughly considered. Think of it as cultivating your (brand’s) allure.
Brands live and die by their names, but its not necessarily an exact science as to what name will catch on. Who knew that something called “Google” would be the most well known company in the world? (And before them, Microsoft). Also, who knew that Adobe Photoshop would inspire the verb “photoshopped” (as clunky as it sounds) to be an everyday term for editing a photo digitally.
Consider your brand a personality: describe it as an individual and give it emotions, experience, knowledge, likes and dislikes. Is it brazen and witty? Smart and casual? Formal and elegant? Perhaps it is chaotic and mysterious? Use this personification as a foundation when thinking about all aspects of your brand strategy.
This “personality” can motivate the power of brand awareness, perception and experience working in tandem with aesthetics, but first people need something visual to grasp and remember. A snappy name and an attractive face (logo, logotype, marque — whatever you want to call it) make them often the first thing an audience and potential customer sees, and we all know how important first impressions are.
Brand aesthetics go from the face, to the voice, all the way down to the smallest visual manifestation of the brand; even an email signature or an “error 404” page need to exude your brand’s values and character.
It’s an unknown science to engineer success in a name, logo, or style — it’s more akin to a dark occult art also known as “luck”. Many thousands and millions have been spent on logos, type treatments, colour proofs and the like, and there have been plenty successful brands born from a napkin or an intern’s malnourished fingers whom have stood the test of time more elegantly.
The key aspect is taking those core aesthetics and consistently applying it throughout all components and touch points of your brand, both externally and internally. If blue is your primary colour, ensure you use the same shade of blue you always have, same with fonts, line widths, imagery, etc. Diverging from the brand can potentially cause friction in an audience as they may find the minor differences may question the legitimacy of your communications, which may impact on issues of experience, awareness and perception, but equally there are points in which diverging can rejuvenate or reposition a brand in a positive way.
Brand experience
When a person uses your app, calls your help line, reads a brochure, or even browses your website, they are directly interfacing and experiencing your brand. When they see an ad, they are experiencing your brand. This particular issue has been introduced most rapidly and deeply with the advent of touch phones going mainstream and “apps” becoming a household word, but the notion has always existed in branding.
Any perceptible sluggishness your app may have, or bad experience with a customer service rep, or even a server going down will impact a customer’s brand experience, no matter how big or small. Any delightful moments can encourage a positive experience and contribute to a brand’s value. Good experiences encourage and sustain good relationships, and a good relationship encourages customer retention and referral to your products, services, or even just “coolness” factor. In psychology, there’s a concept called “negativity bias” which means that even if something bad happens and something good happens and they are both of equal value, most people will judge or evaluate the negative experience to be more affecting.
Branding is primarily about communication: it’s about reaching out, being visible and contributing, be it to a conversation, an individual, or to a group. How an audience experiences your brand’s transmissions, be they active or passive through whatever channels and touch points can have permanent lasting effects. The nature of reviews and referrals should serve as an adequate reminder that brands live and die by how they treat their audience (and their staff, but that’s for another article in another time…).
Brand perception
The section above touched on aspects of perception through experience, but equally perception can come from an audience whom have never directly interacted with your brand.
Aesthetics can be tweaked to engineer a new brand to look and sound more trustworthy, however it’s through experience that you forge meaningful relationships with your audience — how they judge whether you talk the talk and walk the walk. To persuade those to experience your brand, perception will need to be finely considered through all components of branding.
In psychology and user experience design there are two concepts which relate to perception: framing and prompting. Simply speaking, framing works to place something within a context, and prompting encourages a particular action to be undertaken, most notably within that framed context.
With branding, this often comes through in advertising by way of call-to-actions in which a brand will have a key message that may relate to an audience’s needs or desires, and an actionable method to serve those needs/desires. If you can communicate to an audience adequately what your brand is and bridge that gap between perception and experience with your brand’s offerings, then that’s good!
Nike’s classic “Just do it” takes a sports fashion company from selling clothes to encouraging people to work towards achieving their goals, conveniently by buying a pair of running shoes. Apple’s “Think different” spoke to an audience interested in not adhering to the computing status quo and aligned with world-renowned personalities and revolutionaries, like Gandhi, Bob Dylan, Einstein, Martin Luther King and the like. Energizer’s long standing “It just keeps going and going…” slogan framed their products as being reliable, and when a person is considering what batteries might be best for their needs, are prompted by the tagline as to the product’s dependability.
Prompting and framing are valuable tools to engineer perception and encourage action, but it is vitally important the aesthetics and experience back it up. And then that leads into the final component…
Brand awareness
Awareness relates to how your brand can (or does) stand out and apart from its competitors and rivals. Aside from advertising and marketing pushing basic awareness, the biggest thing I love to talk about with brand awareness is point of differentiation: what does your brand do differently that would make someone more aware of using it? What would attract someone who uses similar brands to even be aware of yours?
Good brand awareness means that brand reputation and recognition is strong, even if an audience is not actively engaging with your brand. This is exemplified best through Andrew Wendling’s project Make The Logo Bigger, where he enlarges logos and shows what brands are still clearly recognisable, whether you use their products and services or not.
In 1998 Google entered a saturated market of search engines with other such funky names like Yahoo, Altavista, Dogpile, Hotbot, AskJeeves and many more. Through Google’s simplified interface — a logo, text field and two buttons, one named “Google search” and “I’m feeling lucky” — and supercharged business logic, they managed to deliver a quicker and cleaner user experience which ended up revolutionising the search engine market and has sustained them as world leaders. The biggest takeaway from that is that saturated markets can still be ripe for the pickings as long as your brand has a point of differentiation which can cut through the noise of your competitors.
Awareness is again related to aesthetics, experience and perception. If your brand has a large following of dedicated customers, it can be potentially be exposed and perceived by a larger outlier audience who may be on the cusp of converting into customers. The factor of awareness — as in what your brand’s product, reputation, priorities, reliability or other such values are — contributes to exposure and potentially recall (how someone might remember your brand). Conversely, brands suffering from poor awareness or a negative reputation may be too similar (or too different, or too difficult) from what the market expects. Sometimes that awareness needs adequate tweaking through aesthetics and perception to get people to experience and spread the message about a brand’s offerings.
Some brands can swallow market awareness just by their sheer size. Adobe has managed to completely monopolise the consumer desktop publishing (DTP) and film editing software markets through strategic acquisitions, then through engineering feats solidify their software and brand as the industry standard. Almost all DTP programs these days open and save to the PSD or PDF format, and through yearly iterative releases Adobe introduce more features which require continual upgrades. Strategically speaking it has worked out well for them (same can be said for Microsoft’s Word and Excel). If even grandparents who use a computer once a week to email are suggesting you can “photoshop the wrinkles off their face”, it speaks volumes about how people can be made aware of a brand and their offerings.
Of course, most companies aren’t as big as Adobe and Microsoft and don’t have the financial clout to gobble up entire sectors of industry to improve their brand, but awareness can be engineered and sustained through a solid product/service, meaningful advertising, prompting your active and engaged audience to spread the good word through many other channels, and to manage those vocal dissenters through kick-ass customer service that can convert the most cynical complainer to a high-fivin’ happy chappy espousing the benefits of your brand. The emergence and prevalence of job roles like “evangelist” and “community relations manager” are indicators that managing a brand’s awareness is fundamental.
Everything is branding, brand is everything
To summarise, your brand should be built up on a determined and defined strategy and execution encompassing aesthetics, experience, perception and awareness. Through these four components they should each individually and in combination activate your operations, products, services, design and communications, and motivate your audience to engage and support your brand’s mission statement and purpose.
For all aspects of brand to align and interface correctly for maximum effect, a consistent framework and/or strategy should be employed and exercised to maximise your resources to ensure the sensibilities of your brand’s purpose are front and centre, well defined and cultivated to ensure your brand is one in a million.
