Have we written everything there is to be said about branding?
Charles Bukowski once said, “Writing about writer’s block is better than not writing at all.” I ran out of things to write about, for Slangbusters Branding Studio, and I wondered, is there anything unsaid about branding at all?
I started my career in the branding industry only less than 2 years ago. I came in with a clean slate and probably thought of branding just like I thought of advertising or marketing. Having a bachelor’s degree in mass communication (frankly, where I should have been taught about this) didn’t help either. As soon as I joined Slangbusters, my job for the first month or two was to get acquainted with what industry is and the philosophy of branding. I read the best books there are, starting from “The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding” by Al and Laura Ries, “Brand Thinking” by Debbie Millman, “The Brand Gap” by Marty Neumeier and the holy grail, the textbook, the Bible of branding, “Designing Brand Identity” by Alina Wheeler.
From this extensive reading, I learned about the industry, the process, and a ton of branding jargon that brought me up to speed about the concept of branding and equipped me with the basic knowledge to start writing about it. Through the Slangbusters brand brief, I learned about their vision, values, philosophy, process, and the most important voice and tonality of the brand. I even subscribed to a bunch of good blogs that wrote about branding and identity design. I used to read them in the morning when I checked my email and then write about our thoughts as a part of the branding industry.
Usually, it was easier for me to find topics to write about as I overheard my colleagues and teammates talking at the studio, client calls, reports that we submitted to the management and this added the Slangbusters touch to the articles that we published. I wrote about issues that we actually faced, questions that we actually wondered about, and insights that we reached ourselves through a variety of processes.
50 days into quarantine (Yes, I keep count) and hence, work from home, my only source of industry updates were the blogs I had subscribed to. Yet, I faced what I thought was the writer’s block indefinitely. I then wondered, am I making a difference by writing about something that might’ve already been published? Is everything that needed to be said about branding already written?
There are hundreds of research papers, books, and magazines, thousands of videos and podcasts and if I am not exaggerating, millions of blog pieces are written about branding. According to the popular SEO tool Moz, when checked on the day this blog was published, the keyword “branding” has about 30.3k monthly search volume, which means it has been searched more than thirty thousand times, every month. Imagine the number of people writing about it to attract these curious souls on their website.
Yes, since the internet is the most democratic sphere out there, there are a number of people who write about a number of things, regardless of their knowledge about it and become the epicenters of misinformation.
In such an overwhelmed sphere, putting out more words seemed pointless.
I went to the studio and brought back some of the books that I had read when I joined Slangbusters. I thought, maybe reading them again would give me more knowledge than they did when I read them the first time. Unsurprisingly, it did. I realized, if branding is anything, it is a method that will highlight the uniqueness of an idea and position it differently from the other. Branding is about targeting that specific group of individuals and maybe create a favorable community out of them, instead of attracting masses. I realized, even though there are a gazillion words written about branding, maybe my word will say it better than the rest, and a business will benefit from my analogy. Maybe my words will help another branding agency putting things in perspective. Maybe my words will help an entrepreneur put trust in Slangbusters to brand her idea.
In any case, the Slangbusters motto is, We Explain Better. I ought to do that. Even if everything is already published out there in regards to branding, I have to put it in the Slangbusters perspective.
