Your Brand Is Not Your Logo!
A long time ago, a high-school teacher of mine gave me wise advice: “Don’t choose a profession that has a complex name. If you can’t explain what you do to your grandma, chances are most people won’t understand.” Sometimes I wonder what would happen had I listened to her.
I’ve been a brand consultant for almost two decades. Still, I am having difficulty explaining what I do to people. To give you an idea, recently a designer friend recommended a client of hers to me. We had a phone call, during which I answered some of his strategic questions. 45 minutes into our conversation, he dropped the bomb: “I still don’t understand the difference between what you do and what your designer friend does.”
When I tell people that I am a brand strategist, they either think I design logos, register trademarks or write taglines. Truth be told, I can’t really blame them; the brand is an often-used, seldom-understood word.
When people use the word ‘brand’, they might be referring to a whole bunch of concepts: Identity, image, logo, or name, to name a few. Why?
Because consultants keep creating terms such as brand differentiation, brand champions, brand essence, brand culture, brand mission, brand partnership, brand portfolio management -and one of my favorites- brand rally. After a while, the word brand becomes an article like “the” or “a:” it becomes invisible.
That reminds me of the old Batman TV show. There was a Bat version of everything. Batman and Robin had a Batmobile; they lived in the Batcave; they had Batearplugs to protect their ears. They even had a Bat Spray to repel sharks. As you can imagine, the Bat prefix got tiring, repetitive, and also confusing after a while -just like the brand did.
So what is a brand? Let’s get this out of the way.
Your logo is not your brand. Neither is your name or your trademark.
While there are as many different definitions of a brand as there are brand strategists, probably the most commonly agreed-upon description is this:
“A brand is a promise.”
A promise of a relationship and a guarantee of quality. That’s an appropriate analogy. For your customers to be interested in you, you must first promise them something. As an example, a shampoo could promise a functional benefit (makes your hair more manageable), or a sensorial benefit (has a crunchy texture), or an expressive benefit (makes the user look nonconformist), or an emotive benefit (makes the user feel sexual.)
That said, giving a promise is not enough. Every time your customers come into contact with your brand, you must deliver on your promise! What differentiates a good brand from a mediocre one is how it delivers on its promise at critical touchpoints.
If you fail to deliver on your promise, you might end up in a worst place than you started. After all, as the saying goes, “Nothing kills a bad product faster than good advertising!”
