Why branding needs a different rap.
I just read an article called “The Basics of Branding” in Entrepreneur Magazine. Quite frankly, it made me mad. As an entrepreneur, I want the best advice I can get. This time I felt cheated.
I don’t mean to be dismissive of the author in the article I refer to below, who actually presents many good points about branding, but since the basic premises are far off, I cannot help suggesting that we need to rethink what branding actually means. This article is no different than 99% of branding literature and advice our there, as a matter of fact.
As I have made it my mission to change the perceptions and practices of branding in order to help people and businesses leverage its true potential, I wish I could erase every line of text from the internet that suggests that a brand is something physical, something you can see or touch.
Your brand’s foundation is NOT the logo, and branding is NOT about stamping it everywhere you can, as suggested here. Actually, far from it.
This thinking might have worked during the Industrial age, if ever, but no longer. Branding that only encompasses visual and verbal communications, increasingly fails to differentiate and boost value.
If you agree with me that a brand is a set of perceptions that people have about a product, service, company or person, then I also hope you agree that brandING encompasses anything you do to affect those perceptions. To think that only logos, styling, slogans or messaging works to differentiate businesses in 2017, well, that’s just naive.
As the competitive battleground has shifted from products to experiences, successful branding requires more of a company than the help of a few designers or a marketing department. Designing, orchestrating and delivering differentiating, meaningful experiences coherently over time places new demands on organisational design and culture. It takes massive work. Brand work always involves integration between disciplines, from strategy and culture to innovation and marketing, and beyond. To focus only on the external simply does not work. Company culture is the biggest opportunity and the worst obstacle of branding, depending on how it works out for you. Whenever branding only involves communications or marketing, the odds are that branding fails to deliver.
What we need is to start changing how we view branding, and how we practice it. It is perhaps the most critical aspect of business today, because it deals with how customers experience and perceive us, and that directly affects behaviour (which translates into sales, social media behaviour, word-of-mouth etc.).
The most successful brands today understand that their brand is their business, and their business is their brand.
You can read the Entrepreneur article I am referring to here.
