What is a brand?

As the owner of a business or startup, the subject of branding has probably come up in one or more conversations. If you’re like most people, the meaning of the word "brand" is fuzzy, and you might find yourself asking “what is a brand?” or “do I need a brand?”

Despite the fact that the word "brand" has become a near-meaningless buzzword, the concept is more important than ever in the crowded marketplace we all must do business in. So I wanted to try to tackle the question of “what is a brand?” once and for all, as well as related questions of what is brand-ing, how you go about building a brand, the benefits and challenges of branding and what kind of organization should invest in developing a meaningful brand.

What a brand isn’t

Before we get into what constitutes a brand, lets first talk a little about what it is not. You’ve probably heard this before, but I’m going to say it again: your logo is not your brand. A logo is simply one of your brand's assets—a hallmark. Your corporate colors, mascot or product or company name are also not your brand. These items are all important identifiers of your brand, but they are not the brand itself. A brand is not actually a tangible thing—it is a concept.

So what is a brand?

If you’ve done any reading or research about the concept of branding, you know that there seem to be a lot of ways to define what is a brand. Here are a few of the clearest and most concise definitions of a brand that I have read:

• A brand is “a person’s gut feeling about a product, service, or company.” — Marty Neumeier

• A brand is “a singular idea or concept that you own inside the mind of a prospect.” — Al Reis

• A brand is “a promise wrapped in an experience.” — Charlie Hughes and William Jeanes

• A brand is “the set of characteristics that arise in a customer’s mind when that person hears your name.” — Bill Chiaravalle

• A brand is “a container for a customer’s complete experience with the product or company.” — Sergio Zyman

• A brand is “a methodical influence on the creation of beliefs in the consumer's mind.” — Dan Herman

Basically, a brand is your customer’s perception of you. It is an intangible concept—your audience's emotions and feelings toward you. As Marty Neumeier has famously said: “a brand is not what you say it is. It's what they (your customers) say it is.”

What is branding?

So if a brand is what your customer or audience thinks about you, branding is the process of shaping and influencing that perception. The fact is that your organization already is a brand—meaning, your customer already has an opinion of you—it is just up to you whether you choose to be involved in purposefully shaping those thoughts.

You shape your audience's perception by designing the experience associated with your organization. Other synonyms for branding would be signaling, positioning, or as defined by Debbie Millman, “deliberate differentiation.” As reflected in Millman's statement, branding requires a great deal of intentionality.

How do I build a brand?

If branding is deliberate differentiation, then you must start your brand development by identifying how you intend to be different. Notice I said "how you intend to be different" not just "how you are different." Differentiation is not a given, you must search it out.

The first step to discovering your difference is to identify your purpose for being in business. Once you know your purpose, you can identify your organizational beliefs and define the style by which you conduct business. These items—purpose, beliefs and style—make up the foundation of your brand. If the term foundation isn't clear enough, you can also think of these qualities as the skeleton or DNA of your brand. Your brand foundation is the concept (you know, the intangible concept referenced earlier) that you want to reflect to the world.

Your brand foundation is only one half of the equation though. Once you understand your foundation, you must develop a plan for acting on that concept. It is this action, or experience, that brings the brand to life for your customer. Your brand experience is built from visuals, words and interactions that are designed to demonstrate your organization's purpose, beliefs and style.

You must consistently reflect your foundational principles through each point of contact with your customers in order to influence their perception of your organization in their mind.

What are the challenges of branding?

The benefits of branding are many (we'll get to that in a minute), but it is not for the lazy or short-sighted. Building a meaningful brand is hard (but potentially very rewarding) work. Here are a few challenges you'll need to be prepared to face:

• Your brand vision has to come from the top. The leadership of your organization must be intimately involved with the development and execution of the brand (down to even the most seemingly insignificant aspects of the business). You have to actually have beliefs to build on. Identification of your purpose and beliefs requires a lot of soul-searching that not everyone is prepared to take on.

• You'll be forced to find your uniqueness (or face your lack thereof). Branding is deliberate differentiation, so you'll need to search out those differentiators, and if you can't find them you may need to pivot onto a different path that is less traveled.

• It only works if it is authentic. Customers will see right through you if you're not authentic. This means you might need to face the fact that what you actually are isn't what you want to be, and from there you'll need to decide whether to make a change or find a unique angle on your current qualities.

• It is never done. Not only must you always be intentional in how you present the brand, but it is natural for your brand to evolve little by little over time and you must remain in-tune to those changes and realign continually.

• You will have to say no sometimes. Once you put a stake in the ground, you will realize that not all opportunities or decisions align with your beliefs. Things that may very well work for other organizations might no longer be a good fit for yours. You'll need to make tough decisions in order to deliver on the promise you've made with your brand.

• Your customers will hold you to a higher standard. The stronger your brand, the greater your customers' expectations will be. They'll be rocked by any piece of your experience that is not on-brand, and they will let you know about it. Let this feedback challenge and fuel you to become an even better organization.

• It is an investment. One of the driving principles behind branding is building value for your customers, and developing value is rarely the cheapest way to go. Not only must you invest a great deal of your own time and energy into it, but you'll need professional help with execution, and gone are the days of simply picking the cheapest production option and running with it. All of these items require consideration now, but those considerations will pay off in the long run.

• It is a long game. It takes time and there isn't always a metric to track it. But I challenge you to watch your numbers over time, and you should see long-term gains in customer loyalty, referrals, and profit margins.

What are the benefits of branding?

Yes, that was a long list of potential hurdles, but the benefits of branding are powerful. Consider this: when you invest in building a brand, you create something your customers can believe in. They believe in you because they find a reflection of themselves or who they want to be in you. Finding a reflection of yourself in a product or service translates to fierce loyalty, and loyalty is pretty much the pièce de résistance of any sales strategy. But it gets even better than that: loyalty is an indicator of value, which typically produces a nice side effect in the ability to command a premium price because your customers place a higher value on your product or service than they do on your competitors' products or services.

How do I know if I need to build a brand?

Let’s call a spade a spade: not every organization needs to build a brand. If you sell a commodity product or service and have no desire to put in the work to innovate your way out of that position, then branding is not for you. When you sell a commodity, you are signing up for a race to the bottom on price, and branding has no horse in that race. However, industries that have long been labeled as commodities are rapidly spawning new upstarts that are finding ways to compete on true value, so you may not be stuck in the commodity game if you don't want to be.

On the flip side, if you sell a product or service that is rooted in creating true value for your customer, then branding is for you. You will want to take a look at the foundations of your organization and make an honest judgment on whether you can identify a true area (or multiple areas) of differentiation. Once you've identified your differentiator(s), you need to question whether they are being reflected in your customer's experience or if you need to put work into better defining the experience of the brand to be more memorable. If you're wedged into a crowded market, you might look to brand development to differentiate you from the pack, or if you look around at your competitors and can't see any evidence of a strong brand presence within their organizations, then you could be sitting on a prime opportunity to develop a meaningful brand own your market in the eyes of your customer.

Remember, your customers are developing their perception of your organization right at this moment. Now that you have a better understanding of branding—have you done anything lately to shape that perception, and ensure it is accurate and memorable?

More info link urls

• Logo vs. brand by Seth Godin

• Where style and substance meet by Studio Science

• Stop mismanaging your brands by Steve McKee

• What Breakfast at Tiffany’s can teach us about branding by Strong Design

• Why your brand is more important than your product by Entrepreneur Magazine

• Brand is a 4-Letter Word by Austin McGhie [Book]

• The Brand Gap by Marty Neumeier [Book]

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Design dictionary

Understanding all of the terms that are used throughout a design project isn't always easy, yet it is hard to fully engage in the process if you aren't understanding all of the terms.  To help clarify them, we compiled this little design dictionary with some brief descriptions that will help you understand some of the most common terms and concepts we use throughout a project.

Select the term you're interested in learning more about from the list below:

White space

CMYK color

RGB color

Spot color (PMS color)

CMS

Hierarchy

Minimum Viable Product (MVP)

What is white space?

White space refers to the part of a design layout that is devoid of type, graphics, or any other information or ornamentation. White space doesn't have to be white in color, it could be black, subtly textureded, or any other color, the main criteria is that it is simply an area that does not contain information. White space is important because it is used to subconsciously guide a reader's eyes through a design. It gives readers a place to rest and restore their eyes in order to continue absorbing your information with more focus and guides them through your content by accentuating the information that is adjacent to it.

What is CMYK color?

CMYK color is used primarily for the printing process. The acronym CMYK stands for Cyan (bright blue), Magenta (bright pink), Yellow and Black, which are the four colors of ink used in 4-color process printing. During the printing process, these colors are printed over one another at varying opacities in order to produce a broad spectrum of colors. When the inks are printed onto paper, they are absorbed into the paper. Because the color is absorbed, the CMYK color spectrum is not as broad as the RGB color spectrum. It is important to note that the calibration of the press that will be printing your piece can vary, so if you want to try to keep a color consistent across multiple printed pieces you will want to be sure to stick with one print vendor, and if possible, have the pieces printed on the same printing press. If you are especially particular about having a certain color printed consistently, you may wish to look into printing using a spot color.

What is RGB color?

The RGB color space is used primarily on screen, and you probably encounter it the most when viewing websites. The acronym RGB stands for Red, Blue, and Green, which are the colors of light that are combined to render an extremely broad spectrum of colors. The RGB color space can produce a greater quantity of colors because the colors are created from light sources, and no color is absorbed by a substrate such as paper. Because of this, brighter colors can also often be produced using RGB than with CMYK. RGB color can be rendered differently based on the screen that it is displayed on because it is impossible to control the calibration on the many, many screens throughout the world that may be displaying your website. Like all things web-related, we need to simply accept that when working with the web there will be slight differences in color across different screens and browsers.

What is a spot color?

A spot color is a color selected from the Pantone Matching System (abbreviated as a PMS color). Pantone produces a large palette of colors (the Matching System) using very specific pigment recipes, as well as printing inks that match up with each number in the palette, which they sell to printers as pre-mixed inks. Printers use these inks in their presses to consistently print a specific color. These inks are referred to as spot colors, because they are best for printing solid areas of color (a specific spot), and would not be desirable to use when printing an image that involves several ink colors overlaid (such as a photo).

What is a CMS?

The acronym CMS stands for Content Management System, which is a type of software that helps you manage the content that makes up your website. Depending on the needs of your website, your content can be made up of copy, images, videos, audio clips, or PDF downloads. CMS systems have become incredibly popular because they actually enable you to update a lot of your own copy and images on your website in a way that doesn't require you to know much—if anything—about code. That means, when your phone number or address changes, you don't need to bother to call your designer or web developer to fix it for you—you can simply log in to your CMS "backend" system and change it yourself! Although a CMS doesn't enable you to make larger-scale layout changes, the fact that you can make a lot of these smaller changes yourself can translate to a lot less hassle and a lot more cost savings for you!

What is hierarchy?

In terms of design, hierarchy refers to the visual order of importance of a set of elements within a layout. Basically, hierarchy is prioritization. It helps guide readers through information by visually showing them what is the most important. The more information included in a design, the more important hierarchy becomes because users can only process small amounts of information at one time. If you find yourself having trouble "knowing where to look" or processing a layout, there is a good chance it is due to a lack of hierarchy. The first step to achieving hierarchy is defining the main point you hope to convey within a layout. This step is tough because often people try to have multiple "main messages" within a layout. However, it is important to determine the one most important goal. This doesn't mean you can't provide multiple kinds of information, but trying to make many things "the main thing" is completely counterintuitive to achieving hierarchy. Once you know the most important goal, you can consider your additional goals and prioritize them in decreasing order.

What is a minimum viable product?

A minimum viable product is the most basic form of your product or service needed to launch your business. This is an important concept to a startup because, in the course of launching a brand or website, the scope of your product can easily snowball as you dream up more and more features, pushing out your business launch and delaying the ability to start bringing money back into the business. Focusing on the concept of a minimum viable product is important to getting the product up-and-running and moving towards profitability because it requires that "nice to haves" be set aside in favor of focusing on fine-tuning the product's core capability to speed along development and the product launch. A business or product will always be evolving, and a strong business will perfect its core service and functionality first, before carefully implementing additional features and benefits that further strengthen the product.

What is design?

A few months ago, there was been an incredible website, Start-Ups, This Is How Design Works, circling through social media. The mission of the site is clear: teach start-ups why they should value design. This got me thinking that maybe we should address that topic in our own way here on the blog.

Throughout the years, design has gotten a reputation as the profession of making things "look pretty." But what is design, really? While it is always a designer's mission to make a piece as aesthetically appealing as possible—and don't get me wrong, this is a very important quality for your brand to have as well—design is much deeper than that.

At its core, design is about solving problems

The real function of a designer is to help solve communication problems and make things usable for your audience. A designer's mission is not simply to make a piece look pleasant, but to help make it communicate the proper message to the intended audience. This means that a great designer won't simply take design orders, but will push back when things don't make sense and will try to realign the project when necessary in order to help it work as well as possible.

Aesthetic appeal + usability = win

Please don't take this message to mean that aesthetics are not important. They are incredibly important to creating a rich experience for your customer, and typically that is heavily influenced by the aesthetics of your brand. However, it is important to remember that no amount of aesthetic design will make a bad experience a good one, so it is critical to allow design to permeate the appearance of your project and into the way it actually works so that you can to provide the best experience for your audience.

What is a design revision?

When we create an estimate for you, you'll usually see some sort of reference to a number of revisions that are included with your project. We believe iteration is important to the design process, and although not every design requires revision, often it can produce a tighter, more unique design in the end, but is a design revision exactly?

In order to provide you with the most accurate estimate possible, we do have to draw up revision parameters associated with the project cost. The number of revisions included with your project will be outlined right on the estimate for your project, and you can always add more revisions on an hourly cost basis.When it comes to revising your piece, you might be wondering what exactly constitutes a revision. After all, it is a pretty open-ended term. A revision constitues a change or variation to an initially presented—or in-progress—design concept, and is typically a change of less than 1/4 of the design. A revision is simply meant to be a slight modification or course correction to progress toward the final design. A new design concept is not considered a revision. This means that a new design concept would be an addition to the project, and would need to be estimated separately, in addition to the current project estimate.

What is a brand; the sequel

We've written a previous post in an attempt to define branding using an illustration from Breakfast at Tiffany's, however we wanted to write a companion post in hopes to clarify branding a bit more.

Although we help people build their brands all day and all night, it is always tough to describe it when someone asks "what is a brand?" so we've been working on finding a better way to explain this infinitely important concept in a way that is simple and easy to understand. Here's what we've come up with: A brand is a perception.

In context of your organization, a brand is the perception a customer has of your company. Similarly, in context of yourself personally, a brand is the perception someone has of your character. There are two components of a brand: your internal brand and your external brand.

Internally, your brand is who you are at the core—it must be intentionally formed throughout your culture by continually upholding your established values.

Externally, your brand is the impression (or perception) that a customer or prospective customer has of your company.

Weak brands stem from an internal brand that is undefined, unremarkable, and maybe even just plain negative. Because their internal brand is so weak there is nothing to leverage into a memorable experience for their customers. Therefore their customers' perceptions of these companies are that they are vague, boring, or putting on a show (that they quickly see-through). This type of experience is off-putting for a customer and doesn't inspire customers to fall in love with your product or service.

Powerful brands find their strength in first building, strong, remarkable internal brands and then taking deliberate steps to demonstrate that brand throughout each touchpoint with a customer or prospective customer. By deliberately infusing their brand through every interaction—including their logo, website, marketing materials, office decor, customer service, etc.—these companies' customers experience a strong, consistent, memorable perception of what truly drives this organization. This type of experience is a delight for your customer and leaves them hungry for more of your product or service (and often willing to pay a premium for it).

Here at Strong Design, we work hard to further our clients brands. We do this by taking the time to learn about our clients' brands and designing each of their marketing pieces to help accurately shape a customer's perception of them and align the external perception of the company with the remarkable brand that lies within.