If you’re like a lot of my clients, you’ve been in this meeting:
“Blah blah blah . . . branding . . . blah blah blah . . . the brand . . . blah blah . . . build the brand . . . blah blah blah . . . your brand.”
This is the meeting where some consultant tries to tell you how he’s going to build, enhance and/or protect your brand.
Ever wonder what that means?
What Is A Brand? (In English)
Brand (n): the identity of a specific product, service, or business.
Too vague? A little etymology might help. The word “brand” comes from the practice of branding livestock. Yeah, with a hot poker. Because a body’s got to know when he’s got his neighbor’s cow.
So, your brand is everything that lets people know that you are you and not, say, your most irritating competitor. Specifically, the brand usually includes the company name, the logo, a color combination, a tagline, and overall look and feel.
Great, More Marketing-Speak
“Look and feel” refers to general design guidelines, supporting graphical elements, and font and photo selection. Your look and feel is a set of established standards your designer follows so that all your stuff looks like it came from the same place.
If you’re a writer, you can think of look and feel as the visual equivalent of voice. In fact, look and feel and voice work together to create a feeling in the reader. Hopefully that feeling is that they want to buy!
The reason people have a hard time wrapping their heads around the concept of look and feel is that most people don’t even notice that it exists, and that’s okay. If you notice the look and feel, you might be a designer, or the piece might be trying too hard.
An Example
Check out www.annbevans.com to review some of the elements of our brand. The orange circle with the ab on the side is our logo. Next to the logo is our text mark (“Ann Bevans Collective”). Our color combination is orange and gray, and the look and feel includes whimsical design elements such as several very entertaining caricatures of me! In fact, “whimsy” as a concept is part of our look and feel, as is “smart-aleckiness.”
So What’s Branding?
If the brand is your identity, what is branding?
Branding is the process of imprinting your brand on other people’s brains. You want people, especially people in your target market, to be so familiar with your brand that they automatically connect it with you, even where no overt connection exists.
Branding happens every time your brand is presented to a person. If the person is new to your brand, he will establish a new, fairly flimsy connection. If he’s seen your brand before, he will strengthen that connection and incorporate any new information. It’s a bit like going over a pencil line in ball point pen.
This happens whether the context of your message is a sales pitch, media coverage, or a billboard. Sometimes you control the context and sometimes you don’t. Branding may or may not be hitched to a promotion, special offer or other call to action, but the mechanism applies either way.
The key to successful branding? A topic for another time, but here’s a clue: repetition, repetition, repetition.
Look at you, all smarter than you were five minutes ago!
January 18, 2011 at 7:42 am |
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