What is Branding?

Marty Neumeier, who is considered the Father of Branding, describes Branding to Chris Do as:

• Branding is not a logo. A logo is a very useful tool for business but it's not the brand. It's a symbol for the brand.
• Branding is not a product. Customers may buy this product or that product, but that is not a brand.
• Branding is not a promise that the company makes to customers. Although branding ends up acting as a promise, it is not that either.
• Branding is not the sum of all impressions that a company makes on an audience.

A brand is a result. It's a customer's gut feeling about a product, service, experience or a company. It ends up in their heads, in their hearts. They take whatever raw materials you throw at them & they make something out of it. They're making it, they're creating it and so in a sense, when you are creating a brand, you're not creating one brand, you're creating millions of brands, like however many or people in your audience. Each one has a different brand of you.

So a brand is a like a reputation, your business reputation, and everyones going to be a little bit different about what that reputation is and that's OK as long as you have it corralled mostly where you want it and that it's beneficial to the company.

We tend to look at companies like: This is something we're doing, we're telling a story, we're making a client, we're making a pitch and that's what we do. But that's not what a brand is, a brand is the result of that and if you don't start there, you don't know what you're doing. You think you know what you're doing but you don't.

From a designers point of view, it's a gut feeling about whether its going to work or not and then they sell it as hard as they can to get the client to sign off on it.

From the clients point of view, they're like it's a checklist, I got the logo, I got the tagline, I got the ad campaign. Check, check and they think they're done.

None of that is right, what's right is:

• What happens in people's heads?
• What does the brand achieve?
• What's the reputation that a brand achieves through the products they put out, the design of the products, the messaging, the look and feel of them?
• A brands culture, how does that affect people?
• How do the brands employees behave? How is that affecting the brands reputation?

All of the above counts, and so it's a big world and it actually takes in almost all of business, not so much finance, but finance is involved to as finance has to green light all these things.

Almost everyone in a company is affecting the brand, doing something with the brand, doing it for the brand or hurting the brand.

Consult the guide below to learn more about what it takes to create a brand or rebrand an existing one.

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