The word “branding” is one of the most overused and misunderstood in business. Ask someone to tell you what a brand is and most will describe something visual – a logo, a label or an ad campaign. It’s a logical response, but the visual side of branding – the wonderful stuff we see around us every day – is only part of the story. If you really want to understand branding, you need to look deeper and go back several steps.
Marketing guru Seth Godin once described a brand as “the set of expectations, memories, stories and relationships that, taken together, account for a consumer’s decision to choose one product or service over another.”
OK, so Godin’s gone fairly deep there, but he’s also encapsulated matters neatly. In simple terms, a brand is the personality of a company, and branding is how that personality is expressed.
The visual side of branding that we’re all familiar with – logos, websites, advertising, social media profiles – are simply tools that a company uses to tell its brand story. The difference between good branding and bad branding is how well that story is told.
A smart branding agency will want to fully understand a client’s brand story before they even start to think about how that story should be told. Why? Because they’ll want the visuals that they create to tell that story honestly and accurately. It’s essential for the story to be authentic and believable if consumers are to buy into it.
The art of branding requires understanding a company’s DNA and identifying the qualities that make it unique. What are the personality traits that make it different from – and hopefully better than – similar firms in the same space?
When clients commission a branding agency, they’re often surprised to discover they have quite a journey ahead before they get to see any design work. The start of the process isn’t visual at all because the key to creating branding magic is contained in a single word: information.
As pioneering ad man David Ogilvy famously said: “Big ideas come from the unconscious. This is true in art, in science and in advertising. But your unconscious has to be well informed, or your idea will be irrelevant. Stuff your conscious mind with information, then unhook your rational thought process.”
Branding agencies crave information. They want to know about sensible stuff like the project timeline and the budget, but they also want the answers to a whole bunch of questions that may seem irrelevant. They’ll want answers to questions that you didn’t even think were questions. My advice? Be honest and open. Give them the answers. Don’t hold back.
Designers are information engineers. All they really do is take information and transform it into visual form. Give them great information and they can create great branding. Give them poor information and you could find yourself on a long and emotional journey to a large invoice.
Once the branding team has immersed itself in your story and understood it, it will distill its findings into a series of key messages, each of which will describe a facet of your brand personality. These key messages are the cornerstones of branding; they are the building blocks of your story. Once they’re agreed, they will influence everything that comes afterwards, from the colours of your brand identity and the style of your photography to the layout of your website and the content of your social media posts.
Ultimately, branding is about storytelling, and people only engage with stories that are authentic and believable. Understand the story, think about how you will tell it honestly, and the visuals will follow.