Branding — The Most Polarizing B-word There Is
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve come across a brand, company, or individual who simply believes that by throwing up a few posts on social media, or name dropping through a collaboration, or designing the latest gear/recipe that they are winning the branding game.
The whole point of this article will be summed up right here (for those of you who want the meat of the story right at the top), your brand isn’t a logo, a list of bullet points, a symbol, a typeface, it’s your DNA — the fabric for which everything done will confirm or deny.
So, let us begin.
Everyone knows it’s important to have a strong brand but far too many people don’t know how or why you should have a strong brand, especially when it comes to marketing or growing a company.
Recently a friend of mine mentioned to me an amazing analogy for branding vs. marketing, which was,
“Branding is the bridge and roading for which the transportation of language (marketing) can comfortably go back and forth from brand to audience and vis versa.”
Having run a social media agency, worked as a social & brand strategist, and created content for numerous brands, it’s clear just how devestating the lack of knowledge of that quote can be. Because, for these brands, the people behind them, are the ones the suffer — the founders, employees, and the connections they’ve formed. They will never be able to reach what could be because they haven’t defined what should be.
The first step in creating, maintining, and/or solidifying a brand should be to sit down and answer these two questions:
- Why do you exist?
- Why should people care?
You should let them guide you into the depths of the soul of your brand. If you can do that concisely, latent with a depth, it will open up the floodgates of creativity for you.
For example, I just recently finished reading a book called “Sneakers” by Rodrigo Corral, Alex French, and Howie Kahn. In the book they featured one of my favorite footwear designers who works for Adidas named Paul Gaudio who mentioned a pivotal point in the life of Adidas.
He goes on to say this,
“A few years ago we underotok a massive effort, from one end of the organization to the other, to rethink who we are, what we do, and how we do it. We looked at how we were seperating ourselves into to two divisions: performance and style. As a company full of creatives people who love sport and design we looked in the mirror and said, ‘These two things aren’t separate. They’ve never been sperate. So, why are we separating them?’ What we came up with is that we exist to create. We exist to bring sport and creativity together. We decided to put that into the center of the conversation. How do creators think, feel, and act? They create their own path and they don’t ask permission.”
What Paul did was help the Adidas team realize that their brand was being pulled in two directions, instead of being unified under one, so they changed the conversation — key point being, they did it internally and let that permiate throughout the entire company.
The identity of a brand has to start from within. It’s the core of how everything should operate. It’s a simply complex idea that leads and governs every single thing a company does or doesn’t do. Period.
When you look at top brands like Adidas, Nike, BurBerry, Ralph Lauren, etc. they know their identity, and although, it does have to adapt to stay current with the times, the core identity will always be there.
So, find that idea, that message, and let that direct everything from the tagline, to the mantras, to the font, even to the type of office space that houses the company or the lighting used to illuminate the product.
Every little detail matters, every single one.
