New Tradition

Pic­ture: Vit­torio Sciosia

If you read my pre­vi­ous post you’ll know that it was sug­ges­ted that I put together a blog post which helped explain the dif­fer­ence between brand and brand­ing. I set out to address the ques­tion by say­ing the dis­tinc­tion between the two was that

• brand­ing enables people to recog­nise and under­stand how to nav­ig­ate your business’s goods, ser­vices and organisation;
• brand is the con­sequence of how you go about doing what you do.

In this post I’ll dig a bit deeper into the sug­ges­ted defin­i­tion of brand­ing.

The cau­tion­ary note is that I’m attempt­ing to explain the dis­tinc­tion and why I think there’s ambi­gu­ity over the dif­fer­ence. I’m not claim­ing to be provid­ing an exhaust­ive defin­i­tion of either or both!

Hav­ing said that, let’s clear up one fairly com­mon mis­ap­pre­hen­sion straightaway:

A logo isn’t a brand

It’s a brand mark.

And a brand mark is sym­bolic; it is applied to visu­ally mark out the bound­ar­ies of a business’s ter­rit­ory and clearly dis­tin­guish it from altern­at­ive pro­viders of sim­ilar goods and services.

(In fact, the word ‘logo’ is pop­ularly assumed to derive from the Greek word ‘logos’ mean­ing a char­ac­ter or sym­bol which rep­res­ents a word or phrase.)

No mat­ter how soph­ist­ic­ated mar­keters like to think that we are these days, it’s a prac­tice that’s as old as the human race itself.

As a spe­cies, it seems, we just can’t help mark­ing what belongs to us, whether it’s con­veyed as a brand mark on a product or is emblem­atic of a nation of people in the form of a flag; whether it’s a sheep’s fleece branded with a farmer’s ini­tials (which explains the tenu­ous con­nec­tion with the image at the top of this post) or a sign over a shop.

Each of us has also been given our own brand marks by our par­ents — our names — which we uniquely express via our signatures.

So, for busi­nesses, effect­ive brand marks serve to sym­bol­ic­ally rep­res­ent the proven­ance of an entity — whether that’s phys­ical, intel­lec­tual or vir­tual — in a man­ner which is both unique and dis­tinct­ive enough to dis­tin­guish itself from com­par­able altern­at­ives. It doesn’t neces­sar­ily fol­low that they have to be beau­ti­fully designed.

In fact, for a busi­ness, what really mat­ters is the capa­city of a brand mark to help exist­ing or poten­tial con­sumers of a business’s goods and ser­vices to recog­nise the busi­ness and react to its pres­ence, prefer­ably in a pos­it­ive way.

Whether they do respond to it pos­it­ively or not will depend, not on its brand mark or brand­ing per se, but on what that brand mark or brand­ing rep­res­ents — and that’s the brand thing.

So if that’s a brand mark, what’s branding?

Where they’re used, brand marks gen­er­ally form part of a suite of brand­ing ele­ments — like the use of col­our, fonts, phys­ical mater­i­als, pic­tures and imagery or icon­o­graphy — whose applic­a­tion to items like pack­aging, print, sta­tion­ery, phys­ical space and sig­nage is gov­erned by guidelines.

Des­pite the fact that applic­a­tion of brand­ing enables busi­nesses to mark out the bound­ar­ies of their ter­rit­ory, its prin­cipal pur­pose is to make it as easy as pos­sible for con­sumers to find their way to a trans­ac­tional point — whether that’s a trans­ac­tion involving money, ser­vice or information.

Brand­ing trans­lates your busi­ness and what it does into some­thing that is mean­ing­ful, under­stand­able and use­ful for the out­side world.

If the brand­ing ele­ments are applied appro­pri­ately and con­sist­ently wherever con­sumers encounter it, not only will they encour­age recog­ni­tion and under­stand­ing of the rel­ev­ance of a brand but, over time, it may be pos­sible to acquire a brand­ing state of grace — con­sumers intu­it­ively recog­nise your brand­ing whether the brand mark is vis­ible or not.

But brand­ing isn’t con­fined to just one of the five senses, the other four are fair game too.

For instance, have you ever walked past a Sub­way? It’s got an instantly recog­nis­able and dis­tinct­ive aroma hasn’t it? In fact, you can often smell a Sub­way before you see it and recog­nise that there’s a Sub­way nearby.

And how about Play-Doh? Or Cray­ola cray­ons? (You may not have encountered the last two for years, but you prob­ably just
recalled the smell.)

What about the little Intel jingle? Or the repeated use of music in radio and TV advert­ising by brands like LloydsTSB or Brit­ish Gas?

No mat­ter the extent to which indi­vidual busi­nesses go to to ham­mer their point home, the prin­cipal func­tional pur­pose of brand­ing is to clearly mark out the bound­ar­ies and areas of its ter­rit­ory and help con­sumers find their way to a trans­ac­tional point.

But in per­form­ing its func­tion, brand­ing also has the capa­city to con­vey emo­tional attrib­utes too. And this is where the muddy waters begin to appear which, I’d argue, con­trib­ute to a mis­ap­pre­hen­sion about the dif­fer­ence between brand and branding.

So what were the reas­ons that led brand­ing to be used in this way?

The chan­ging mar­ket­place and evol­u­tion of branding

Once upon a time, busi­nesses were geo­graph­ic­ally con­fined and media was all but non-existent. How­ever, in Europe, the indus­trial revolu­tion changed all that.

Innov­a­tion in trans­port and com­mu­nic­a­tions opened up the oppor­tun­ity to both find new ways of sourcing mater­i­als, mak­ing and doing things, as well as trade your business’s goods or ser­vices in more than one location.

(It’s always worth remem­ber­ing that busi­nesses like Sainsbury’s, Mor­ris­ons and Tesco all star­ted out as a single shop or mar­ket
stall — Sainsbury’s in Drury Lane, Lon­don (right) and Wil­liam Morrisons’s mar­ket stall in Brad­ford. Jack Cohen’s Wall Street Mar­ket stall in Hack­ney, Lon­don, later became Tesco.)

By doing so, you were pitch­ing your business’s stall else­where in the midst of estab­lished com­pet­it­ors who already offered the same goods and ser­vices that you did. At the same time, new names were pop­ping up on your patch in your own marketplace.

That opens up a new front in the com­pet­i­tion for atten­tion, even among cus­tom­ers whose pat­ron­age you had pre­vi­ously enjoyed.

When that com­pet­i­tion for con­sumer atten­tion extends bey­ond the bound­ar­ies of your phys­ical envir­on­ment — thanks to the pro­lif­er­a­tion of both national and inter­na­tional broad­cast and print media, and increased trad­ing across inter­na­tional bor­ders — the accom­pa­ny­ing com­mer­cial clam­our and noise presents you with two prob­lems: how to secure a dis­tinct­ive and sus­tain­able repu­ta­tion and — if it’s your inten­tion to do so — how to grow your business.

In the face of increas­ing com­pet­i­tion, the recog­ni­tion of your busi­ness via its brand mark is one thing, but help­ing con­sumers under­stand what it rep­res­ents is some­thing else entirely; it could be the dif­fer­ence between buy­ing or not buy­ing your brand’s goods and services.

The likely source of con­fu­sion: The road to emo­tional branding

Let’s sup­pose your busi­ness couldn’t con­sist­ently com­pete on the basis of price. It had to be able to con­vey ideas on which it could com­pete and which con­sumers would instinct­ively recog­nise and value; things like qual­ity, ori­gin­al­ity, ser­vice, sup­port and innov­a­tion, for instance.

Of course brand­ing can’t, itself, make the slight­est bit of dif­fer­ence to the intrinsic value of a good or ser­vice, because it only serves to rep­res­ent those qual­it­ies by help­ing express what a busi­ness does.

(To assuage the design­ers who will dis­agree with that last state­ment, I’m talk­ing strictly about brand­ing here. In the next post I’ll be arguing that a con­sist­ent char­ac­ter­istic of great brands is their pur­suit of brand prin­ciples, of which inter­ac­tion design is one. But brand iden­tit­ies are a con­sequence of this and not the catalyst.)

But what brand­ing can do is seek to influ­ence people’s per­cep­tion of a brand.

It’s how, for instance, the brand­ing approach adop­ted by Dor­set Cer­eals helps it encour­age con­sumers — based on today’s pri­cing at sainsburys.co.uk, at least — to part with a couple more pence per 100g for its muesli com­pared with, say, Alpen’s ori­ginal Swiss recipe product.

On your next trip to the super­mar­ket, why not pick up both brands of cer­eal and com­pare the two based just on their respect­ive approaches to branding?

Com­pared to the Alpen pack­aging, you may notice that the tex­ture of Dor­set Cereals’s pack­aging is slightly rougher — sug­gest­ing an ‘earth­ier’ qual­ity com­pared to Alpen’s smoother packaging.

You can’t see Alpen’s muesli but you’re invited to look at Dor­set Cereals’s product thanks to trans­par­ent win­dows cut into the pack­aging — con­vey­ing the idea that this brand is both focused on the nutri­tional con­tent of its product and proud of it too.

Finally, the text mim­ics a type­writ­ten face and is impressed into the outer pack­aging (just run your fin­ger­tip across the type) which — whether you real­ise it or not — sug­gests each box is care­fully pack­aged and not mass produced.

Admit­tedly that’s a pretty curs­ory ana­lysis of the pack­aging, but do you think the brand­ing of the Dor­set Cer­eals product pulls its weight in con­vey­ing what’s dis­tinct­ive and unique about the brand? Is it enough to con­tem­plate part­ing with that extra couple of pence per 100g?

Whether you like muesli or hate it, the example serves to show that brand­ing design pos­sesses the capa­city to roam bey­ond its func­tional role and encom­pass an addi­tional role — employ­ing the senses to con­vey emo­tional ideas about the brand it represents.

The use and abuse of brand­ing as a means of con­vey­ing personality

It’s this capa­city of brand­ing to con­vey emo­tional ideas that’s given rise to the idea of ‘brand personality’.

And, since a brand’s per­son­al­ity is a fic­tions of its par­ent business’s ima­gin­a­tion, it’s also where the worlds of fic­tion and real­ity either har­mo­ni­ously con­verge or dis­cord­antly collide.

Through­out this post, I’ve been care­ful to say that brand­ing serves to help con­vey func­tional and emo­tional ideas about a busi­ness in order to trans­late and artic­u­late how its brand of goods and ser­vices help a wait­ing world. The prob­lem is that brand­ing can also be used to por­tray its brand of goods and services.

The moment a busi­ness lays claim to human qual­it­ies like ‘val­ues’ and ‘char­ac­ter­ist­ics’, and seeks to reflect those qual­it­ies through its brand­ing, it is tread­ing a fine line between con­vey­ing the char­ac­ter­ist­ics it really pos­sesses and por­tray­ing the ones that it wishes to be seen to be asso­ci­ated with.

The only prob­lem is that the way people seem to be, and the way they really are, can often be poles apart. And busi­nesses can be just the same.

The tempta­tion within busi­nesses is to artic­u­late a brand repu­ta­tion to which they aspire and imme­di­ately deploy all ele­ments of their mar­ket­ing com­mu­nic­a­tions armoury — includ­ing brand­ing — to por­tray acquis­i­tion of that pos­i­tion without even embark­ing on a strategy to change the way they do business.

But chan­ging the way you appear doesn’t change the way you are.

And its the super­fi­cial applic­a­tion of brand­ing to por­tray one thing rather than con­vey another, that is prob­ably where the con­fu­sion over the dis­tinc­tion between brand and brand­ing stems from.

It’s been com­poun­ded by the fact that — in the scrap for con­sumer atten­tion that is intens­i­fied by the scarcity of avail­able space in tra­di­tional media — busi­nesses opt for pro­mo­tional con­tent which car­ries claims that are littered with hyper­bole and neo­lo­gisms: to be first, to launch some­thing new, to improve on some­thing, to be award win­ning, to claim superi­or­ity over a competitor.

So I’d argue that — until recently — it’s been all to easy for busi­nesses to let its brand­ing do the leg­work and por­tray char­ac­ter­ist­ics of, for instance, ori­gin­al­ity or innov­a­tion, rather than go to the effort really being ori­ginal and innovative.

But brand­ing does not maketh the brand. Con­sumer exper­i­ence is the ulti­mate judge of the way brands really do business.

And the shift in the com­mu­nic­a­tions land­scape — which I’ve illus­trated pre­vi­ously in this present­a­tion at Slide­share — is already chan­ging the abil­ity for busi­nesses to fall back on present­a­tion to do the heavy lift­ing for sub-optimal operation.

Brand­ing can no longer be relied on to sus­tain reputation.

And, in the next post, I’ll pick on a brand in order to illus­trate exactly how its brand­ing appears to prom­ise more than its brand is really able to deliver. By doing so, I hope to con­clude the epic jour­ney to explain what I con­sider to be the dif­fer­ence between brand and branding.