The term branding is used interchangeably with logo design, identity design, and even sometimes typography and perhaps we need to set a record directly. I know you are the best person to tell us what brand Marty is? Yes. So let’s start with what the brand is not. Good.
Because not many things people say that. It’s not a slogan. A logo is a very useful tool for a business, but it is not a brand. It is a symbol of the brand. A brand is not a product.
So when people talk about this brand buying this brand or that brand we are talking about buying one product or another product. The brand is not. People say the brand promise a company delivers to customers and there is some truth to that. I mean it eventually works and is promised, but that’s not what it is either. People like to advertise, “Well it’s the sum of all the impressions that a company creates for the public.
” You know well if you’re trying to sell a lot of impressions I can see where that might be useful to you.
But from a business perspective why would they want that? How does this help creative people understand what they are doing? So none of these things are really what the brand is. The brand is the result.
It is a customer’s gut feeling about a product, service or company. It ends in their heads and in their hearts. They take whatever raw materials you throw at them and make something out of it, but they make it. They make it. So in a sense when you create a brand you don’t create one brand, you create millions of brands like but many customers or people in your audience.
Each one has a different brand. So the brand has a reputation. right. So it’s the reputation of your business and everyone will be a little different from this reputation. That’s okay as long as you get it surrounded mostly where you want it and it’s good for the company.
So we tend to look at companies and designers tend to look at branding as, from our perspective, like this is something that we do. We tell a story. We claim. Do you know that we do that and that’s what we do. But that’s not what the brand is.
The brand is the result of this. And if you don’t start there, you don’t know what you’re doing. Actually you don’t know. Thank you, you know what you’re doing but you don’t do it. So from a designer’s perspective I’m always meant to be that way as I just had it, it was my gut feeling.
right? About whether this will work or not. And then I’ll sell it so hard that the customer can sign off on it.
From the customer’s perspective, they’re off the checklist. I got the logo, I got the tag line, I got the ad campaigns.
Check! And I think they are finished. None of this is true. you know? What is true is what happens in people’s heads.
Like what we have achieved? What reputation we create through the products we put out, the product design, the messages we put out, the look and feel of them, our culture. you know? How does this affect people? How do our employees behave, you know, how does that affect our reputation?
All those materials count.
So it’s a big world. And almost everything actually takes work. Not so much finance but finance is also involved because finance has to highlight all these things. But almost everyone in the company is you know, influencing the brand, doing something with the brand, doing it for the brand, or hurting the brand.
So you have to think about it this way. I didn’t want to say a word because this was perfect and unscripted. Marty speaks only from these decades of experience, writing, and expression . It’s very clear to me..
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