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Today we are starting from the very beginning: with Brands. We will just be defining and overlooking some high-level principles about them. I might do a branding step-by-step post later, but we need to be really clear about what brands are.
Now, let’s get to it.
What is a brand?
In the book Principles of Marketing (Philip Kotler/Gary Amstrong), a brand is defined as a "name, term, sign symbol (or a combination of these) that identifies the maker or seller of the product."
A brand, at its most basic and simple form, is equivalent to a person’s name. It is a data point of identity. You can use it to name a company, a movement, a theory, or pretty much anything abstract you want to talk about and eventually promote or present as something distinct from a potential set of alternatives.
The main function of a brand is to focus, consolidate, or package everything we can think of something. Everything we were told to think by them and everything we had been told or found ourselves about them.
At its most atomized version, brands are a simple sum:
brand = identity + reputation
A Brand allows you to tell people who you are.
Brands are meant to be unequivocal but not necessarily universal: this means that there is only one of you (as a person, as well as a brand if you are working in marketing), and you should be able to tell clearly (mostly) everyone who you are.
Unequivocal
For a brand to do its job, it first needs to bring focus. In essence, allow answering “what are we all about?”.
If you ask yourself, your friends, or your team and you can’t get a straight answer, that means your brand is not doing its job well, and you will need to establish that explicitly as soon as possible.
If you were to run an ultra-rapid branding workshop, you would need to ask and answer the following questions, so in an ideal world for you, anyone else would be able to repeat those answers back to you without hesitation:
What’s our name?
What do we do?
Why do we do it?
And, at a more advanced level, your team should be able to answer them plus:
For whom we do it?
What' do we believe in?
Why should people choose us?
Among which alternatives?
If you can receive clear answers to these questions, your brand is on a good path. Even better if you can get them from people outside your specific sector or niche.
Not Universal
Now, you need to assess the levels of working knowledge people, especially the audience you want to work with, have to understand who you are and what you are all about. Often, there is a big gap between what the “average joe” and what you know about a topic or the space in which you will work.
For example, If you work in a particular niche like Blockchain technology, for a person to truly understand what you are about, they would need to (approximately) understand first:
Basic computing
Internet technology and trends
What Blockchain is
and then they might be able to understand what you are about. This is a very technical field because they are many prerequisites to speak the language and jargon, where very few people understand what you are. Even fewer would understand what’s going on in your industry. The greater the amount of steps required, like in this example, the more expensive it is to turn your brand into a household brand. Not necessarily everyone needs to know, or even less care about you.
Brands are simple pieces of technology.
In conclusion: A brand is a name, plus a reputation based on signals emitted by you and your team of the things you say, you do, how they interact.
They should be easy to know and understood by your peers and, maybe later, everyone else. Nothing more, nothing less.
In a rudimentary way, brands are technology because they are tools; they are created to serve a final purpose. If you ask a bonafide old-school marketer like me, that purpose is to recognize and choose that brand (buy from) anytime the need to be met arises.
Since brands are technological tools, they need to be approached with the same ethical skepticism, rigor, and neutrality as any other piece of technology; however, people’s perception, feelings, and ideas of a brand are not, and they are to be taken seriously as they are components of the brands too.
Brands are not “just subjective items,” but unique configurations of very finite, generally unequivocal components or traits, and they can be built, composed, deconstructed, re-furbished, taken apart for scraps, or deleted completely to serve a function or to help someone do something (mainly to feel and to choose among a relatively discreet set of alternatives).
And ultimately,
Brands are not people.
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