Brand this. Brand that.
Everyone seems to have an opinion about what a brand is. “You need a brand.” “You should have a personal brand.” “That brand isn’t very good.” “I love that brand.”
Now, when people say these types of things, I’m sure you’ve heard it too, I think there’s a whole host of things that they could be referring to. See part of the confusion is that the word is both used as a noun and as a verb, and there’s significant contextual overlap. Oxford primarily defines it in these ways, a brand name or to assign a brand to.
It’s not that these definitions aren’t right, they are, the word has just come to take on layers of meaning, which are also right.
Needless to say, looking around at the modern world, we’ve bought in to the idea of brand in a big way. So what is brand? And why in neoliberal capitalism does this is idea capture our attention so much?
What is a brand?
Let’s start with a quote from one of the thought-leaders of the modern brand movement.
Your brand isn’t what you say it is. It’s what they say it is.
Marty Neumeier
Does that clear it up?
Moving past the esoteric. Practically speaking, a brand is made up of an ever-evolving combination of tangible and intangible parts. More on that soon. Why Neumeier is right in what he says is that at the end of the day a business can only every have good intentions, the market, the individual consumer will decide. Even the word decide is a little misleading. That’s in part because of how the enlightenment has shifted they might feel, they might act.
Where this gets complex is that humans are humans. We have finite capacity and finite resources. It’s this fact that introduces a market dynamic that forms the basis of competition. Let’s bring it down to earth?
Businesses are competing for a scarce resource.
Our attention.
We can’t give all our resources to everyone all at once.
Now, there’s all sorts of ways of competing for attention all with varying degrees of effectiveness in all sorts of contexts. This is where strategy is invaluable. It helps us situate ourselves within a given environment, within given competition and with given customers.
So, what is a brand?
Our preferred definition comes from a long time industry thinker, Robert Jones.
Your brand, fundamentally is the bundle of thoughts, feelings, actions and impulses about you that people have our there in the world – and that’s why it’s so powerful.
What both Jones and Neumeier are pointing to is that a brand is really an internalised reality, an embodied yet complex idea.
These realities aren’t neutral. It’s this fact that has made brand what it is. Where economists have long held a perspective that individuals are rational, we know that these realities positive and negative shape our actions.
And as we know from the work of Daniel Kahneman, negative realities can be stronger and sticker than positives.
What isn’t a brand?
Take a moment and think about how you would respond.
This is actually a trickier question than what it appears to be on the surface.
This is partly because the word is so liberally applied to all sorts of things that it shouldn’t be by all sorts of people with opinions. And the popularised use really most often refers to a logo, symbol or word mark. If you’ve been on Instagram you might even get the impression a brand is a vibe. I mean brands are ubiquitous in modern life. Of course we accept all the usual things will have a ‘brand’ but we’re living in a world where toilet paper has a brand.
If we agree that a brand is fundamentally a bundle of thoughts, feelings, actions and impulses, then if we invert our definition we get a surprising list.
Here we go.
A brand isn’t a logo
A brand isn’t a logo. A product. A service. A tagline. A promise. A letterhead or business card. A trademark (Though legally this might be what it is considered to be) An entity. A mission statement. A really impressive vision. A nicely designed pitch deck. What you say it is. What you want it to be.
Counterintuitively, you may have every single one of those items ticked off and still be without a brand. Where this gets slightly confusing is that all of these things can contribute to building a brand but don’t alone constitute the brand itself.
A brand is an embodied idea. It is the things that drive, influence and affect those thoughts, feelings, actions and impulses we all have.
So how does a brand work?
Hypothetically, you’re a brand new business. You have a ‘brand’. Or do you? Well, if no one has thoughts, feeling, actions you might just have bunch of ideas and assets and believe your own hype. Which to be fair, starting a business you’ll need a bunch of all of that.
Regardless, how does this work out in the real world?
As it turns out, brand don’t exist in a vacuum. Intuitively we understand that once we start engaging with people, a brand begins to be established.
Referring back to our ‘isn’t’ list, we see these things and those adjacent to them, start to inform audiences. This holistic system of tangible and intangible elements that collectively influence how people perceive, engage and form emotional connections.
You have the building blocks, the fundamentals, the necessary elements. What next?
Honestly, there are few approaches. Things like network effects create extreme leverage and are the secret behind many of today’s most powerful brands. But for most, there’s a clear place to start
Consistency.
Compounding is a very powerful law. Like money, good will compounds. As an example, $100,000 invested for 10 years with a return of 10% each year becomes $259,374. Add another 5 years, that figure is now $417,725. Another 5, $672,750. Let’s double it, 40 years. $4,525,926. That’s a 4425.93% increase. A very good investment.
Do the work.
Build a brand that consistently shapes the thoughts, feelings, actions and impulses, you’ll be surprised where you end up.
