What is a brand really?
Your brand is the promise you make to your customers, users, and employees. This promise is often communicated subtly, based on years of conditioning and people pick up on these cues to form assumptions about the kind of product or service they can expect from your business. Take restaurant menus, for example, if a menu is cluttered with low-resolution pictures, a chaotic colour scheme, and printed on laminated paper, you’ll likely assume the prices are low and the food quality might not be the best. On the other hand, a menu with lots of white space, a monochrome colour scheme, and printed on thick, textured paper will likely make you think the restaurant is high-end, even expensive. The food quality could be the same, but the communication has already happened in an instant. This is why branding is important—you often have a split second, over many interaction points, to communicate a message, and you don’t always get to speak directly to your audience.
How you look, sound, and act all need to align to ensure trust. If your visual identity is young and hip, but your tone of voice is formal and dry, and your actions are quirky and fun, you end up with a sort of Frankenstein’s monster of a brand. Whether trustworthy or not, Frankenstein’s monster scared everyone. Align all three areas of your brand to communicate a consistent message, and you’ll foster trust with your audience—they’ll know what to expect from the get-go.
How do I know if my brand is working?
To understand this, you need to take a few steps back. Your brand should align with the goals of your business, only then can you measure whether it is working or not. The corporate strategy should inform the business strategy, which in turn informs the brand strategy. This allows you to decide the direction your brand should go and properly measure if the brand is serving the business. Without the overall picture, you cannot decide if the brand is operating as expected.
Brand strategy should be broken down into building blocks, and you need purpose, values, and mission to form the foundation of your brand strategy. Then define what you want to say and how you want to say it. The tone of voice should define the visuals, not the other way around. Once these are in place, you can think about positioning. Where do you currently sit in the market? Where do you want to sit? What does the landscape look like? Once all of these elements are in place, you can get into the fun stuff and figure out what you’re going to look like. A common mistake is starting at the top of this pyramid and working backwards. It’s much harder to retrofit things like tone of voice, mission, vision, and values if you already have a visual identity in place. Start with the foundations. If you don’t have them already, your brand strategy probably isn’t working.
Understanding your own brand
To properly understand your own brand, you need to objectively figure out who you are. There are a few exercises you can do to understand this internally. Mapping your brand on an emotive matrix will give you a good indicator of how you should be pitching your business. Doing this with internal stakeholders can be surprising to see how your internal team understands the brand’s personality. Doing this with customers is the best way to see how your brand is really understood and will give you the best results for making changes to align with the business strategy. Understanding how you are perceived currently will give you the data required to measure yourselves against competitors in the market, define where you currently sit, and ultimately give you the tools to change your position as needed.
To communicate clearly to your audience, you need to be able to explain your business. This may sound obvious, and 99% of people understand what their business does, but being able to succinctly get this across in its simplest terms can be challenging. A good way to boil this down is with a challenge: could you explain your business to a child? If you can manage this, you probably have a pretty good grasp of what your organisation does. This simple explanation is your baseline. You can work up the complexity from here, depending on your audience.
Superbrands are products of their environment
You read the title, so we’re going to use a superhero metaphor (stick with me). Spider-Man is a very successful superhero because he is a product of his environment. Spider-Man lives, works, and fights crime in New York City, a massive metropolitan landscape full of densely crowded tall buildings. His superpowers reflect this. The ability to traverse quickly around skyscrapers via web-swinging makes him fast and nimble. He’s sticky and can climb tall buildings in an instant, which is essential in New York’s vertical landscape. He has Spidey-sense, the ability to sense danger, which is crucial in a dangerous place like New York. Now, if you take Spider-Man out of his fictional New York setting and put him somewhere like the suburbs, he’s not nearly as effective. No tall buildings to swing from, and relatively low elevation means no need to climb. Even his Spidey-sense would be less effective. Spider-Man’s values are driven by his experiences, derived from his Aunt and Uncle: “With great power comes great responsibility.” He’s driven by a purpose he picked up from the people around him. Brands should do the same.
Your brand should reflect your community, and your community is subject to change. I don’t mean your geographical location, but the community of people using your products and services. A great example is Stanley, the drinks bottle company. Stanley started out as a very male-oriented business, making water bottles for fighter pilots in WWII and marketing to men. Building sites, fishing trips, father-son activities, that kind of thing. Women barely featured in Stanley’s plans for almost 100 years.
In 2017, three mums who run a shopping blog called The Buy Guide changed everything for Stanley. They discovered the product, loved it, and posted about it. The Buy Guide’s audience was 98% women between 35 and 40 years old. That demographic started buying Stanley cups. Spotting this opportunity, Stanley leaned into their new market. They invested in advertising geared towards women, made new product lines with brighter colours, and started talking directly with this new consumer set.
They capitalised on a TikTok video where a woman’s car caught fire with a Stanley cup inside, and when inspected, the water still had ice in it. Stanley bought the woman a new car, and the story went viral, further cementing them as a must-have accessory for women. As a result, Stanley went from a £75 million business in 2017 to a £750 million business in 2023. Engage the audience you have, not the one you think you need.
So you’ve decided your brand needs some work
Rebranding doesn’t always mean overt change. Did you know that in 2019, IKEA redesigned their logo? The change is almost imperceptible, so why bother? IKEA’s business strategy has always been making quality products accessible to everyone, and their brand strategy reflects that. Adjusting the optical size of the typeface, changing the kerning between letters, and tweaking the serifs all work towards improving the legibility of the logo at small sizes. Muting the colours used in the logo makes for easier, more consistent reproduction across a huge range of platforms. The IKEA logo gets printed a lot, so making the printed and digital versions of the logo consistent is crucial. The ® icon in the logo has been brought inside the shape to make it a natural rectangle, avoiding cropping and making it an easier shape to use in print and digital applications. Some of these changes make a difference to the end-user experience, some to internal stakeholders, and others have a genuine financial impact on the business. Small changes can have a big impact when done for the right reasons.
Iteration is key to success. Your brand should be a reflection of the best version of yourself. Think of you on a good day or after a really good haircut. It’s clearly authentic and still objectively you, but at your best. That’s what your brand should be. If you update or change your brand, what is presented back should never be a shock. It should be rooted in what you already know but aren’t necessarily communicating.
Pick your partners carefully
It’s essential to pick an agency that is comfortable challenging you. The best brands are born out of collaboration and honesty; everyone has a part to play. The process should be a dance, not a wrestling match. Know when to lead and when to follow. When going through a visual update, remember designers are not artists; they are chefs. Designers need ingredients to work with, not a blank canvas. It’s your job to provide the good stuff. The key ingredients for a great brand are a clear brief and objectives, honest relevant background info, business strategy and data, inspiration and ideas, user research, and a good understanding of what currently works. You can get by without a couple of these, but a good chef makes do with what they’ve got. You will always get out what you put in.
Brand guidelines, not brand bibles
Brand guidelines should be a platform, not a railroad. They provide people with the tools to make something better, not to keep them boxed in. Brands should grow and change while sticking to a central DNA. That’s what great brand guidelines do. There’s no need to overcomplicate your brand guidelines. If you pack them with fluff, people are less likely to read the important bits. Stick to the key elements: colour, type, application, a little bit of theory, and most importantly, examples. Show, don’t tell. It’s actually easier to show people what they shouldn’t do rather than what you want them to do. Don’t be afraid of putting bad examples in your guidelines. It might make the document look a little less slick, but it will work much harder for you in the long run.
Summary
- Do the leg work first – A brand without a foundation is always going to crumble under pressure
- You get out what you put in – A blank canvas is good to nobody, get stuck into the process, you might enjoy it
- Change is not just good, it is necessary – You have to become comfortable with adapting. You don’t need to get in Tiktok, you do need to understand if your audience is using it
- Pick your partners carefully – More often than not, chemistry and trust is more important than industry experience
- Authenticity is how you win – Be true to yourselves, be honest about your products and keep your promises
- Standing out isn’t the ultimate goal, communication is – You don’t need to be the loudest in the room, you need to be the one making the most sense and resonating with the audience
