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The Who, What, How & Why of a Brand

Posted on March 16, 2020 by derrick rozdeba

The Brand

Infamous advertising guru David Ogilvy originally defined a brand as “The intangible sum of a product’s attributes: its name, packaging, and price, its history, its reputation, and the way it’s advertised.” Ogilvy always had a way with words and found clarity in simplicity. While his definition is clear, logical, and succinct, it only scratches the surface. Brands, like people, aren’t easily defined. Both are complex and just plain messy. It is so complicated that Heidi Cohen pulled together 30 branding definitions to help brand owners. That being said, I have broken this topic into Who, How, What and Why to help explain what is a brand.

The Who – The Product

The brand story always begins with a product. Without a product there is no brand. Authors P. Kotler and K. Keller define a product as “anything that can be offered to a market to satisfy a want or need, including physical goods, services, experiences, events, persons, places, properties, organizations, information, and ideas.” For the moment, let’s suspend the concept of services and talk about something that is made from physical materials.

So much time and thinking must go into designing, building, testing, refining, and producing a product. Decisions must be made on how and where it will be manufactured? What ingredients and basic materials will be used? How, where, and when will it be marketed? Who will be the best customer? How will the product feel? What will it look like? Smell like? What colour is it? All of these physical product attributes must be replicated perfectly each and every time. The logistics and distribution, the support, the partnership, the price, the competition and the consumer must be analysis and selected. Then you need to assemble a team of employees to execute the production schedules, logistics, marketing and sales plans. All of these tasks are daunting.

The last thing you are thinking about is its brand identity, brand personality, brand value, brand purpose, and brand vision. Without a product there isn’t a brand or a who.

The How – Product Attributes

How the product works in making a consumer’s life better is the start to a wonderful relationship. Product attributes are the unique physical and abstract aspects of how the product works such as speed, size, weight, material, finishing, durability, functionality, flexibly, and features. The brand experience begins the day the customer positively interacts with the product features and attributes. The interaction can be instantly gratifying or build over time through repeated usage or elaborate steps of anticipation. In some of these situations, the brand is completely orchestrated to minute details; in others, the brand experience is wholly defined by the consumer. The consumer’s interpretation of how the product makes their life better is when the brand relationship begins.

The What – Visual & Audio

The what is all of the visual and audio manifestation that moves a product beyond the who and how into transforming it with human characteristic with physical and emotive features. Unlike a human, a brand can build its brand identity from the ground up. This brand identity begins with a name, colour palette, design, logotype, symbol, and, where possible, stimulating consumer’s senses: sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch. Every interaction with the brand directly or indirectly through visual or audio content must support and build the brand experience. This means every branding channel used must feel like it coming from the brand’s ethos.

The challenge is expressing what people think about your brand. This is ultimately where your brand lives in the consumer’s mind, based on feelings and emotion. Some branding experts describe it as the brand promise or the emotional bond. I like Ze Frank’s definition as an “emotional aftertaste”. A great brand should taste like a wonderful 2000 vintage Bordeaux wine, preferably from the left-bank.

The Why – Action

Action is louder than any brand identity. This is where the brand walks the talk. The brand’s guiding principals must be solid and based on its purpose of why it exists. The best time to watch a brand shine is when things go wrong – especially terribly wrong. What a brand does when it fails to deliver on its promise is a true moment of truth.

In essence, a brand is all the positive physical and emotional brand attributes combined into a consistent, memorable experience with a product or service. Please note, that the interactions don’t need to be direct. Advertising and storytelling play a big role. We all love a great story. Great brands tell great stories that inspire a passion for life and illustrate the why and how behind the product.

What is Branding

Branding is the act of showcasing your brand purpose, promise and/or personality. Its the articulation of why your brand exists. Consumers don’t care about the how and what. Consumers care why brands do what they do; it gives customers a reason to embrace a product. Successful brands always start with the brand’s why. Consumers want to understand why they should care about your brand. As Cheryl Burgess CEO of Blue Focus Marketing says, “a brand is a reason to choose.”

Branding is actively showing how your brand’s personality is desirable, relevant, unique, and cool. Never underestimate the cool factor. To have any value, your brand must always be relatable, reliable, consistent, but also change with the times and with consumer’s needs. Jeffrey Harmon founder of Harmon Brothers explains that “branding is the experience marketers create to win that attention.” All branding elements must be defined by what the brand represents, including in advertising and social media.

Branding is Big Business

Clutch.co, who evaluates marketing agencies, list over 28,121 branding companies in the US and Canada. Branding agencies come in all sizes from a one-person shop to hundreds or a company with thousands of employees in offices around the world. The cost of hiring a branding consultant or agency is extremely variable. The scope of work determines the cost. A consultant could be simply developing the visual elements or completing a complex task like developing the brand position and communication elements that support the brand strategy and business plan. The cost could range from thousands of dollars to over a million.

If a brand is cultivated with meaningful existential reference points that the consumer can embrace, the brand can have enormous monetary value. According to Brandz Top 100 Most Valuable Global Brand, the world’s most valuable brand in 2019 was Amazon at $315.5 billion, followed by Apple at $309.5 billion.

Brand is a Concept

Humans are creatures of meaning not transactions. Successful brands live in consumers’ minds. Defining the emotional connection is the most difficult but the most essential step. This is where the branding agency is worth their weight in gold. The deeper the connection, the stronger the relationship. The stronger the relationship to the brand, the more valuable the brand becomes. The trick is giving the consumer the power to own the brand but ensuring that the brand is still actively steering the relationship with positive brand activities and associations. Lester Wunderman, author of Being Direct says “Advertising becomes a dialogue that becomes an invitation to a relationship.”

Brand Personality

People are attracted to people (and furry friends). The quickest way a brand can relate to people is through an authentic and distinct personality. This personality is made by how the brand and its employees act and speak. A brand’s personality can’t be manufactured but it can be built with the right tools. Recruiting the right people to represent the brand is a good start. Shaping the brand’s values will set the stage for the brand ‘s personality.

You must decide what characteristic is paramount. Define what the brand will not compromise on such as: quality, safety, transparency, sustainability, trust and/or customer service. You can also define what the brand will not be. These values will drive the brand’s tone of voice. Being witty and funny might not suit certain brands but being caring, empathetic, and lovable might. Once determined, all of the brand’s messaging and marketing must reflect its determined personality traits.

A brand evolves over time as do its customers. An EmotiveBrand blog post on the topic says: “Brands mean different things to different people at different times.” Amy Daggett, owner of Dagget Design, says a brand “is an associative memory in the brain of the consumer, who connects–or associate–the brand with a set of brand attributes, benefits, impressions or emotions. It’s everything the public thinks it knows about your name brand offering–both factual, and emotional.”

Brand Elements

Brands are complex and always evolving. A great emotional advertising campaign that connects with customers can make a brand famous. But if the product doesn’t live up to expectations, it’s dead in the water. Every product offering, every service, every message, advertisement, and digital manifestation, every internal policy, email, and business decision must be congruent with what the brand stands for. Each brand element and touchpoint must be strategically and creatively aligned to have maximum impact. To help navigate all the complexities of branding, I have complied several graphics to help guide brand stewards.

Brand Essence

Combine all of the brand essential elements and collectively you have the essence of the brand.

The Anatomy of a Brand

Brand Culture

Brand culture is the set of experiences, attitudes, values, and meanings shared by the brand, its employees, and the customers. As Benoît Heilbrunn said in his book Brave New Brands: Branding Between Utopia and A-Topia, “A brand may be viewed not solely as a sign added to products to differentiate them from competing goods, but as a semiotic engine whose function is to constantly produce meaning and values.”

Brand Architecture

There are five possible brand structures to support a master brand and various sub brands. Most brands don’t have the luxury of building the architectural brand model first. They adopt the best solution for their ultimate goal of capitalizing on existing brand equity.

Brand Strategy

Strategic Brand Plan

Branding Channels

Every brand touchpoint can either build or detract from the brand experience.

What’s a brand name and logo worth?

Posted on April 12, 2015 by derrick rozdeba

No one and no brand can live without a name.

The musician Prince (born Prince Rogers Nelson) tried for five years and failed. The pop star dropped his name and requested to be referred by an unpronounceable symbol he devised. What was wrong with “Prince”? I could understand it if he was called “Sue”. Left with no pronunciation the media called him “The Artist formerly known as Prince,” which was eventually shortened to the acronym “TAFKAP.” In the end TAFKAP went back to his original name Prince.

The most important visual elements for a brand is its name and logo design (if there is one). You must have the word mark (name) and design mark (logo design) trademarked and legally protected both locally and internationally. This is the first priority. If you can’t protect it, move on and find something you can. Investing millions of dollars on building a brand on a trade name or mark doesn’t make sense if someone else can use it.

Brand Value

Millward Brown’s BrandZ list of the world’s top 100 most valuable brands in 2014 – estimate the total brand value to be over 2.9 trillion dollars. A 12% increase over 2013. The top most valuable brands are also the same brands that are top of mind such as Google ($159 billion), Apple ($148 billion), Microsoft (90 billion) and McDonald’s ($86 billion).

Brand names are not only an investment but a liability. With so much money and reputation at stake, there have been many trademark disputes in protecting brands. Toy maker Mattel Inc. is always going to court to protect its clean-cut Barbie doll brand against misuse especially against pornographic misrepresentations. Apple Inc. was involved in litigation for years with the Beatles’ record company, Apple Corp. Ben and Jerry’s ice cream company sued an adult entertainment company for using parodied names in the movie titles such as “Boston Cream Thighs”, “Peanut Butter D-Cups,” and “Chocolate Fudge Babes”. You get the idea.

During World War I, the American government seized Bayer‘s trademark rights and sold them off to Sterling Drug. In 1995 it took $1 billion dollars for Bayer AG to acquire the Bayer Aspirin line and the rights to the Bayer brand name and trademark in North America (Sterling Winthrop) from SmithKline Beecham. Today, it is one of the top recognizable pharmaceutical brands in North America and in the world.

Brand Trademark Design

Not only do we compartmentalize information in our brains by words (i.e., trademark names) we also associate strongly with images (i.e., design marks). Sometime the design mark is a visual interpretation of the brand name like the pecten in Shell Oil or the M (golden arches) in McDonald’s, or the apple in Apple. Over time a brand name is loaded with the brand experience and the design mark (a simple visual element) can be interchangeable with the trademark name. But the logo design is not the brand but is the anchor of the company’s visual identity and a critical component to a brand’s success.

The Nike swoosh is a wonderful example of transferring the Nike brand experience to an elegant design mark. Remember the PGA Masters game in 2005 when Tiger Woods was at the 16th hole with a chip onto the green. The ball reached the cup as if in slow motion then for an endless period of time it sits on the lip of the hole. The Nike logo in full view, as the ball finally drops into the cup. The crowd goes wild and again a winner is confirmed. For Nike that little golf ball was worth millions of dollars in building the Nike brand.

Building a Brand Identity Is Getting Hard

Posted on April 12, 2015 by derrick rozdeba

The brand name tells us what the product or service is called. The design mark offers a visual cue that helps identify the brand. Together, these two brand elements start to build the brand identity which is composed of a word or words, colours, design, logotype and symbol. In essence, you are giving an identity a name and then giving the name a face. The challenge is developing a brand identity that will stand-out against the 3,000 brand messages that we are exposed to daily.

Developing a brand name today is almost impossible with so many products and services entering the marketplace every day. I tried to find out how many brands exist today in the world but wasn’t successful. The World Intellectual Property Organization report that in absolute terms, trademark demand quadrupled from just under 1 million applications per year in 1985 to 4.2 million trademark applications by 2011. In developing countries such as China, India and Brazil the rise in trademark applications is exploding. So in the last four years there has been approximately 16.8 million new trademark applications. To put this into perspective the Oxford English Dictionary contains 171,476 words in current use. There is a great demand for unique and memorable names if you can find one that you can protect.

What’s in a Name?

History will tell you that many brand names wasn’t strategically developed as we would like to think, based on brand values and beliefs, target audience, and competitive edge. The good one’s however stick because they sound and fit the image they portray and reflect on their customers.

Many historical brand names came from the name of the person who founded or invented the product like Walt Disney, Ford, Bayer and Nestlé. Then there was the brand names derived from the product formulation or attributes such as Coca-Cola that came from its two “medical” ingredients: “Coca” came from the coca leaf which is used to create the cocaine the drink originally contained and “Cola from the Kola nut, which provided the drink’s caffeine. 7-Eleven convenience stores got its name to promote their long-operating hours which was unique in 1946. While some people think the GAP clothing stores came from “gay and proud” the original owners saw an opportunity in filling the generation gap with clothes for both adults & children.

The easiest brand names are words that tell or signal to you something about the product or service such as Twitter, Walmart, Airbus, Second Cup, Burger King, Netflix and Nescafé.

With the explosion of e-commerce and internet companies, there is over 100,000 new domains registered daily, adding further pressure and demand for unique brand names. With limited number of trademark names available companies have become creative by misspelling names like Flickr, del.icio.us, nwplying, Digg, Topix and Google. Googol is the word that defines the large number of 10 to the power of 100. Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brinn liked the name because it reflected the large amount of information its search engine could retrieve except they made it further unique by misspelling it.

Then there are just plain great names like McDonald’s, Amazon, Apple, Fox, Yahoo and Starbucks. Stay away from brand names that are too difficult to say or spell – simple names have the best chance of sticks in consumer’ minds especially when they are bombarded with brands all day long.

A unique and memorable brand name is important but make sure the name doesn’t carry any negative connotations especially in another language. The Buick LaCrosse was changed to Buick Allure in Canada because LaCrosse was slang for masturbation, among other things in Quebecois. The soft drink Fresca, when translated to Spanish, turned out to be slang for “lesbian”. Well, niche marketing is a strategy I am not sure this was their intent.

The typography in your brand name can be as impactful as a graphic. The most obvious element is selecting the right font. To frame the opportunity, you need to define how you want your customer to feel when they see your brand name/logo. Do you want to show your brand as playful, sensitive, strong, masculine, young, old, futuristic, loud, sophisticated, or solid – the list can go on and on. If your brand is a law firm or bank you may want a traditional typeface with a conservative serif font that instills trust and confidence. If you are a technology brand you might want a modern typeface with sans serif font all in lower-case. Some great examples of unique typography are Google, Coca-Cola and Disney. These brand names communicate a look and feel that has become quickly recognizable.

Designing a Mark or Logo

While the trademark name might not tell us anything about the brand the design mark or logo can. The logo design can convey aspects of a company’s personality or attitude. For example, Target Stores with its memorable and fun red bull’s-eye or the twittering blue bird for Twitter or the iconic Nike “swoosh”. Other iconic and memorable logo designs are Mercedes-Benz three-point star, MTV’s constant changing colour, patterns and images in the over-sized M, Rolex’s pointed crown that symbolizes royalty, victory and perfectionism and Shell’s bright yellow and red shell.

Colour plays an important role in communicating a feeling or emotional connection to the brand. Red is the colour of fire and blood symbolizes energy, excitement, youthful and passion. Brands that have used red successfully are Red Cross, Coca-Cola and Target. Yellow is the colour of sunshine and is associated with joy, happiness, intellect and warmth such as Veuve Clicquot Champagne, Sun Light and Caterpillar. Green is the colour of nature connoting growth, harmony, health and commonly associated with stability and prosperity. John Deere and Starbucks have used green successfully to distinguish themselves. Blue the colour of sky and water has a trustworthy, dependable feel and is often the colour for banks and insurance companies. Then there is black and white which most brands use in some capacity but used as the primary brand colour can be very powerful, confident and sophisticated. Brands that use black or white that come to mind are Guinness, Chanel, Gucci, Nike and Apple. You can also use colour to differentiate from entrenched competitors assuming that the colour matches the brands personality like ING bank with its distinctive orange and T Mobile with its bright pink.

Protecting an Asset

Making a brand name or logo design too distinct or in the moment can also lock it into a time period that will quickly date it. Over a hundred years many brands have tweaked their names and logo designs to keep current with culture changes and the brands evolution such as John Deere, Bayer, Shell, and Pepsi to name a few.

If you can’t trademark your name or design mark keep looking for one that you can. As a trademark, your name provides a propriety and legally protectable method for identifying your goods or services from the competitors. Don’t waste your time if you can’t protect your identity. Without a trademark you have nothing.

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