what is a brand & why is it important?
A BRAND IS AN EMOTIONAL EXPERIENCE
The funny, sometimes maddening, thing is: your brand is an experience, whether you acknowledge it as such or not. Customers (and potential customers) will have interactions with you (the company) through your content and communications, products and services, and probably (hopefully!) with some human beings thrown into the mix somewhere, too.
All of those impressions, together, build slowly over time. Some may seem more important than others. Some may strike deeper chords. But when you think about what makes up a customer’s perception of a company – it’s a mix of everything.
The million-dollar question usually then becomes: how much of this experience are you willing to try to manage? What is within your circle of control or influence? What help would you need to make those things as powerful as possible, and if you could do it… where would you start?
If you’ve been in the trenches, you know how intimidating that can feel.
We can tell you where to start, based on our 20 years of experience: with how your brand looks and feels and what it sounds like. (Which is also about big ideas like who you are and what makes you special – but we’ll get to that in a bit.) Start with intentional, purposefully chosen strategic and creative building blocks, and the foundation you lay will help support all of the big stuff that’s surely on the way for your company.
We can help you keep it simple. There are two parts to the process, really: Strategy and Creative. And what each piece produces can be simple, too. The end result of the strategy side isn’t a million page research report… it’s literally one page (that’s magic). The creative output isn’t a 700-page “Brand Bible” that no one knows how to interpret, but just 7 key creative elements that can be built into almost anything.
The brand-building process is challenging, it’s fun, and the look, feel & voice of your brand is almost 100% within your control, when you do it correctly.
So let’s get to it, shall we?
When it comes to creating or refreshing a brand, it’s tempting for brand managers, creative teams and other business and marketing folks to think A LOGO is everything. Or that THE MOST PERFECT LINE OF COPY will solve all of the sales challenges. If you could only find THE RIGHT complimentary color for the palette, everlasting peace would reign supreme in the world… right?
But —
A BRAND IS MORE THAN A COLLECTION OF CREATIVE ASSETS
Those creative assets – we’re talking logo, fonts, colors, graphics, and so forth – are important, but only as much as they’re able to communicate what your brand is all about. Those parts and pieces can only be powerful if your brand, just on paper, is powerful. And it needs to be powerful (see also: compelling, interesting, unique, differentiated) because in its highest form, your brand is here not to just sell things that do stuff for customers – but to deliver an emotionally satisfying experience. Sure, there’s rational stuff you’ll need to address – what you offer, how much it costs, how much is shipping? What about returns? (Yes, tons of rational stuff will take your attention.). But to be meaningful and memorable, you have to connect to your customers on an emotional level.
