Usually branding sits within the marketing department. Not because it is a creative outlet of promoting a brand, but because marketers are the ones who shape all the components before the visualisation of the brand and its communication to the world.  Sure, a brand starts as an idea and it is communicated in colours, words and images. But there is science behind the choice of the visual identity, which is often surpassed by people who only see the end result. 

Some of the world’s biggest brands are based on simple ideas, beautifully executed, standing for a purpose and a cause, creating meaning for the organisation as well as the tangible and intangible products. This is achieved through a clear declaration of intent, a core belief that surpasses through the whole of the organisation and supported by aims and promises to the customer. So, the question is, why everyone thinks they can do branding so easily? The answer is one: because the marketers who are adept in branding make it seem easy. 

The misconception of the logo in branding

My current marketing boss is a well respected lawyer within the conveyancing sector who chose to go down the path of software selling after all these years of lawyering. In contrast to common knowledge that indicates lawyers are in their majority boring and dry, I can assure you my boss is not. He loves playing with images, conveying (excuse the pun here, I had to) his vision into images although he is great with words. And he also loves doing my branding job because of a common misconception within the non-marketing folks: the brand is just colours and a logo. Well, I am sure that anyone within the marketing discipline who is adept in branding would wish that it was THAT easy! 

The logo of a brand is not the brand. It is a signpost to the brand experience. Together with the associated brand elements – name, strapline, typeface, colour and aesthetics – it aids in identifying the brand and validating it in the mind of the consumer. The word “brand” describes all those attributes associated with a specific experience. Those are emotional, physical, mental and soul fulfilling attributes that the customer will attach to the brand themselves. The only way to control those attributes attached to the brand is by a cohesive brand strategy, which includes as the last stage the logos, the colours and everything else that my boss likes to do and not share. 

Determining brand strategy focus

Back to basics then for branding. Let’s take the movie “A Christmas Carol” as an example – the English version from 1951 please (got to love a good classic british Christmas movie). Ebenezer will be the brand on this occasion and the 3 ghosts will be Reputation (past), Experience (present), and Expectation (future).  

• The ghost of the past shows that the reputation of Ebenezer was tarnished because of the brand promise not being consistent with the service or the technology offered; 
• The ghost of the present reminds Ebenezer that he delivers an ok experience and does not create any psychological bond or loyalty with his customers; and 
• The ghost of the future shows Ebenezer how he could be loved by everyone he reached, if he stood for something and behaved in accordance with his brand promise. That way, he could improve his reputation and the experience of all the people he reached.  

By acknowledging the three ghosts of one’s brand, the possibility of improving the brand and actually connect in-depth with the target audience becomes real. A brand strategy takes those into consideration and focuses on increasing the brand valuation through differentiation with competition, connections building, added emotional value and representing the change they want to bring to the target audience. Establishing a brand’s value is necessary for brand investment decisions, marketing budget allocation, mergers and acquisitions and partnerships, communication of brand worth and securing financial assistance, wherever needed. And this is only done by documenting a brand strategy without missing the “boring” steps.  

What to include in a brand strategy

Brand architecture 

The brand architecture makes business strategy visible through the hierarchical management of brands. There are some scenarios that can occur during the lifecycle of a brand: product and service launch, business acquisitions and mergers. Having a brand architecture in place communicates on a strategic level the structure of the organisation as a whole and applies logic and coherence across a portfolio of products and services to differentiate and connect with audiences. It basically manages the portfolio that exists within the brand to create greater clarity, impact and synergy. And these three together increase the value of the brand. Even if your brand is part of a bigger corporate structure, not having a documented brand architecture of the product and service you provide within the corporate context will not convince funding internally to expand and improve. It will most likely make it easier to be cut off and be sold to someone else to “fix”, like random car parts at a dealership. Harsh, but true.  

There are 3 brand architecture models that I have used in the past and there are many variations within and overlaps between them. If you are interested to know more, send me a quick email and I will send you some content I worked on in the past. 

Brand planning 

 To plan the branding strategy, everyone needs to be involved from the get-go. This means the CEO, the MD, the heads of departments, the marketing department, sales, HR and key internal stakeholder groups. We cannot, for example, isolate the marketing team from not knowing what stage we are at with the branding because the head of sales is “in discussions with the legal team to sign off the name” (cough, cough) and they want to showcase to the rest of the business that they are the owner of the brand. Newsflash – everyone is the owner of a brand and the marketing department will be the guardian and communicator of it. Which brings me to my main point that not everyone knows how to do branding the right way, or even for the right reasons at times.  

Brand research 

To undertake a branding or rebranding of a product or an organisation, it is imperative that you have an insight into the everyday running of the business, the marketplace, similar products and services and the culture of the sector you target. What I usually do, even when I have to create a product video or something simple like marketing collateral, I always find out what we do as an organisation at the moment, the collateral of the competitors, internal communication styles, and research reports with trends, statistics and surveys. If you have to do that everytime you have to write a piece of collateral, it is important you do that for the brand, too.  

As a continuum to all the research, questions need to be asked internally to different people, to see how cohesive the existing brand understanding is. When I first joined the legal tech software company I work for now, I asked the same question to different people at different departments: “What is our product X?” . To my surprise, everyone had a different explanation.  From the product manager to the head of professional services and each individual sales person, everyone explained the product in a different way and some responded “it depends who I sell it to”. When I asked for an example, they could not give me one and tried to fob me off. This is a bad way to create a brand, as people do not focus on the value it brings to the customer and cannot convey that value with words, only with discounts. And discounts mean price wars hurting the overall bottom line.  

Brand archetypes 

“If your brand was a celebrity, who would it be?” This is one question I have always been asking internally in every single job I worked for. Based on who that brand would be, the storytelling can start. Branding is an intangible asset, it needs to be put into context and storytelling. To help the non-marketers, there are brand archetypes out there that can help with the identification of the brand. The archetypes are a benchmark of expectations to live up to and must be authentic or the brand will fail. Reading them and deciding who you are as a brand without meetings with other stakeholders to educate and discuss further does not make you an expert in branding. You will certainly not be able to create a brand just by choosing one archetype off the shelf and follow a storytelling to justify what you have in your head. With discussions with the right stakeholders, the archetype will frame your thinking and will provide a focussed vehicle for communication of that brand value.  

The key elements for a brand strategy are a separate beast of their own. I will just mention them here briefly for now: 

• Purpose – how do we make the world a better place and what need we fulfil? 
• Vision – a request from the audience to join our quest to making the world a better place; 
• Values – what we stand for as a brand and what we believe in (no lies, everyone needs to live those values); 
• Mission statement – Brief, clear manifesto of the key brand criteria; 
• Value proposition – the unique selling point which our competitors cannot do- and statements such as “we make you money, we serve your customers” are not a value proposition because everyone can do that and it is not a factual claim; 
• Positioning – placing your brand at the forefront of the consumer because of that uniqueness of the product and/or service; 
• Personality – if your brand was a human, what type of human would that be? 
• Audience – don’t be a jack of all trades because you have a product or a service that you believe can expand to all customers in your sector, be a speck of gold in a sea of sawdust instead and be focussed at one or two audiences and build purpose 

What is included in the part 2 of brand building for non-marketers?

Yes, the above information is a lot of work – and we have not even started to look at brand identity, a.k.a. the “fluffy stuff” that people believe marketers do daily, or how to evolve the brand culture internally and the importance of designing the brand and sustaining it in a competitive environment. I will be giving more details on those on part 2 and, maybe, in part 3. As our beloved branding father Wally Olins wrote some years ago, “A brand is worth only what you are prepared to pay for it”. And focusing on a logo and pretty colours without research and data to back up your brand choices to the CEO is not branding. 

Thank you for reading my brand strategy advice for non-marketers. I welcome all comments and all emails, please contact me to talk all things branding on vdiamanti@gmail.com.