What a brand is

Ask people what a brand is, and most will describe something they can see: a logo, a colour, a shape. That is the visible part. But a logo is only a sign. What it stands for lives somewhere else.

That may sound like a big claim for a logo on a box. But look at what else works this way. Money is worth nothing unless enough people believe in it. A nation is a line on a map until enough strangers agree that it is real.

Brands belong to this family, with one big difference. Nobody chooses the country they are born in, or the money in their pocket. Brands, we choose. And we choose them again every day.

Marty Neumeier, an American designer and author of The Brand Gap, captures both sides of this in one image. He calls brands the little gods of modern life, each ruling over a different need, task or mood. We follow them, but unlike the old gods, we stay in charge. If one falls from Olympus, we simply pick another.¹

So a brand is something invented, with no army and no law behind it, that millions of people choose to belong to. But if a brand is a belief, where exactly does it live? And how does it get there?

It lives in our heads, and it gets there through experience. Andreas Freitag, a German brand consultant, describes it this way: the sum of a shop's or product's qualities and of our experiences with it condenses into one picture.² No single ad creates it, and no single purchase does either.

Think of Volvo. People have driven the cars, flipped through a brochure, heard about a crash someone walked away from. None of these moments says much on its own. Yet out of all of them, one idea forms in people's minds: safety.

Todd Irwin, a brand strategist, describes exactly this mechanism: Apple stands for ease of use, Volvo for safety, Nike for motivation and Uber for convenience.³ These are among the strongest brands there are, and few get this far. Only brands that have positioned themselves clearly over many years manage to shrink thousands of moments into one word. When they do, they spare us from thinking everything through again each time we choose.

Experts call this picture the brand image. Bernd Radtke, a German economist and author of Markenidentitätsmodelle, adds an important detail. The image lives in each customer's memory, and everyone interprets it differently.⁴ So there is not one picture of Volvo, but millions of them. Most of them share the same core, safety, yet each person adds their own memories and feelings around it.

This is what makes brands so unusual. A company can own a factory, a patent or a building, and all of them exist whether anyone thinks about them or not. A brand is different. It is a thought that millions of strangers carry around with them, and the company that owns it has never been inside a single one of those heads. Hardly anything else people own works this way.

It also explains why brands are so often confused with the tools that shape them. Logos, ads and campaigns can be seen and touched, so people take them for the brand itself. The brand, however, is what those tools leave behind in people's minds.

If the brand lives in people's heads, then marketing and advertising are not the brand. They are ways of influencing the picture. People often use the three words as if they meant the same thing, and that is where a lot of confusion begins.

Seth Godin, one of the best known marketing writers in the US and author of This Is Marketing, gives marketing a much bigger job than selling. At its core, he says, it is the generous act of helping someone solve a problem. Their problem.⁵ Above all, marketing creates culture: status, belonging and the feeling of people like us.⁶

That changes how we should think about advertising. Godin splits it in two. Direct marketing is about action, and its results are measured. Brand marketing is about culture, and it cannot be measured.⁷ Because that picture forms from every experience, not just from ads, brand marketing is almost everything a company does:⁸

• how the phone is answered
• what the packaging looks like
• where the shop is
• the hold music
• how the bosses behave
• even the packing material in the box

Hardly any of this shows up in a sales report. Some of it no one may ever consciously notice. It still ends up in the picture.

One more tool deserves a mention: design. Neumeier points out that design usually has one of four jobs: to identify, to inform, to entertain or to persuade.⁹ Branding adds a fifth job: to make something stand out. That fits everything above. An image only sticks if it differs from all the others.

A brand shapes how we see a product before we have even tried it. We judge first and check later, if at all. There is an uncomfortable word for that: prejudice. In everyday language it stands for unfair judgements about people, made without knowing them and often aimed at whole groups. That is why few people would connect it with something they love.

Oliver Errichiello, a German brand sociologist and author of Philosophie und kleine Geschichte der Marke, does not avoid the word. He first admits that our relationship with brands is odd. We believe in them, treat them as real and hand them our money, yet we can hardly say what they are.¹⁰ His conclusion: in the end, a brand is a positive prejudice that many people share.¹¹

He means this as something we need, not something to fix. Our brains put things into categories, because without such shortcuts we could not cope with the flood of impressions and information that reaches us every day. Whether we like a brand is mostly a matter of taste, and taste is rarely swayed by arguments. When a brand keeps its promise again and again, people stay loyal, and they keep buying.¹²

But such a prejudice is only worth something to a brand when many people share it. So whose picture is it in the end? The company's, or everyone else's?