Why brands matter
Before positioning, before models, before design, there is a simpler question: what is a brand, and why does it work at all. This is the ground floor of the whole section.
In this chapter: what a brand is, what brands do, and brands and identity.
What a brand is
A brand is the meaning a name carries in people's minds. Within a culture, brands are words loaded with shared meaning that let us communicate efficiently in a complex world, delivering a whole chain of associations, meanings and attributes at once.1 It is not the logo, which only triggers that meaning, and not the product, which is only one of the things that shape it.
A useful working definition measures a brand by its results: a high level of awareness, a positive image, a clear and distinctive picture of the brand, high regard, satisfied and loyal customers, and economic success.2 Design has four classic jobs, to identify, inform, entertain and persuade. Branding adds a fifth that changes the game, to differentiate. There are no boring products, only boring brands.3
What brands do
A brand's value shows in what it does for both sides of a market. For the buyer it provides orientation and identification, and it creates market transparency that lowers the effort and cost of searching and deciding.4 For the seller, a strong brand builds a firm basis of trust with the most important stakeholders, makes crises easier to weather because emotional closeness raises credibility, makes the company more attractive as an employer, keeps prices stable, and lifts the value seen on the capital market.4
This is the economic case for branding. Brands have gained strength as buying behaviour has changed: price is no longer the decisive criterion for many buyers, who again reward quality and innovation, which makes the brand a decisive competitive factor.5 Emotion deepens the effect. Past a certain level of attachment a brand is not only bought again but shown off and recommended.6
Brands and identity
Beyond quality and origin, brands do social work. People are herd animals, and through brands they signal which groups they belong to or want to belong to. A brand does not only signal group membership, it makes a real contribution to the development of a person's identity.1 That is why brands can charge more than function alone would justify, and why the strongest brands feel personal to the people who use them.
The relationship has also flattened. Brands are used selectively inside a personal narrative to shape how a person is seen, which makes the brand and customer relationship less hierarchical. And a brand only holds together when three groups share the same picture of it: the owners who set the core, the agents who represent it, and the outsiders who talk about it.1
In practice
How to use this chapter on a real brand.
Describe your brand as the meaning you want a name to carry, not as a logo or a feature list. Write down the chain of associations you want triggered, then check whether your product, service and communication build that chain or contradict it.
List the functions the brand actually performs, for the buyer and for your own company, and be honest about which are real and which are aspirational. Then ask which identity the brand lets a customer express, and whether owners, staff and audience would all describe that identity the same way. Where they diverge, the brand is not yet coherent.
Questions to ask: what does our name make people think and feel, which associations are we creating on purpose and which by accident, what does the brand do for the buyer and for us, and which group does it help people belong to.
Recommended reading
Sources
1 Freitag, A. Von Marken und Menschen. (Brands as meaning-loaded terms; identity and belonging; the triangle of owners, agents and outsiders.)
2 Gnann, C. (2008). Angewandte Markenforschung. Diplomica Verlag. (A results based definition, richer than the American Marketing Association's.)
3 Neumeier, M. The Brand Gap. (Differentiation as the fifth job; no boring products, only boring brands.)
4 Casanova, M. (2005). "Public Relations als strategisches Führungsinstrument." VS Verlag.
5 Bauer, Klepper, Perrey, Tochtermann (2011). Die Marke macht's. McKinsey & Company.
6 Nufer, G. & Förster, O. (2010). Lovemarks, emotionale Aufladung von Marken.