If Branding was an elephant, then every marketer you see is a blind man feeling for it. It would seem that while we know what Branding feels like, we have varying definitions of what it is or what it should be. But we can all agree that good Branding is essential for any company, entity, or even idea that exists.
Branding is one of those universal subjects that everyone, and not just digital marketers, has to learn about. Communication experts, CEOs, and even the average employee must create a personal brand at some point. The only qualification you need to have a brand is to exist.
And you can see this across all kinds of traditional and digital media. People have become brands, and companies have humanized their brands to varying degrees of success (mostly overwhelmingly when done correctly). But for such a pie that everyone has (or should) have their hands in, Branding is perhaps the most misunderstood and underutilized aspect of marketing.
In the broadest sense, a brand is simply the sum total of what everyone thinks when they come to you, and Branding is merely the act of taking control of that total and using it to achieve your goals.
Now, quite a lot of businesses I have worked with do not have a brand that does anything for them effectively. If they have, it is an incomplete brand chocked in a fancy brand guide that isn’t worth the effort put into it.
I could talk about a brand guide for days, but for the scope of this article, I would say that a brand is not a fancy document to be left in the coffers of a company cloud drive. It is a rule book that guides the behaviors of your company and its employees, within and without your organization. A brand guide is more than just a marketing document; it ties in with the internal culture of your business.
But hold that thought. We are here to uncover the parts of a complete brand and what it should look like, and you will see why I say a brand guide is a rule book.
A Brand should stand on these four pillars
Or should I say four things a brand should be? A brand does a lot more than be recognizable from across the room. For your brand to realize its full potential, it must do at least these four things.
A brand should tell a story
It is a character that wants to achieve something in the world and thus has to move and do stuff. As a brand acts, it socializes with the real world and reveals its character through what it expresses in the process, much like the conflict in a story is driven by the obstacles in a protagonist’s path to success.
A brand is consistent
Much-loved brands have consistency in their character, just like much-loved characters in any great movie or book you have read. An internal logic always justifies their reactions to the outside world. This is exactly how a brand operates. Since the 80s, Apple has consistently stood in front as an innovator, breaking out of the mold with something new. Apple often earns enough flak when they do not innovate like they promised.
A brand grows
Much like anything that exists, a brand is subject to change, and growth is easily the most positive kind of change. As much as growth changes a brand, what it doesn’t do is change the core values of the brand.
A brand has to feel authentic
The educated consumer will not just buy from you because you need money. You have to be offering some other kind of value aside from your products and services. The more of that value you deliver, the more authentic and deserving of your position. And the most effective way to authenticate your brand is to walk your talk.
The Anatomy of a Brand
If I had a dollar every time I heard someone say, “Your brand is not your logo.” They are right, but the truth is a little more complete than that. It goes like this,’ Your brand is not just your logo, it comprises other things.’ And it is those other things that we will expound on in this section of the article. Here is the complete anatomy of a brand.
It looks like a lot at first, but it isn’t. If you have a brand guide, please do the following:
- Kindly hold it up to this image
- Identify the parts of your brand guide that are here.
- Note what you do not have in your brand guide.
- Continue reading this article
Brand Strategy Drives Brand Success
Brands don’t just happen. They are planned. Nearly every brand success you read about has had millions of actions coordinated to make the person or entity look that way. When a brand is not ‘branding,’ you immediately know because of the inconsistencies.
Internal Brand
Your internal brand is the aspect of your brand that the customer doesn’t see. It is very much like the DNA of your brand and goes on to form the substance about it. Your internal brand is composed of the following;
Brand Purpose
This is why you do what you do outside of commercial gain. Yes, you want to make money, but you could be doing something different from what you are doing now. What is the very reason why you are doing this particular thing as a business?
Brand Vision
While you go about your purpose, a long-term objective helps measure your success with that purpose. A vision describes what you want to see your brand become in the environment that it is situated in.
Brand Mission
Your mission defines your brand’s commitment to ensuring that it aligns with its purpose and maintains its vision. You have to determine what you are doing now to guarantee success.
Core Values
Your core values are the ideas that your brand holds dear in how it behaves and does business.
Now, while it is popular these days for businesses to walk around plastering the elements of their internal brand everywhere, it doesn’t make it right. You do not go around telling people the shape of your DNA, do you? You are not a cartoon made for children. It paints the company as one that feels self-important and self-righteous. Yes, we know you have a mission, and so what? The brand starts to feel more mouthy and less active.
The elements of the internal brand should be kept within the company. If anything, the internal brand should be internalized by the workers in the company. Since these employees represent the brand, internalizing these messages would enable them to express your brand in actions and behaviour more clearly and deliver your brand’s true impact.
Positioning
This aspect of your brand strategy defines the position you want to occupy in your audience’s mind and your environment at large. Don’t worry; there is always room for you in the mind of your target audience, no matter how small. It is your job to define that space so you know exactly what to do on that precious piece of mental real estate you have carved out.
This aspect comes with a lot of research and, naturally, a lot of interaction with the external environment of the business. Doing this after you have solidified your internal brand allows your brand to flow from your business authentically rather than shaping your business into a brand that dances to whatever tune the audience plays.
The three aspects of your brand positioning to define are;
Audience
You started this business to serve a specific need, which is owned by particular people who are your target audience. You already have a rough idea of who your target audience is in your mind, but here, you have to define who exactly your brand should appeal to down to the last detail.
Since a brand’s purpose is to establish you in the minds of your audience, defining your audience allows you to tweak your brand into something more friendly to their tastes and provides more insights into how you can make full use of the attention they give you.
Competitors
So many options exist these days for the consumer. Even the most perfect customer persona has other options. Researching your competitors reveals the nature of the industry and what your audience is pressured with when they look to solve their needs. The lessons learned from here would also help you form your unique value proposition.
Difference
Think of this as your unique value proposition but in brand form. The difference is where you take all of what you have learned about your audience and competitors and craft what makes you different, if not better than they are. The more unique your difference is to your target audience, the more memorable it can be. And the deeper you can root yourself in the mind of your audience.
Be careful to gather enough data so you can tweak your final brand into something meaningful and useful to your target audience. Positioning will go on to affect everything about how your brand expresses itself.
Brand Expression
All aspects of your brand that deal with what other people see and hear are parts of your brand expression. Typically classified into three, they are;
Character
Your brand character defines how you create relationships with your customers, clients, or audience members. Parts of a brand character include.
Personality: This refers to how your brand generally comes across. Is it friendly or formal?
Brand Voice: Voice happens when a character talks. This should align with the personality you have defined and have a tone to go with it. Your brand voice is how you say what you want, while your tone communicates the feelings in your words.
Verbal Expression
This aspect deals with the actual words and stories that your brand puts out there. Modern storytelling demands that you deliver parts of the story piece by piece, much like you would on a live channel like radio or social media.
So it always helps to have a Core Message broken into pieces and communicated live to your audience daily. These messages should be crafted in the addictive Storytelling form to emphasize what your audience needs to know and in what order they need to know it. It can be summarized in a Name, A Tagline, and A Promise. When you hear people say that a brand is a promise, this is what it means.
Visual Expression
Finally, you can deal with the visual aspects of the brand when the invisible parts have been well-defined. The visual expression attempts to communicate if ever so briefly, the most important ideas that you have espoused in the other aspects of your brand system.
Your Visual Identity comprises your logos, colors, templates, and the other materials that carry your communication. This is packaged in what is usually a brand guide to keep it consistent across all communication channels and different touchpoints.
While your Presence defines how your office is decorated, and what people see about your brand when you are around.
When you think of Brand Expression, think of delivering your overarching story, the right piece, at the right time and on the right channel or medium. You need to think and plan.
What to Learn from the Anatomy of a Brand
Having the anatomy of a brand at the back of your mind would help your brand in several ways. It not only clarifies what a brand is about. It enables you to take a closer lens to the elements of your brand. I will leave you a few things you should remember to refer to this brand anatomy for.
Find weaknesses in your brand
When brand messaging is inconsistent, when there is a creative block around marketing, or when a brand does not know what story to tell, the regular culprit is a lack of complete understanding of the brand by the company. In times like these, I refer to this framework to understand what parts of it are not present or fully understood.
Sometimes, a brand doesn’t make sense because some parts are missing. This anatomical template can help you spot the parts of the brand that are weaker or out of sync with the other aspects. Remember that they have to work together. It can also help fix a brand by filling in the missing parts to strengthen it.
Brand marketers can also employ this to flesh out the bare bones of a brand that a company could start with if they are under immense pressure to enter the market.
Start with a brand strategy
Ideally, all parts of your brand should be well-defined and cohesive before you start marketing the brand fully, but since we do not live in a perfect world, you may need to head into the market quickly.
Ultimately, consistency is crucial in expressing and forming a brand, and to keep your brand consistent, authentic, and meaningful, you have to have a solid strategy behind it. At least the elements in the brand strategy should be fully defined and joined in place before you even begin to think about expression. Else, you may just be mouthing off on social media without any impact.
Do the Visual Expression after everything else has been done
Very often, this is the only aspect of Branding that most businesses have and maintain. Everything may look okay outside, but under the hood, almost nothing of substance manages meaning or uses creativity efficiently when it comes to achieving their goals.
Let your logo, colors, and visual representation be backed with much more meaning. You would not only appear to be more purposeful, but the confidence you gain when a cohesive brand strategy supports your logo allows your brand to be expressed with more certainty about its impact.
Your brand can be under your control
In my professional capacity, I recommend that every aspect of the Brand Strategy be internalized and understood before you move on with creating your brand. It is better and cheaper in the long run when you pay heed to the anatomy of a brand framework.
Filling in all the sections is not the endgame in itself. The anatomy of a brand only splits your brand into quantifiable components that you can work on and improve upon. It also gives you realistic and tangible objectives to achieve on that front, making it easier to create one when you are just starting.
When a brand is incomplete, there is an inconsistency in its expression, less efficiency in its marketing, and poor management of meaning and creative human resources. Ideas would be very challenging to execute in favour of your goals because you have not defined your brand and thus cannot measure its goals yet. It would also feel like you always start from scratch when you have to do something. Also, be sure to document everything in your brand guide.
Remember that a brand takes time to flesh out and build and even more time to grow and cement itself in the audience’s minds. This is because a lot of thought goes into it. Give your brand all the thoughts you can because it is a real asset. And it is one that you can completely control if you understand it.
Do you know that you can put an end to all of the content problems that your business suffers from? Check out this article on understanding content strategy for your business.