The Myth About Branding

You can’t really brand a product. Instead, your brand IS the product. So how does a brand develop? Customers create the brand — not you or your marketing company. As customers use your product (or service) they begin to associate it with a name and identity… your logo, your brand name, your communications look and feel.

So the key is to lay strategic groundwork. It all gets down to communications, specifically design and writing. The objective is to plan your message and offer it up in a manner that’s clear, concise, consistent, and cohesive.

The biggest branding pitfall is a marketing ploy that goes like this: The marketing company or ad agency makes a logo intended to ‘say who you really are’. Then, they paste it onto a stack of brochures, business cards, and Web pages and say: "Look, here’s your brand." In fact, your corporate identity is not your brand. It’s only the first step in the branding process.

Closing the Gap

Some things haven’t changed with the digital age. Real communications go full-circle. Communication is not a one-way process. It’s not a line. It’s a loop. You start with a message, which you begin serving to your audience. To get even that far, you’d better really understand your audience — who they are, what they care about, how they think, what frustrates them, what makes their hearts throb, what gets them fired up.

If your message gets through without interference (another topic!), people respond with feedback. To communicate effectively, you listen attentively to feedback. Some people call that number-crunching (collecting and analyzing marketing data, sales figures, etc.) Some people call that the touchy-feely side of marketing communications — taking surveys, making phone calls, answering emails, simply listening to stakeholders. It’s all important.

As you allow customers to complete the loop, you refine not only your product or service, but your message. Through feedback, you strengthen communications. In all, marketing communications is an up-close and personal conversation with your customers that has no end.

When it comes to branding, the critical feedback you’re looking for is the customer who names your brand back to you — the customer who confirms that in fact, your stakeholders have now defined your brand — the customer who sees your typeface, your design style, your catch phrases, your logo, your literature, your packaging, your website, and says, “You’re the one.”