Branding Beyond Visuals & Repetition cont.
If you didn’t have the graphic branding components, how would you “see” your brand?
That’s the question posed in “Branding With Your Eyes Closed,” an article published in Advertising Age by global brand strategist, Jonathan Salem Baskin. If you close your eyes and describe your brand, you’ll most likely describe it in very specific words—characteristics, details of your services and products, differentiating words that set you apart from your competitors. How you describe your brand is then put into action with marketing materials, ad campaigns, and other visuals. When we go through a branding process with a client, we ask to visualize a lot—visualize your logo, website, and brochures. You’ll find that conversations about branding revolve around the visuals we create to tell the story about your brand. The author goes on to describe that brands were initially conceived through graphic arts because that’s how you got the message to the public. When you take the visuals away; however, describing connections to your products or services without showing your logo or brochure requires “some verbal gymnastics.” For some, describing your brand may, unexpectedly, sound generic.
With your eyes closed, you’d have to give consumers meaningful content that enables them to share with others reasons why your product is excellent rather than describing how great of a marketer/salesperson you are.
With your eyes closed, describing actions becomes easy. You’d find yourself focusing on behaviors that evidenced what you hoped your consumers think or imagine, and you could build your branding on an ongoing series of real-time actions instead of inert positions of words and images. When you close your eyes, you may think, “how does my brand matter to my customers rather than how I promised my brand to them.”
The author then concludes that any brand image would be an outcome of these behaviors, not their direct purpose.
At Werremeyer, branding has become a way of life, and how we operate day-to-day. While branding is a process, and we believe that visuals are a major factor of a successful brand, these articles really put what a brand means to your customer in context.
– September 30, 2011