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Are you building a box? Or are you building a brand? The first step is understanding the difference.
With a name that has the word “brand” in it, you can just imagine what my social media ad feed looks like. Brand this, brand that, build a brand, create a brand, brand brand brand…. On any given day, a dozen Canva designers, template creators, and smiling, coffee cup holding young (almost without exception) women with painfully straight hair and the best teeth their parents could buy, flood the feed. All are going to help me – almost instantaneously – create my brand.
Actually, they are not.
They might as well be helping me pick out matching cushions and drapes, with a few pieces of art for the walls. Some of these brand designers would make wonderful interior decorators. Don’t misunderstand – aesthetics, the visual parts of the brand symbols, help to differentiate one brand from another. Consistency in presentation is part of a brand’s identity. But is it nowhere near all of what makes a brand.
In fact, I would be willing to wager that powerful brands could be built without a “main color theme”, artsy logo graphic, or distinctive typeface.
Try this mental exercise.
Consider a brand whose product you admire. Good examples are the computers and devices we use. For photographers, pick your favorite photography platform. Now mentally remove all the little visual hints that give away the “brand”. Is that camera still a Canon, Nikon, or Sony? Of course, it is. Let’s say that your favorite brand announced that it was permanently removing all the badges, colors, and logos from its products. If you had the opportunity and desire to buy the next product, knowing it was a particular brand even though it was handed to you in a plain white box with plain black letters, would you still buy it?
Of course, you would.
Because you are buying a product, not a pretty box or stylized logo.
I know what you’re thinking, that the pretty box are a part of the whole, that they are so engrained into the visual image of the product that those visual aesthetics alone represent the core values of the brand.
But which came first, the chicken or the egg?
For established brands, this understanding makes sense. We know that it isn’t the logo that sells to us, it is the value in the product behind the logo. The reputation of the product or service is more important than the color of the box. If that box changes color, will we still buy the product?
What about less established brands, or products of comparable – or even unknown – value? Do humans make value judgements and decisions based on the box? Certainly. People in the wine aisle make choices based on labels all the time. “This wine must be great, just look at that label!”
If the beautiful wrapper around your brand were gone, would you have something inside that is still recognizable?
A tremendous amount of study has gone into the psychology of color and shapes. There’s no denying that brands that make decisions based on a deliberate use of this science make life easier on themselves. Want to instill trust, stability, and professionalism? Blue is your best bet. Is your product or service about vitality, growth, health, wellness of all types? Go with shades of green. Creative, cheap, and cheerful? That has orange all over it. When’s the last time you saw an ad catering to “female entrepreneurs” that didn’t use pastels and – for better or worse – pink?
So, yes, the colors, shapes, typefaces, logos, icons, and other visual clues are a part of brand. I would be a hypocrite to say they weren’t, given how strongly our own photography companies adhere to their visual brands. Some components, like the black and gold color scheme, actually weave through all our brands in some way. The visual components announce that the customer can expect a certain quality, process, and workflow that deviates very little, if at all, from time to time. It creates a “known quantity” effect. If one day we stripped down our brand into a plain white box and pitched ourselves with only our name and our product, would it have the same effect?
That is the question. That should also be the goal. Not to actually strip your aesthetics and see how far you get, but to work every day as though you might have to do so at any moment. If the beautiful wrapper around your brand were gone, would you have something inside that is still recognizable? Would your product, service, message, method, over all customer experience, be strong and unique enough to identity what’s inside that plain white box?
If you can say that, you have built a brand. If you understand that, then you can work toward it every day. Brand is more than the box. Brand is everything you put inside that box for your customer to find. The box is the easy part.
Are you building a box? Or are you building a brand? The first step is understanding the difference.