what is a brand
now?
We’ve had about a hundred years of
the brand as a conscious, deliberate,
managed thing that we use to represent,
promote, promise and evangelise,
so what is a brand now?
The question
just here
A brand is a vision.
For a while, all the big thinking said
that we should make a brand become onevalue, one-word that it could totally own,
that would be something very important to
people and could lock it permanently into
the collective mind in a very meaningful
way. So, Volvo means safety, Virgin means
rebel, Apple means innovation, and so on.
But this is the second century. The
global village and the human system and
information technology and social networks
have all moved in and moved on, a long way.
The people have been put, ideologically,
at the heart of the organisation.
A brand is a vision of the way the
organisation believes things ought to be.
You go back to the middle of the last
century and what mattered to people was
the substance of an idea or a product or
a service: the intrinsic quality of it.
It had to be solid and lasting. Through the
1960s and 1970s, attention moved from the
objective to the subjective – not ‘how good
is this’ but ‘how does it make me feel’.
After that, from the eighties on, branding
took the lead and we all followed in a
quest for externalised satisfaction:
‘how does it make me look’. Branding was
about the external, with making things
appear to be a certain way.
Many organisations and their consultants
are still using that model: using branding
to put a good face on. But the people have
learned from all the earlier transitions.
Further empowered by the information age,
they have embraced radical change. They
are experienced, knowing, demanding and
selective. Now they expect to enjoy quality
and feel good and look good and, now, feel
good about anyone who wants their support.
Now, they are involved with their suppliers
and providers and servicers.
Take the birthday cake as an example.
Back before packaged goods changed our
lives, mums made birthday cakes from
scratch, mixing farm products like flour,
sugar, butter and eggs. As the goods-based
industrial economy advanced, people started
buying pre-mixed ingredients in packets,
from brands like Greens and Betty Crocker.
Later on came the service economy, and
busy parents started ordering cakes from
the bakery or the supermarket. By the time
we get to the 1990s, people aren’t making
the cake or even throwing the party.
Instead the whole event is outsourced to
McDonalds or Burger King and we are in the
experience economy.
After this, people almost started to see
themselves as brands. They want everything
they do and buy to fit their idea of
themselves and their world: a place with
a complex set of values. They can search
and check the products and services and
prices and practices and behaviour of every
provider they use. They are highly brandliterate and they are connected to each
other in more ways than ever before. Now a
birthday cake would have to be top of the
range from a well-known individual craftartisan, beautifully designed, hand-made
and custom finished from cruelty-free,
free range, guaranteed organic ingredients.
Welcome to the information economy.
Today, to be relevant and effective and
sustainable, a brand is a vision of the
way things ought to be to meet the needs
and aspirations of a highly sophisticated
user constituency.
Ivan Turgenev
Russian writer
1862
A picture shows me at a glance
what it takes dozens of pages of
a book to expound.
Some people say you can explain a brand as
a story, but what is it the story of? It’s
the story of a vision. For most branding
purposes that story has to be reduced to a
very few compelling ideas which are more or
less instantly understandable, but a story
implicitly means ‘telling with words’.
In 1862, the Russian writer Ivan Turgenev
wrote “A picture shows me at a glance
what it takes dozens of pages of a book
to expound.”
We often hear it said that a picture is
worth a thousand words, and needs and
aspirations are feelings - ideas that
people largely experience as images in
their minds. Brands need to respond in the
same language. To understand how brands
appeal we can draw on findings from Plato
about the four ways in which people are
aware, which Jung also used in his teaching
on human psychology. These are: thinking,
using logic and rationale; sensation, the
direct perception of phenomena; feeling,
concerned with emotions; and intuition,
the ability to sense the intangible.
Notice that only one – the logic and
rationality of thinking – expressly
requires words to function.
Thinking
Sensation
Feeling
Intuition
No surprise that we call it the company
vision – a word implicitly proposing
visual ideas. The company vision is
usually written in words but it is almost
always intended to engender strong feelings
of inspiration and commitment by evoking
visual imagery.
A brand is a vision that needs to be
created in pictures.
Perhaps it is clear why the job of
creating branding became the role of a
separate and identifiable design industry.
Advertising agencies have always dealt
creatively in a large amount of imagery,
but most frequently also involving a
significant word count. Design bears the
central ethic of communicating with line
and form and colour and illustration.
And this is still presently the key
defining attribute of Atticus.
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