Branding and marketing: being and telling stories

Alina Wheeler, Designing Brand Identity, 2003.

If the brand is the starting point of any business activity, marketing comes into play immediately afterwards. Once the cornerstone principles have been established and the brand has acquired a defined identity, it will be the task of marketing to try to carry out its raison d’être. If the brand is the message, marketing is like the company: it decides to communicate that message, taking into account the positioning that the brand has decided to adopt, its personality, the values and tone of voice defined (and which should also be embraced by the entire team).

Branding is who you are. Marketing is your message.

If your business were a person, branding would be its personality: how it decides to introduce itself to new friends (customers) and how to establish a trusting relationship with them.

Why do we continue to buy Apple products today despite knowing that the intrinsic value of the product is much lower than its price, while in 1993 the Newton was a total failure? Some might say that the market was not yet ready, the reality is that Apple ‘s brand had not yet developed.

Jason Fried, co-founder of Basecamp, summed up the brand concept in a tweet: ‘You don’t have a brand until someone else tells you what it means. Until then you just have a logo, a brand, a word or a personal vision of what your business could be’. How to achieve this success?

When designing a brand you go to define its essence, its raison d’être, you think of it as a person: a vision shared by many scholars and professionals is the brand-person parallelism:branding is what you are. Like a human being, a brand is complex and multifaceted, it has a physical appearance (logo, colour palette, typeface), a personality (which is expressed both through visual elements and through the tone of voice one decides to use), a soul and behaviours that differentiate them from others.

Just like a friend who has entered our heart, a brand leaves an impression: it offers a vision of the world and invites others to support it. The strongest brands are driven by an ideal and tell it to those who embrace it. How you reach people, how you tell them about yourself, is the work of marketing.

Brand rationality and emotions

The brand is rational and emotional, just like a person. Both sides must be clearly defined and aligned to develop the full potential of the brand, which must operate consistently on the basis of a well-defined set of principles and values.

The principles form the rational building blocks for the brand and are combined with a clear mission (what you intend to do to achieve your purpose) and a clear strategy (the immediate actions to be taken to fulfil your mission). From this union, a working platform is formed to guide the brand ‘s actions so that they are relevant, coordinated and coherent.

The brand strategy should be able to create and maintain an emotional connection with users: from informing its customers about the actions it takes, to how it strives to shape the world, through which activities it educates and entertains the people who follow it.

The emotional side of the brand is formed through internal (corporate culture) and external (consumer-facing) touchpoints. These touch points include the design of the product or service experience, visual communication, advertising, customer service and, more generally, theoverall brand-customer experience before, during and after the purchase.

Brand creates long-term differentiation

Brands that stand out from the crowd do so by engaging people on a higher level, making themselves memorable. The most interesting brands are relevant, engaging, entertaining and most often courageous: they stand for or against a social issue and have the confidence to stand out from the crowd.

A clear example of this is Diesel which, after declaring allegiance to Pride Month, celebrated the loss of 14,000 followers with a post celebrating the farewell of those who do not share the same values:

https://www.instagram.com/p/BzdF8V5ii3h/?utm_source=ig_embed

This activity goes beyond the simple product sold and gives strength to the brand as a spokesperson for values that every company must possess in order to guide and differentiate its business.