People ask me all the time to define what a brand is. But I usually find it more helpful to talk first about what a brand isn’t because people have a notion or an illusion, a habit, a thinking, that the brand is the logo. But, the brand isn’t the logo. The logo, whether it’s a great logo like the linked rings of Aldi or the Swoosh of Nike are really just badges that help us to remember the brand. The brand in fact is the collection of meanings that we carry around in our heads and in our hearts about any given organizational product or service.
So, in a sense, brands don’t really exist. In a sense they only exist in our collective consciousness if you like. And if you take a world class brand like Nike, they’ve managed to pull off the great trick of having literally millions and millions of people around the world share a little package of thoughts about them. So when you talk about Nike and I frequently in my workshops draw the Nike Swoosh on the board without the word, everybody recognizes it. What’s even more interesting is they know what it’s called they know it’s called the Swoosh, but they know what it means. And they always come up with the same package of things. They talk about sports, achievement, they talk about premium, they talk about design, the fashion, they talk a little bit about hip-hop culture that kind of thing. And then someone in the room will always put up hands up and say what about label practices in the Far East.
So there’s an interesting lesson there that actually it’s not the people in the boardroom that own the brands, it’s the people on the street that own the brands because Nike of course, which is the portal of the first lot of things about what sports and achievements and so on. But I really don’t want people to associate them with negative practices.
If I write the word John Louis on the board, there’ll be lots of different words but they come down to three fundamental meanings, quality, service and value. And then someone in the room put up their hands and say, “And partnership,” which isn’t a negative, but it’s an interesting thing because we don’t usually care about what they ownership structure of a shop is. But we do care about what the ownership structure to John Luis is because they’ve made us care and it gives us this extra little business comfort about that brand that makes us think they must be terribly nice people because they shared everything to the west stuff.
So, brand is about meaning and then, I apply that when I’m working with brands large and small. By trying to drill down to what it is that you want to be seen as in the world. What do you want your position to be? What do you want your style or interaction to be? What do you want people to feel about you? What do you want people to tell other people about you? And it’s only when you drilled on that far that you get to the heart of creating a brand. Once you’ve created the brand, you can then start to talk about marketing, you can start to talk about old marketing disciplines, but you have to sort the brand out first. Otherwise, you’re marketing something that has no meaning. That’s what a brand is.
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