Designing Brand Identity: What's a Brand?

Brand Basics
By: Yazan Al-Tamimi

Brand Basics
This is an outline of my branding studies, I will be summarizing all the information I
learn throughout my studies and researches into small presentations hoping it will
make good and easy references for people who are looking to understand and learn
more about branding.
!
In this presentation I will talk about the Brand basics and I will cover the following:
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- What is brand?
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Stay tuned and engage with me on twitter on: @YazanTamimi

What’s a Brand?
Language is supposed to illuminate meaning, but it doesn’t always work that way.
As usage evolves, definitions become unmoored, and different people start using
the same word to mean entirely different things.
Brand is one of those words that is widely used but unevenly understood. What
does “brand” mean, and how has the word’s application changed over time?
The first definition of “brand” is the name given to a product or service from a
specific source. Used in this sense, “brand” is similar to the current meaning of
the word “trademark.”
More than a century ago, cattle ranchers used branding irons to indicate which
animals were theirs. As the cattle moved across the plains on their way to
Chicago slaughter houses, it was easy to determine which ranches they were from
because each head of cattle was branded.

What’s a Brand?
With the rise of packaged goods in the 19th century, producers put their mark on a
widening array of products—cough drops, flour, sugar, beer—to indicate their
source. In the late 1880s, for example, as the Coca-Cola Company was getting
started, there were many soda producers in every market. Before Coca-Cola
could get a customer to reach for a Coke, it needed to be sure the customer
could distinguish a Coke from all the other fizzy caramel-colored beverages out
there.
In the first sense of the word, then, a brand is simply the non-generic name for a
product that tells us the source of the product. A Coke is a fizzy caramel-colored
soda concocted by those folks in Atlanta.
In earlier times, we referred to these non-generic names as “brand names.”
Between 1945 and 1965, marketers might have said that Proctor & Gamble sold a
laundry detergent under the brand name Tide. Nowadays, people would simply
say P&G sells the Tide brand of laundry detergent. Problem is, the shorthand
suggests there’s no difference between a brand name and a brand. But, in
contemporary marketing, there is.

What’s a Brand?
Beginning in the later part of the 20th century, marketers began to
grasp there was more to the perception of distinctive products and
services than their names—something David Ogilvy described as
“the intangible sum of a product’s attributes.” Marketers realized
that they could create a specific perception in customers’ minds
concerning the qualities and attributes of each non-generic product
or service. They took to calling this perception “the brand.”
Put simply, your “brand” is what your prospect thinks of when he or
she hears your brand name. It’s everything the public thinks it
knows about your name brand offering—both factual (e.g. It comes
in a robin’s-egg-blue box), and emotional (e.g. It’s romantic). Your
brand name exists objectively; people can see it. It’s fixed. But
your brand exists only in someone’s mind.

“Brand will become the most powerful strategic tool
since the spreadsheet.”
–Marty Neumeier

What’s a Brand?
!
As competition creates infinite choices, companies look for ways to connect
emotionally with customers, become irreplaceable, and create lifelong relationships,
A strong brand stands out in a densely crowded marketplace. People fall in love
with brands, trust them, and believe in their superiority. How a brand is perceived
affects its success, regardless of whether it’s a start-up, a nonprofit, or a product.
In fact, one of the ways we sometimes see that a brand is growing stronger is when
its customers start referring to it by something different from its brand name. Think
“FedEx” or “Tar-jé.” This only happens when customers feel enough of a
relationship with a product to bestow it with a nickname—which, in the cases I just
mentioned, happily reinforce the brand attributes Federal Express and Target seek
to promote: speed and efficiency for the former and affordable chic for the latter.
But sometimes, customer perceptions can be a headache for brand managers.
Natural and organic food retailer Whole Foods Market has been struggling for years
to shed the moniker “Whole Paycheck,” which captures public perceptions of what
it costs to shop in the store.

What’s a Brand?
Brands have three primary functions:
- Navigation: Brands help consumers choose from a bewildering array or
choices.
- Reassurance: Brands communicate the intrinsic quality of the product or
service and reassure customers that they have made the right choice.
- Engagement: Brands use distinctive imagery, language, and associations to
encourage customers to identify with the brand.
These are important to remember when beginning the branding process for your
company or for re-branding a current company. If you are a small business looking
to brand yourself, take your time! It is a long process that needs to be done
correctly in order for your brand to grow and compete in the market.

“It is never too late to be what you could have
been.”
–George Eliot

Brand Touchpoints
Social Networks • Sales Promotion • Advertising
Environments • Experiences • Websites • Newsletters
Business Forms • Signage • Packaging • Exhibits
Proposals • Emails • Voicemails • Publications • Apps
Letterheads • Business Cards • Billboards • Ephemera
Vehicles • Services • Products • Employees • Speeches
Presentations • Video • Mobile • Word of Mouth • Trade
Shows • Direct Mail • Public Relations • Blogs

Brand Touchpoints Matrix
New technologies have radically changed how
consumers engage with brands. We, as consumers,
often connect with brands via multiple touchpoints such
as websites, mobile apps, ads, social networks and
various services.
People hold companies to high expectations to deliver
experiences that are consistent on all platforms, and to
complicate it further we are more demanding than ever
and expect to be able to choose freely when and how we
interact with products and services.

Brand Touchpoint Matrix
The Brand Touchpoint Matrix is a planning tool developed by Hello Future in order to
create a more understandable view of how to think and act as a brand today. It’s built on
the notion that every touchpoint – or interaction between the customer and the brand –
has certain built-in properties that makes them more or less suitable for different things.
The horizontal axis plots touchpoints from those often experienced during shorter
periods of time (and that doesn’t require too much involvement from the customer) to
longer term interactions and relations.
The vertical axis tell us if the touchpoint has more mass media properties (reaches lots
of people) or if it’s more suited for personal interactions (easier to create a personal
experience).
For example, a 30 second TV spot can reach a wide audience but doesn’t really create
any direct value, while a local LEGO user group reach a small audience but create a
strong community that give both the people involved and the company lots of value back.
(Note: the position of the touchpoints has to be analyzed individually for every brand/
customer segment – the model above is an example)

Brand Touchpoint Matrix
The most valuable touchpoints
The most successful brands are the ones that can create true value,
build a relationship with their customers and give them tools that, at
the end of the day, make the brand irreplaceable. Interestingly, the
touchpoints that can create these kinds of relationships, such as
communities, can be found in the upper right part of the matrix.
This teaches us to provide clues and cues in every touchpoint so we
entice customers toward the touchpoints in the upper right half of
the model, where we find the really interesting interactions that
provide value to both the customer and the company. It’s in that
corner that we find the value that advances a brand beyond their
competitors and can create true loyalty.

Consumer Decision Journey
Let’s take an example of how to use the previous model by asking an important question
for brands and marketers:
How do people make their purchase decisions? Research from McKinsey introduced
a view on this called the “consumer decision journey” (CDJ) which show that customers
often follow the path consider, evaluate, buy, enjoy/advocate/bond.
So what do this mean for the Brand Touchpoint Matrix? Well, in general we see that the
lower half of the grid is where traditional advertising and marketing belongs (requiring skills
in creating buzz with interesting and/or entertaining content), while the upper half is more
about service design (requiring skills in creating value for customers).
Identifying which touchpoints that works best with the consider, evaluate, buy, enjoy/
advocate/bond phases and how we can help the customer take the next step are key to a
successful CDJ.
We think this explain a lot why some agencies struggle to create good value for their
clients – you can’t apply just marketing logic (or service logic) on every touchpoint. You
have to be able to see an idea through creative, digital, social, business and design to
achieve great results.

“It’s not about ”traditional” or ”digital”.
It’s about the experience.”
-Jonas Persson

Consumer Decision Journey
What the previous model also tells us that it’s not about
”instead of”, it’s about ”together with”. It’s about looking
at the big picture where services, marketing, technology
and products blur, because for customers these
interactions are usually a means to an end, a path to a
desired goal rather than the goal itself.
We’re living in a cross-media world where the planning of
brand experiences are key to success.

I hope this would be useful for you, for comments and
discussions, feel free to leave a comment here or reach
to me via my social network profiles. In my next
presentation I will cover Brand Identity.
Thanks,
Yazan
Facebook • Twitter • Instagram: @YazanTamimi
http://yazantamimi.com

Resources:
Designing Brand Identity - Alina Wheeler
http://www.forbes.com/sites/jerrymclaughlin/
2011/12/21/what-is-a-brand-anyway/
http://www.blackbeardesign.com/branding-101-what-is-a-
brand/
http://brandtouchpointmatrix.com

Designing Brand Identity: What's a Brand?

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