I wrote about branding last June. I have more to say.
“Brand” is what people think of your company, product or service. It isn’t what YOU say it is. It’s what your prospective customers say it is. To a great many people, Wal-Mart stands for low priced decent quality goods and items. Target’s cachet is low-priced but better quality.
Branding is everything you do to establish or change that. It’s also everything your competition or enemies do in the same vein. Unions for years have been attempting to re-brand Wal-Mart as “the giant company that’s unfair to its workers and small businesses.” To date they haven’t succeeded, at least with most people.
“Brand identity” is everything that REMINDS people of your branding or of your brand.
There is to some degree, a continuous spectrum between branding and brand identity. A logo or color scheme is at one end. No one is going to get much of a concept of UPS, knowing that their color is brown. A logo does very little more than that. Sure, colors and logos should be CONSISTENT with your branding. But trying to lean on them to build a brand is a waste of time.
A slogan or tagline, on the other hand, can contribute to building a brand. Repeat it enough times and people will tend to think it is true. At the same time, it is weak compared to other methods of branding. SHOW people what you want them to think.
Barnum and Bailey Circus has been “The Greatest Show on Earth” for 150 years. But they also tell you the same thing throughout their shows. And the whole approach of their shows is a spectacular. They assume they are the greatest show on earth, as a starting point – not only in what they do but how they present it. And the shows do a great deal to live up to that slogan, which is really a claim and a promise.
Now let’s take a contrary example. Verizon has evidently discovered (finally) that people think their customer service is hideously bad. Their answer? A marketing campaign to tell everyone how great their customer service is and how dedicated they are to providing great customer service.
Did they actually CHANGE something, to improve their service?
No.
So that’s a campaign doomed to failure.
Ultimately, branding has to be based on truth.
The more truthiness, the better chance it has at success.