Branding is Bullshit

13 Responses to Branding is Bullshit

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2. mnead says:

   October 4, 2010 at 11:29 am

   As a part­ner of a brand strat­egy and design firm, it may come as a sur­prise that I tend to agree with your posi­tion here. The prac­tice of brand­ing, as many in the indus­try have come to define it, is more closely aligned to shov­el­ing manure than pro­vid­ing sub­stance with busi­ness value. You offer one of the most impor­tant and, I think, rel­e­vant per­spec­tives on a prac­tice which has become con­gested with “experts” sell­ing what they have no con­trol over. The fact is, design­ers, agen­cies and brand con­sul­tan­cies have lit­tle con­trol over the brands they serve. There, I said it. All we can really con­trol is the qual­ity of the guid­ance and direc­tion that we pro­vide our clients. We can help them arrive at a more clear, mean­ing­ful under­stand­ing of who they are as orga­ni­za­tions, and why that mat­ters to their stake­hold­ers. We can help shape the plat­form and the tools by which they com­mu­ni­cate their promise to these stake­hold­ers. We can make strate­gic rec­om­men­da­tions of where and how their brands are expe­ri­enced. But what we can’t do is con­trol the ratio­nal, emo­tional or per­cep­tual rela­tion­ships that one has with a brand. The audi­ence defines a brand through their indi­vid­ual expe­ri­ences. Period. While we can help guide that expe­ri­ence so it’s aligned with a vision for the brand and ful­fill­ing to those who con­nect with it, we can’t con­trol it. As Marty Neumeier, author of The Brand Gap, notes, “your brand is not what you say it is. It’s what they say it is.”

   I’ve always had con­tempt for the term “brand­ing” or the word “brand” used as a verb. Regard­less of whether you’re a designer, PR con­sul­tant, brand strate­gist, or adver­tis­ing pro­fes­sional, you don’t “do” brand­ing. The brand is formed by the indi­vid­ual expe­ri­ence one has with a com­pany, it’s prod­ucts and ser­vices. It’s a claim of dis­tinc­tion — a promise — and how that promise is deliv­ered. With this dis­tinc­tion in mind, your posi­tion that the busi­ness of brand­ing is decep­tive is accu­rate. It’s decep­tive for a design firm to repo­si­tion itself as a “brand­ing” firm, but con­tin­u­ing to func­tion­ing as it always had. It’s decep­tive to take claim to the cre­ation of a brand because you devel­oped their logo and a web­site. Call it what it is. You devel­oped a logo and a web­site. You didn’t develop a brand. You devel­oped tools that rep­re­sent and com­mu­ni­cate the brand. If you built a brand strat­egy to help a client deliver val­ued, con­sis­tent brand expe­ri­ences, you built a strat­egy. You didn’t build a brand. That’s a huge dis­tinc­tion that needs to be clearly articulated.

   The busi­ness of help­ing clients shape their brand strat­egy in order to deliver more val­ued and mean­ing­ful expe­ri­ences is what brand “pro­fes­sion­als” should aspire to pro­vide. That is not a hol­low nor futile endeavor. This, I believe, is crit­i­cal to busi­ness suc­cess because it gives the com­pany a code to live and oper­ate by and a vision to aspire to. Qual­ity prod­ucts, a pos­i­tive work envi­ron­ment and exem­plary cus­tomer ser­vice are all deriv­a­tives of that code and vision.

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4. bearcatski says:

   October 6, 2010 at 6:55 am

   There’s plenty of BS out there, and I agree that few firms have the breadth of ser­vices that allow them to influ­ence the brand on enough lev­els to instantly change it…but there’s noth­ing wrong with shoot­ing for the stars. That is the point of design is it not? Influ­ence pos­i­tive, prof­itable change in an aes­thet­i­cally pleas­ing way.

   Some design­ers and firms might want to do their logo/digital/print work etc. and move on…That’s cool and there is plenty of com­pa­nies (likely smaller ones) that will hire them for their great creative.

   Good “brand­ing” firms have a very holis­tic view of brand and the levers that influ­ence it. Multi-billion dol­lar com­pa­nies are not going to bet their futures and their share­hold­ers money on a few cre­ative people’s genius any more. Those days are over. Big­ger cor­po­ra­tions that want big­ger think­ing that can be ver­i­fied with lots of research…this is where the Brand­ing firms play.

   Is it over com­pli­cated sometimes…Yes.
   But there’s room for all of us

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5. XK9 says:

   October 6, 2010 at 8:38 am

   Hello Mark and Tom.

   Thank you to con­tribut­ing your thoughts and con­tin­u­ing the dialog.

   Tom, I won’t out you but I will share with whomever reads this that you work for one of the more well-known firms that prac­tice brand­ing. I truly appre­ci­ate your per­spec­tive. I’m not say­ing that qual­ity work does not come from com­pa­nies like yours; it cer­tainly can and often does.

   I take issue with how com­pa­nies like yours define what they do. I believe thay might be more accu­rately referred to as Enter­prise Mar­ket­ing Con­sul­tants. Prob­a­bly not as sexy as Brand­ing Experts, but it is honest.

   Some­one claimed that mine is a prob­lem of seman­tics; I sup­pose that’s true. The mean­ing of words is crit­i­cal and I take issue with the mean­ing of the word brand­ing. As used by com­pa­nies like yours, it’s the busi­ness equiv­a­lent of alchemy, the myth­i­cal prac­tice of turn­ing lead into gold.

   No doubt, a busi­ness can be influ­enced by the work you do. But to call it brand­ing is more than “reach­ing for the stars.” It’s claim­ing that you have stars for sale.

   Bill Daw­son

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8. Clayton Borah says:

   February 14, 2011 at 12:17 pm

   I also agree with you. I was a lit­tle con­fused about your com­ment on my Face­book page until I looked into what you were ref­er­enc­ing.
   While I agree that brands exist, period, and we don’t cre­ate them in a sense of cre­at­ing the per­cep­tion the pub­lic has of the prod­uct, busi­ness, or orga­ni­za­tion. There is a time when the prod­uct, busi­ness, or orga­ni­za­tion doesn’t exist. Often my clients don’t do the work of think­ing about who they are as a busi­ness or why any­one should even care that their busi­ness exists. I use the term brand­ing to help have these con­ver­sa­tions. I always make sure that my clients know that we can’t cre­ate a brand, but we can build the foun­da­tion on which the brand exists. I just started my busi­ness a lit­tle over a year ago and am try­ing to fig­ure out how I need to frame this con­ver­sa­tions with poten­tial clients so I get some work and put food on the table. Thanks for shar­ing your thoughts. They are help­ful. I’m work­ing on writ­ing a post myself dis­cussing the mis­use of the terms “brand­ing” and “mar­ket­ing”. Seri­ous pet peeves of mine. I’ll be sure to ref­er­ence this post as addi­tional reading.

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10. Derek says:

    March 28, 2012 at 12:31 pm

    I have to say… I dis­agree strongly with just about every word in that post.

    Your fun­da­men­tal prob­lem seems to be that you thinks a ‘brand’ is a ‘logo’. A brand is no more a logo than it is an adver­tis­ing cam­paign or a newslet­ter design. A logo is one small ele­ment of a brand. A brand is how a com­pany is per­ceived by the pop­u­lous and encap­su­lates far more than just one image.

    Take social media for instance. By engag­ing with your cus­tomers online, by pro­vid­ing them with use­ful con­tent, tips, engage­ment, etc. you directly affect the cor­po­rate brand. Your logo is the same, our color scheme is the same, but now through your actions (designed with such goals in mind) your brand is now per­ceived to be a more open, more inter­ac­tive, a com­pany who is look­ing out for the inter­ests of their customers.

    I would argue that a brand is even big­ger than that… a brand is the phi­los­o­phy that the com­pany lives by… it’s a company’s core iden­tity both exter­nally and inter­nally. Apple’s brand isn’t a gray 2D apple, it’s their cul­ture of think­ing dif­fer­ent, it’s their ide­ol­ogy of build­ing prod­ucts as part of a com­plete ecosys­tem. The ‘brand’ is how this culture/ideology is shared with and per­ceived by the cus­tomer base.

    Con­sider the Coke Brand for instance… it’s said to be worth bil­lions of dol­lars. The red curly text is only one small com­po­nent that made this pos­si­ble… it was a Sales staff focused on get­ting the drink in every con­ve­nience store. It was the oper­a­tions staff focused on get­ting it to taste the exact same every time. I twas the adver­tis­ing staff that put the logo in front of mil­lions of peo­ple watch­ing the super bowl. A brand is far more than a logo… it’s a way of think­ing, the core iden­tity of a com­pany. Peo­ple who focus on ‘brand­ing’ real­ize that the brand rep­re­sents a com­bi­na­tion of all these fac­tors and that by focus­ing on how each ele­ments affects the brand, you can improve the chance that your cus­tomers per­ceive the com­pany in the way you desire… some­thing a logo-alone could never accomplish.

    That’s my $0.02 any­way.
    Derek

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11. Derek says:

    March 28, 2012 at 12:36 pm

    One addi­tional point to my last response… Per­haps the biggest dif­fer­ence in the way I per­ceive brand­ing vs. the orig­i­nal post and the first response from mnead is because I work at the client level. For us, brand­ing comes into every deci­sion we make as a com­pany. When we’re in oper­a­tions meet­ings we’re talk­ing about the brand, when we’re in new-product meet­ings we’re talk­ing about the brand, same with Mar­ket­ing and sales obviously.

    When you work for an agency, you have less con­trol over the ‘actual brand’ and more with how that brand is pack­aged and pre­sented… so in that instance, I’d say there is may be some truth to the idea that brand­ing can be over­rated. Still though, focus­ing on the brand means you’re con­sid­er­ing all ele­ments as a piece of the whole. You aren’t devel­op­ing a logo or a ad cam­paign in a vac­uum… but rather with care­ful con­sid­er­a­tion for each indi­vid­ual element.

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    • XK9 says:

      March 28, 2012 at 11:54 pm

      Derek,

      I found your com­ment a lit­tle hard to digest. You claim to “dis­agree strongly with just about every word” I offered. I don’t think you under­stand what I was say­ing. You seem to come around to agree­ing with the idea that agen­cies are inef­fec­tive at con­trol­ling brand perceptions.

      You offer your com­ple­men­tary psy­cho­analy­sis of my “fun­da­men­tal prob­lem”. Yet, I in no way claim that a logo is a brand. In fact, I state that visual iden­tity (which is much more than a logo) is but a sin­gle com­po­nent of the con­sumer expe­ri­ence. While I may have a “fun­da­men­tal prob­lem” I doubt it could be deduced from this essay.

      As you state, you work within a com­pany and are appar­ently respon­si­ble for some form of con­sumer inter­ac­tion. You’ve bought into the idea of call­ing what you do “brand­ing” as if that is a con­trol­lable thing. What you are doing is most likely some form of mar­ket­ing or pub­lic rela­tions. You might work with adver­tis­ers or design­ers. But you are not a “brander.”

      As I state in the essay, brands exist inde­pen­dent of any prod­uct, busi­ness prac­tice, or con­sumer inter­ac­tion. This is why I find the whole con­cept of “brand­ing” to be one of delu­sional bullshit.

      We have other, time-honored words for busi­ness prac­tices (and areas of exper­tise) that define an entity’s con­sumer inter­ac­tion. Mar­ket­ing. Pub­lic rela­tions. Adver­tis­ing. Design. These are prac­tices that require skill, intel­li­gence and creativity.

      Brand­ing attempts to pack­age mar­ket­ing, pub­lic rela­tions, adver­tis­ing and design under one head­ing. But “brand­ing” in and of itself is not a defin­able prac­tice. Mar­ket­ing doesn’t work in ser­vice of brand­ing; it sup­ports and pro­motes the cor­po­ra­tion (or other entity). Like­wise the other three.

      I shared my par­tic­u­lar exper­tise at the end of the essay to explain my moti­va­tion in decry­ing the bull­shit of brand­ing. I am an expe­ri­enced cre­ative pro­fes­sional who attempts daily to pro­vide effec­tive, mean­ing­ful and last­ing graphic design to my clients. I see the whole strat­i­fied con­cept of brand­ing as a threat to my effec­tive­ness and to my busi­ness. When busi­nesses and busi­ness lead­ers buy into a brand­ing con­sult­ing model it insu­lates the lead­ers from peo­ple like me. And in turn, the designer receives infor­ma­tion through a fil­ter of strate­gists and exec­u­tives. That kind of sub­ver­sion kills mean­ing­ful creativity.

      The great designer Lou Dorf­s­man spent a career cre­at­ing last­ing images for his employer CBS. He was instru­men­tal in help­ing CBS estab­lish its rep­u­ta­tion as “The Tiffany Net­work.” CBS was seen as a class act and Dorf­s­man had a hand in that pub­lic per­cep­tion. Late in his career, Dorf­s­man bemoaned the changes at CBS that were mar­gin­al­iz­ing his effec­tive­ness. At the same time his was being lauded by his peers. At that time Dorf­s­man remarked, “I used to be called a com­mer­cial artist and I worked directly with Bill Paley (leg­endary head of CBS). Now I’m Direc­tor of Design and I report to the head of marketing.”

      Brand­ing is just another attempt to put another sales­man between the cus­tomer (in this case– busi­ness) and the crafts­man (me).

      Bill Daw­son

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      • Derek says:

        March 29, 2012 at 4:53 am

        Thanks for the detailed reply… Here’s why I fun­da­men­tally disagree…

        “As you state, you work within a com­pany and are appar­ently respon­si­ble for some form of con­sumer inter­ac­tion. You’ve bought into the idea of call­ing what you do “brand­ing” as if that is a con­trol­lable thing.”

        I’m a bit dis­mayed that some­one in the indus­try would sug­gest that a ‘brand’ isn’t con­trol­lable. You said in your orig­i­nal arti­cle that a brand is essen­tially the ‘col­lec­tive expe­ri­ence’ of the cus­tomer. As marketers/designers/advertisers/etc. I’d argue that it’s our fun­da­men­tal job to affect the brand of the com­pa­nies we work for. Of course the brand is con­trol­lable, mil­lions of peo­ple work at manip­u­lat­ing brands to improve their value every day, includ­ing you.

        “What you are doing is most likely some form of mar­ket­ing or pub­lic rela­tions. You might work with adver­tis­ers or design­ers. But you are not a “brander.””

        I think some of our dis­agree­ment, as I stated ear­lier, on this topic is due to the fact that you work at the agency level and I work at the ‘client’ level (tech­ni­cally not a ‘client’ as we don’t actu­ally work with agen­cies at all). As such, you’re see­ing brand­ing as a com­bi­na­tion of the marketing/design efforts but also a whole bunch of things that you can’t con­trol such as the qual­ity of the product/service, the qual­ity of the cus­tomer sup­port, the fre­quency of new prod­ucts, the dis­tri­b­u­tion, etc.

        What I’m say­ing is that you’re exactly right that 100% of these things affect the larger ‘brand’, but dead wrong that it doesn’t make sense to have indi­vid­u­als in the orga­ni­za­tion who’s role is to align these efforts and help to ensure that each cus­tomer touch point is suc­cess­ful at adding value to the brand, and that some­how design­ers or oth­ers must work out­side of this essen­tial focus. I would ven­ture a guess that at the agency level, since new clients are sim­i­larly known to both the ‘brand­ing’ per­son in your orga­ni­za­tion as they are to you, the head designer, that you feel that their opin­ion isn’t worth any more than yours and that their sug­ges­tions merely sti­fle your cre­ativ­ity and work. I can totally under­stand that… but fun­da­men­tally dis­agree that such an expe­ri­ence war­rants the blan­ket state­ment that brand­ing is bull­shit and isn’t affected by ‘brand­ing experts’ or ‘mar­keters’ in any way.

        “As I state in the essay, brands exist inde­pen­dent of any prod­uct, busi­ness prac­tice, or con­sumer inter­ac­tion. This is why I find the whole con­cept of “brand­ing” to be one of delu­sional bullshit.”

        You do say this, yet I fail to see the ram­i­fi­ca­tions of such a sug­ges­tion… yes, of course com­pa­nies have iden­ti­ties or brands even if they never do any mar­ket­ing, etc. How does this in any way sug­gest that doing design/marketing/branding can’t play an enor­mous role in chang­ing the brand for bet­ter or for worse?

        When we come up with new prod­ucts in my com­pany, we could sim­ply design the prod­uct any old way, slap a generic name on the prod­uct, push it out to our sales depart­ment, and you’re right… it would quickly ‘have a brand’ in the mar­ket place. It would be a crappy brand, but it would be a brand.

        How­ever, what we do as a com­pany is con­sider the brand at each and every step of the project. When we’re design­ing the prod­uct we say to our­selves “if we add this fea­ture, or make this small change, the prod­uct would be per­ceived this way… or it will work bet­ter for this type of cus­tomer” When we’re design­ing the pack­ag­ing, we do the same thing… same for when we design POP, social media cam­paigns, print/web cam­paigns, etc. At every step of that process, we have some­one involved who is a ‘brand­ing expert’ who attempts to ensure that each touch point in the cus­tomer expe­ri­ence is pro­mot­ing the same mes­sage and adding value to the same brand. This one per­son can bring sig­nif­i­cant focus and clar­ity to the project… and while the prod­uct design­ers, graphic design­ers, finance peo­ple, might not agree at each step… the end result is usu­ally supe­rior with their involve­ment. (this would depend a high degree on the qual­ity of the brand­ing expert obviously)

        “We have other, time-honored words for busi­ness prac­tices (and areas of exper­tise) that define an entity’s con­sumer inter­ac­tion. Mar­ket­ing. Pub­lic rela­tions. Adver­tis­ing. Design. These are prac­tices that require skill, intel­li­gence and cre­ativ­ity. Brand­ing attempts to pack­age mar­ket­ing, pub­lic rela­tions, adver­tis­ing and design under one head­ing. But “brand­ing” in and of itself is not a defin­able prac­tice. Mar­ket­ing doesn’t work in ser­vice of brand­ing; it sup­ports and pro­motes the cor­po­ra­tion (or other entity). Like­wise the other three.”

        Nobody works at the ‘ser­vice’ of any­body in my mind. They all work together in sup­port of the cor­po­ra­tion. I don’t under­stand your 1-to-1 con­clu­sion that the exis­tence of these departments/professionals implies in any way that there’s no value to a ‘brand­ing’ posi­tion or a ‘cus­tomer expe­ri­ence’ posi­tion. Seems sim­i­lar to say­ing ‘well, we have a pro­duc­tion man­ager, so I see no need to have a prod­uct fore­caster on staff’. Both posi­tions work together to prod­uct a bet­ter result.

        “I see the whole strat­i­fied con­cept of brand­ing as a threat to my effec­tive­ness and to my busi­ness. When busi­nesses and busi­ness lead­ers buy into a brand­ing con­sult­ing model it insu­lates the lead­ers from peo­ple like me. And in turn, the designer receives infor­ma­tion through a fil­ter of strate­gists and exec­u­tives. That kind of sub­ver­sion kills mean­ing­ful creativity.”

        The idea of middle-men is some­thing I can com­pletely under­stand. I think you’ve jumped the shark here by belit­tling an entire busi­ness practice/ideology/industry sim­ply because your orga­ni­za­tion has a middle-man prob­lem. That’s all. I’m try­ing to get you to open up to the pos­si­bil­ity that your sit­u­a­tion might be dif­fer­ent than oth­ers out in the world and that ‘brand­ing’ and ‘brand­ing experts’ can actu­ally be incred­i­bly val­ued mem­bers of team.

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