KQ Article

A brand is not a logo. The term logo is short for logotype, design-speak for a trademark based on a custom-lettered word (logos is Greek for word). This term caught on with people because it sounds cool, but what people really mean is a trademark, whether the trademark is a logo, symbol, monogram, emblem or other graphic device. IBM uses a monogram, for example, while Nike uses a symbol. Both are trademarks, but neither are logos. What matters here is that a logo, or any other kind of trademark, is not the brand itself. It’s merely a symbol for it. 

A brand is not a corporate identity system. An identity system is a twentieth-century construct for controlling the use of trademark and trade-dress elements on company publications, advertisements, stationary, vehicles, signage and so on.  But consistency alone does not create a brand.

A brand is also not a product. Marketing people often talk about managing their brands, but what they usually mean is managing their products, or the sales, distribution and quality thereof.  To manage a brand is to manage something much less tangible – an aura, an invisible layer or meaning that surrounds a product.

So what exactly is a brand? A brand is a person’s gut feeling about a product, service or company.  It’s a gut feeling because we’re all emotional, intuitive beings, despite out best efforts to be rational. In the end, brand is defined by individuals, not companies, markets of the so-called general public. Each person creates his or her own version of it.

While companies can’t control this process, they can influence it by communicating the qualities that make this product different than the others. When enough individuals arrive at the same gut feeling, a company has a brand. In other words, a brand is not what you say it is. It’s what they say it is.

To compare a brand with its competitors, we only need to know what makes it different. Brand management is about managing differences as they exist in the minds of people.

WHY IS BRAND SUDDENLY HOT?
The idea of brand has been around for at least 5,000 years. As society has moved from an economy of mass production to an economy of mass customization, our purchasing choices have multiplied. We’ve become information-rick and time-poor. As a result, our old method of judging products by comparing features and benefits no longer works.

Today, we base our choices more on symbolic attributes. What does the product look like? Where is it being sold? What kinds of people buy it? What does the cost say about its desirability? And finally, who make it? Because if I can’t trust the maker, I won’t buy the product.

TRUST MEANS EVERYTHING
The history of American currency demonstrates how trust relates to branding.  After the Revolutionary War, when paper money was reduced to a fortieth of it’s previous value, gold and silver were the only types of currency people could trust. It was nearly a hundred years before people were willing to accept Silver Certificates as a substitute for the real thing, even though the new bills were backed by metal reserves.

It took another hundred years before we were ready to accept Federal Reserve Notes as a substitute for Silver Certificates. There weren’t back by reserves, but by pure faith in the brand called America.

Now we’ve learned to trust in a system of credit cards for a large percentage of our transactions. Will we soon be ready to accept international cyber-currency as an improvement on credit cards? Sure, if we can trust it.

Trust creation is a fundamental goal of brand design. The complex flourished and intricate images employed in the design of the Silver Certificate were no accident – they were conscious attempts to encourage trust in what was little more than a symbol for money.

The concept of trust is equally important when we trade our currency – whether metal, paper, plastic or cyber – for goods and services. Trust is the ultimate shortcut to a buying decision, and it is the bedrock of modern branding.