What is “Brand”?
The word brand is woefully nonspecific. It’s a trendy word in the world of business, it’s something people on Twitter love to engage with ironically, it’s a concept at the core of a score of career paths. But if you ask ten brand strategists what it is, you’ll get ten different answers.
Merriam Webster gives us four, arguably five, relevant definitions:
1: a class of goods identified by name as the product of a single firm or manufacturer2: a characteristic or distinctive kind3: a brand name4: a public image, reputation, or identity conceived of as something to be marketed or promoted
In short, the dictionary can see a brand as a product, a kind, a name, a reputation, or an identity. When one person says “I need a new brand,” one agency hears “product,” another hears “identity.”
So which one did they mean?
My approach (based closely on the approach of my beloved former and hopefully future colleague Johannes Christensen) is to take the word in context. If brand is too multifaceted to be strictly useful, perhaps we can find clarity in a derived word, like rebrand.
When a company rebrands, replaces its old brand with another, what does that entail? Let’s look at each of Webster’s definitions to see if they could be right.
1: Goods from one manufacturer. When a company rebrands, are they creating a new class of goods to replace the old? No, that’s a product launch. Or are they becoming a new manufacturer? No, we’d call that an acquisition, and in fact the opposite is true: in a rebrand, the manufacturer stays exactly the same.
2: A distinctive kind. Is the kind of product, its subjective nature, changing? They’d definitely like you to think so, but that sounds more like a version release to me, not a rebrand.
3: A brand name. Is the name changing? That’s often part of it, but if that’s ALL that’s changing, we’d call that a rename, wouldn’t we?
4: A reputation or identity to be marketed. Is the reputation changing? They definitely want this to happen, but if anything it would be the effect of a rebrand, not the rebrand itself: everyone knew that Altria was Phillip Morris right up until they forgot. What about the identity, is that changing?
Ding ding ding.
In my view, Webster’s final definition is closest to being accurate and useful. An identity to be marketed still opens some cans of worms (what’s an identity? what’s marketing?), but it comes close. I prefer a definition that is straightforward in its broad ambiguity:
Brand is the sum of everything you do to be recognized for something.
To me, this encapsulates perfectly what a Head of Brand is tasked with: taking the things people recognize a company for, and infusing them with specific perceptions and associations. When you rebrand, it’s because you want to start to change how you’re recognized, and for what.
Brand strategy is the first step: deciding what you want to be known for, and starting to decide what to do to be known that way. And while product lines, names, and identity systems will help build that reputation, they’re each one component of a larger story.
Want to talk about what your brand could stand for, or how you could get that reputation? Want to make a case for a different definition of brand?