Hello and welcome, fellow classmates, Professor Breakenridge and, if it should somehow happen, members of the general public to The Branding Beacon, a blog I’m writing for Social Media and Public Relations, an online course in journalism at UMass Amherst. As the title suggests, this blog will cover branding. This is particularly relevant to me at the moment, as my organization is undergoing a complete rebrand for the first time in its history. Branding is new to me–this is the first rebrand I’ve taken part in–and this blog should help me think through some of the issues surrounding it. Each post will discuss a different aspect of branding, from a beginner’s point of view. Enjoy!
New brand? To be continued…
I’ll use this last blog post for class to update everyone on the status of the my organization’s re-branding process. We just had an all-day meeting on Friday with our branding consultancy, and the project is moving along well (if slowly). The meeting had two goals: 1) the branding consultancy needed to report back to us on the audit of our existing brand they’d been doing for us for the past few months, and 2) we needed to give them criteria for what we wanted from our new brand.
Their audit of our brand (our current and past marketing materials, our social media properties, our website) and their overview of our competitive landscape was helpful, even if it didn’t tell us anything we didn’t already know: our brand has been inconsistent, our social media presence weak. While our organization is (literally) viewed positively by 100% of the people they interviewed, almost the same percentage of people think we can do a better job of telling our story. Overall, we need a more compelling brand. We’re certainly aware of this–it’s why we’re engaging in this process.
The second part of the meeting was more of a challenge. We needed to define the aspects of what we want to become, brand-wise. What are our aspirations? What do we want to be? What words would best represent it? We were asked to come up with 10-20 words or phrases that could give the branding consultancy some direction, which they would then take back to their office and whip up a bunch of potential new names/logos/taglines. We ended up with words like “energetic,” “youthful,” “thought leader” and more. We shall see what the branding people come up with!
Once we have a new brand (in about 4-5 months), we’ll get down to some of the really exciting work: completely re-working our website and hashing out a social media plan. For the latter task I’ll be able to apply a lot of the lessons I learned from Social Media and Public Relations. This class has been a very good learning experience. I’m glad I signed up. Adieu!
Branding and social media
All of us in Professor Breakenridge’s class have learned a good deal about social media already, so none of the following info should come as much of a surprise, but I think it’s a good idea to introduce some basic guidelines for how social media relates to branding, particularly for small organizations like mine. I found two good articles (here and here) by Anita Campbell on sba.gov, the US Small Business Administration’s website. The SBA’s mission is to support small businesses, and Campbell’s articles offer simple, straightforward tips to using social media for branding. It’s a beginner’s guide, much like this blog.
I won’t summarize the articles here (they’re quick reads so you should check them out yourself), but Campbell closes with a piece of advice we’ve heard from Professor Breakenridge numerous times:
Remember, the more effort you put into social media, the better the results. Aim for a consistent, engaging experience, and you will attract new followers and, eventually, customers.
Good advice!
Taglines
Another ubiquitous aspect of branding is taglines. A tagline is a short phrase that captures the essence of a company’s brand. Examples include Nike’s “Just Do It,” YouTube’s “Broadcast Yourself,” Apple’s “Think Different,” BMW’s “The Ultimate Driving Machine,” the New York Times’ “All the news that’s fit to print,” DeBeers’ “A Diamond is Forever” and so on. Nearly every large company has a tagline; in fact, they’re so omnipresent in our society that we typically hardly realize they’re there.
According to Alina Wheeler in Designing Brand Identity (page 25), there are ten essential characteristics of taglines:
- Short
- Differentiated from competitors
- Unique
- Captures the brand essence and positioning
- Easy to say and remember
- No negative connotations
- Displayed in small font
- Can be protected and trademarked
- Evokes and emotional response
- Difficult to create
A good question is whether or not my particular organization wants or needs a tagline. We don’t have one now–never have. Some of our competitors have them, some don’t; having a tagline isn’t a prerequisite in our field. In fact, in the next branding meeting we have, I’m going to bring up the topic of taglines. How’s that for education in action?
The language audit
Now here’s one of the tougher aspects of branding: the language audit. The language audit is essentially a thorough review of an organization’s “voice”: the way its writing expresses a certain tone and emphasis, the consistency of the voice, and most importantly, how and why the voice currently in use positions the brand in a certain way. Is the writing formal, stodgy, old-fashioned? Why? Is it modern, trimmed-down? Why? Does the tone align with the brand goals? Is it consistent across platforms? All of these questions have to be answered in the language audit, “the Mount Everest of audits” according to Alina Wheeler (Designing Brand Identity pages 128-129).
I’ll take my cue from Wheeler’s book once again and do a quick language audit for my own organization. We’re currently undergoing a rebrand, as I’ve said, and reforming our language–the way we talk about ourselves–is paramount.
Adherence to brand values
Is the tone and look of the information consistent with your brand attributes?
Right now, the answer to this is yes. Our brand is conservative, formal, and geared toward academics. Following that lead, our language is complex, formal, and filled with jargon. However, if/when we change the brand, and therefore broaden our target audience, we’ll need new language that is less complex, simpler, and more able to be understood by a wider audience.
Customization
Is content based on what you already know about the customer?
In a sense, the answer to this is yes. Our audience is primarily engineering academics, and our content and the language we use is familiar to them and typical of what they see and hear in other places. The challenge will be recalibrating our content for a wider audience.
Structure and navigational ease
Is the purpose of the communication readily apparent, and is the communication easy to use?
The answer to this is typically no. Our website is complicated and hard to use, which reflects the complexity of the organization. Our emails follow suit. This is another area to be addressed in the rebrand.
There are a multitude of other parts of the language audit–so much so that I can clearly see why Wheeler calls it the Mount Everest of audits. Here’s a small sampling of other aspects that can be covered:
Company name–formal or informal
Descriptors
Taglines
Product names
Mission and values
Call to action
Key messages
…all the way down to email signatures. All of these things need to be aligned with the brand, and need to be consistent. Quite a challenge indeed.
The history of branding
I’m going to take a break from talking about different technical aspects of branding for a moment and talk about its history. I found an interesting article from Rivia, a branding consultancy, that quickly summarizes the history of branding from its origins to today. The gist? Branding has moved through three distinct phases:
1. Get the word out
Branding’s beginnings in the late 19th century focused on the product itself: what it could do, its quality, etc. The idea was simple: advertising (and branding) let people know the product existed.
2. Feel it
Post WWII, branding changed radically: the explosion of consumer goods created the need for companies to differentiate themselves not by what they made but by how their brands made people feel. The ultimate goal of marketers was to have people identify personally with the brand.
3. Social media and a new responsbility
While I think the second phase of branding is still going strong (a glut of more or less the same products still exists, and companies still differentiate themselves through brand), social media has added another dimension to the branding game: “A shift from a one-way communication (company to consumer) towards an interactive dialogue with the consumer and between consumers.” Companies now interact much more frequently with their customers and part of the brand is the manner in which the company interacts. In other words, employees represent the brand from the inside out, at all times.
The logo
Another obvious part of branding is the logo, or “brandmark.” While coming up with logo designs is of course best left to the real designers out there, I’m sure at some point in my organization’s re-branding process we’ll be able to provide input and feedback on a variety of drafts of new logos. So what are the types of logos out there? What do they mean, and how do we decide what kind of logo best serves our needs?
(The following categories of brandmarks comes from Alina Wheeler’s Designing Brand Identity, pages 52-62.)
Wordmarks
A wordmark is a freestanding word or words. Wordmarks are pretty straightforward, and are typically just the company name, like Aetna. The font and design can end up being fairly distinctive and recognizable, like Google. My organization currently uses a wordmark.
Letterform marks
A letterform mark is a single letter that represents the brand.
That’s Westinghouse’s letterform mark. While letterforms are certainly simple and can be elegant, I have a feeling they’re best used by huge corporations. A letterform from an organization no one has ever heard of might cause confusion.
Pictorial marks
A pictorial mark is a recognizable image that represents the brand. The most recognizable pictorial mark happens to be the most recognizable brand on the planet right now:
Very simple and elegant, of course, but also very hard to do well.
Abstract marks
These use a visual form to convey an idea or a brand attribute. Here’s Time Warner Cable:
The eye represents viewers or the act of viewing. Pretty neat.
Abstract marks can vary widely and, in theory, can represent anything (although their meaning can sometimes be hard to decipher). For a tough one, here’s Hyatt Place’s logo:
It’s hard to tell what they’re trying to express, although it does look cool.
Emblems
Emblems are the most comprehensive brandmarks: they are a shape, text and design that come together to represent the name of the organization. They’re put on everything. Emblems are, to me, the most interesting of the bunch.
This emblem catches the look and feel of the company both gracefully and simply.
An emblem that captures what the company does is TiVo:
Fun, playful, recognizable and easy to understand.
If I had to guess, I would say my organization will come up with a new name, a new wordmark for that name, and an abstract mark to accompany it. We shall see!
What’s in a name?
While there’s quite a lot more to say about branding in general than was covered in my first post–e.g., how to use a brand to differentiate yourself from others, how to use a brand to communicate your ideals, vision, values, authenticity, etc.–there’s one topic related to branding that I want to talk about now: naming. It’s a core feature of any re-branding process, and it’s something we’re grappling with in my organization. Do we want to change our name? If so, what do we change it to? What are the risks of changing the name? What are the benefits? Getting this right isn’t easy–you can’t just pick a random name and run with it. It’s a challenge that requires a disciplined approach.
Going back to Alina Wheeler, she says, “The right name is timeless, tireless, easy to say and remember; it stands for something, and facilitates brand extensions. Its sound has a rhythm. It looks great in the text of an email and in the logo. A well-chosen name is an essential brand asset, as well as a 24/7 workhorse.” (page 22, Designing Brand Identity.)
I can say with certainty that the current name of my organization does none of those things. It’s very long and neither easy to say nor remember. It makes my job in communications that much harder. So while my organization certainly has a well-deserved great reputation, its name is a decided negative.
The hard part now is figuring out a new one. Luckily we have a branding consultancy guiding us through the process. We haven’t started talking about names yet, but, taking my cue from Wheeler’s book (pages 140-41), I imagine the re-naming process will look something like this:
- Revisit positioning–like branding in general, the name has to represent the organization as a whole. What are our goals? Our target markets?
- Get organized–figure out who’s on the team (we’ve done this), and develop a timeline (also done).
- Create naming criteria–what do we want the name to do? How do we want to be positioned?
- Brainstorm solutions–likely the hardest step, and one we haven’t taken yet. We’ll come up with quite a few names, I’m sure, then organize them into categories and themes.
- Conduct initial screening–cull the list of names by making sure they’re legal, and checking them for positioning.
- Conduct contextual testing–try them out! Say the names, leave a voicemail, put them on a business card, etc. This will be very interesting and likely tell us a lot.
- Testing
- Final legal screen
- That’s it! The fancy, shiny new name is revealed in all its glory.
What is branding?
Before bringing together a bible-like branding blog for beginners, I need to bounce to the base of the topic and define my terms.
So, what is brand? What is branding? What is brand identity? And what does it all mean?
Brand
I would define a “brand” as a company or an organization’s character. It’s the way people see you; it’s the way you carry yourself. Just as you can like or dislike someone’s character, you can like or dislike a brand. To quote Alina Wheeler (note on her below), “People fall in love with brands, trust them, and believe in their superiority. How a brand is perceived affects its success.”
There are too many examples of brands, both successes and failures, to list. Think of any major company in the public eye; it has a strong brand that lets people know who they are, is targeted at who they think needs to know and tells them why they should care. Think of Volkswagen, Taco Bell and, say, Disney.
In this way, then, the brand represents the sum total of everything an organization does. It encompasses the culture, the vision, the strategy, and the marketing/communication plan.
Branding
Branding is the process of creating the brand. It’s a major step that needs top-down support–and it’s exactly the step my small non-profit organization is currently taking. We are in the process of re-defining ourselves in order to build awareness and to better succeed in fulfilling our mission. This is where all the serious work will be done that will lead to the All-Knowing, All-Seeing, All-Being brand.
In terms of this graphic, which describes the branding process, we are currently in phases 1-2. We are both conducting research with stakeholders and clarifying our strategy. Who do we reach, and how? What do they think of us? What exactly do we want to accomplish? All of these questions are being asked.
FYI, I’m relying heavily (so far) on Alina Wheeler’s Designing Brand Identity for my information. The above graphic is from pages 6-7.
The Branding Beacon 