Are your clients gossiping about you?
On brands and how they connect.
By Ilsmarie Presilia — June 19th, 2021
Listen to the audio version here.
Hi there, The Ponder Lab here, with the mission to help you understand how people behave and react to brands and design. Today’s topic is brands.
Brands are often defined by examples set by loved companies;
“What are big guys like Apple and Nike doing with their products, ads, marketing and stores, and what will they do next?”
“It doesn’t matter, we’ll just replicate it in our industry.”
Believe it or not, this type of mentality occurs often. It appears that the word “brand” itself has a “brand problem” because it’s overshadowed by what we see superficially. We’ll get into what a brand is in a bit, but we need to standardise it first to properly define it.
What is a brand not?
When most of us say “brand”, we usually think and mean a company, its logo, product, service, website or even specific colours (think Coca-Cola’s red). While these are aspects of a brand, they do not come close to the definition of it. Most of what a brand is is not tangible or visual but more holistic. By understanding this, we realise that they need substance. We cannot blindly copy or replicate others because we believe that a specific trend (e.g. trends in colours, typography, logo, UI etc.) or our taste might appeal to our audience.
And while we’re on the topic of visuals, it’s important to note that numerous people talk about needing a “rebrand” without ever having had a brand. They misunderstand the purpose behind a rebrand, thinking that it’s a simple revamp in visuals. A rebrand is necessary for a variety of reasons. However, most of the time, it’s done with a purpose;
• to manage a company’s reputation.
• to reposition a company.
• because a company is growing or merging.
Mistaking this is a common path to failure, especially for people who think that all it takes to succeed is a beautiful logo, website and marketing. Don’t get me wrong, marketing is crucial, but I’ll discuss that on another occasion. The purpose of marketing is to attract attention. It becomes a problem, however, if you attract the attention of your audience aimlessly. The audience, naturally, will not respond well, and it’s usually when this happens that people want to rebrand.
When someone approaches me with an identity assignment (rebranding, redesigning a logo or website), I have a set of questions ready to ask them. Humans are so fixated on solving problems that we won’t notice that our self-diagnosed problem is a symptom and not the actual problem itself. Sure, you can change those things, but yet another quick adjustment of your visuals will not miraculously change the image the audience has formed of you and your company.
When it comes to brands, their visual identity might be the only thing people notice — it is surface level. But if it were the only thing that Apple and Nike had to rely on, they wouldn’t be so loved and respected today. Your audience is not automatically sold just because something looks pretty — that’s art. A brand’s visual identity can’t be careless like that. Its purpose is to bring everything together, grasp and communicate with the audience.
A better approach would be to ask ourselves “why certain brands are famous and loved” and “why we feel the need to replicate them so much”.
What loved brands do differently.
Love them or hate them, at the very least, iconic brands are respected.
Respect is recognising that someone/something has some worth due to their achievements. A logo by itself cannot be a company’s source of reverence because it’s not an experience — an experience is what adds to a brand. The following might seem exaggerated, but nobody, having had a poor experience with a company, will return because it has an outstanding logo. It’s only once someone finally had an encounter with a company and what it offers that the experience becomes hard to separate from a logo.
Iconic brands understand that good experiences translate to trust, and they choose to have their foundation built on it. They know that the best way to gain trust and loyalty does not only lie in being empathetic toward their customers, but in the reason they exist beyond commercial benefit.
Sure, money is a valid raison d’être, but customers don’t care about what benefits companies. They are people with a problem that they would like solved as quickly as possible. A lot of companies seem to forget that humans can notice genuineness (or lack thereof) quickly. Where they lose pointers is where they disregard purpose and consistency — essential building blocks for trust.
While a lot would just slap their mission and vision on their website and call it a day, well-known companies live by them consistently. They are, after all, internal statements that keep a business, its leaders and employees aligned. It doesn’t hurt making them public, but they shouldn’t be statements that you have written one afternoon and don’t abide by — they need to be genuine and well-articulated from the top (leaders), otherwise it might have the opposite effect.
“Publicising your mission and vision is like publicising your goals and resolutions; people will hold you accountable.”
What is a brand?
As mentioned earlier, the term “brand” itself seems to have a brand problem (mostly to blame on its intangibility). Because of that, there‘s no shortage of definitions — everyone takes their shot at solving the chaos. Two of my favourite interpretations are of former Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and the dubbed godfather of branding, Marty Neumeier.
Jeff states that
“Your brand is what people say when you are not in a room.”
While Marty says that
“A brand is a person’s gut feeling about a product, service, or organisation.”
Together they sound like a brand is gossip and how someone treats another after hearing it. Well, sort of — a brand is more like a perception. This perception is driven by emotion that determines the likelihood that someone is propelled or deterred from taking a specific action.
Trusting your gut is emotional, and gossiping — be it for the passing of (mis)informed information — is also emotional. Being social animals, we have both signals ingrained in us, and they are fine-tuned to help us survive.
Today, depending on circumstances, most of our decisions are not life or death decisions, but deciding on what to purchase in over-saturated industries and markets is overwhelming and can leave us with decision fatigue. So what do people do when they are overwhelmed? They turn to their default setting, which means seeking deeper connections (both personal and emotional) with what they buy and consume. This is where the earlier-mentioned gut feeling comes in to make the choice easier.
Most of us conduct online research before making a purchase and would argue otherwise. Nevertheless, most of what we do, including the decisions we make are emotional, not logical. In fact, Harvard Business School professor, Gerald Zaltman, says that 95% of all purchase decisions are done in the subconscious.
Because of this, we can argue that a brand, although intangible, is a company’s most valuable yet “unowned” asset, given that it’s a perception that exists in people’s minds. Each person perceives and experiences what a company does differently, so in a way, a company can have different brands living within various individuals.
It sounds abstract, but essentially, the audience owns the brand, and it’s what they say it is, not what a company says they are.
As mentioned, today, people crave deeper connections, but there’s a caveat. If a company is dishonest or unable to manage expectations properly, news that in the past would spread over a small town would now get around quicker and further. A single tweet from someone can completely flip one’s business upside down. Thus, as Marty Neumeier discusses in his book “The Brand Flip”, the power shifted from companies to their audience instead.
Not having a brand doesn’t mean that you are excused from this. People have opinions and will perceive you a certain way whether you intentionally create your brand or not. It’s not all hopeless though, through a process called “branding”, a company can make a reservation in the mind of its audience and nudge their perception to coherence.
How Brands Connect
Brands connect by being human-centric — the actual term is “Brand Anthropomorphism”. It is a brand becoming an entity with traits, characteristics, and a personality just like us. See, humans have a self-obsession — they love to see themselves represented in and associated with certain things, even though their peers don’t perceive them that way.
Think of seeing someone on the street and thinking “that person seems cool, I wanna hang out with them”. Depending on who you are, you might walk up to them and strike a conversation… and it works! Neither of you can explain what you particularly like about one another, but all you know is that something about the way they talk, walk, behave, and what they wear and smell like, intrigues you.
Now think of how the same could’ve gone differently; they intrigued you but then had nothing relevant to say or are inconsistent. You’d want to distance yourself and consider them untrustworthy, dishonest and purposeless.
This is why it’s essential to have a brand that connects, rather than one that constantly markets itself but doesn’t care and is transactional. If a business slaps its mission and vision on a webpage but doesn’t actually feel these things internally, its customers will notice and consider them untrustworthy.
Even if you don’t have an established brand, at the very least, you must understand that people don’t;
• appreciate being misled or having their time wasted.
• care about ideas.
• care about what’s best for your company.
Once more,
“People have a problem that they would like solved.”
And they would like you to deliver what you promised. It’s a bonus that you can solve their problem while connecting it to a deeper purpose. This makes it easier for you to distinguish yourself among competitors.
Not only is emotion a great strategy to follow when creating a strong brand, but it must also represent who you are, what you do, and most importantly, why you do it in an emotional way. It also lets the audience know why they should care.
Simon Sinek, the author of “Start With Why”, is no stranger to such reasoning. He says that people identify with WHY, not just with WHAT or HOW. In other words, people are looking for emotional outcomes rather than a simple product or service. “Why” communicates to the emotional part of our brain (Limbic System) that long precedes our much younger and less developed logical thinking part (Neocortex).
Therefore, it’s essential that when a company is developing their brand that they consider their audience’s emotions and desires, and figure out what role the brand will play in their lives to take them one step closer to that desire. This, is of course, aside from building a fitting solution for their problem in the first place.
Wrapping Up
Today we use the word brand for just about anything relating to a company and what it offers. This is problematic because it causes some to think that a brand is just visuals — which is in itself a whole different story — but somehow they believe that it doesn’t require too much effort and can simply be replicated from renowned companies.
When that doesn’t work, they self-diagnose and believe that a rebrand will fix everything — usually, they never had a brand, to begin with, and that visual revamp doesn’t lead to the desired outcome.
We couldn’t be more wrong about the importance of a brand. It is more holistic than what we give it credit for — it’s a perception based on a person’s experience with what a company does and delivers consistently. Based on that, a (dis)connection is formed. A company doesn’t necessarily have to do something wrong to get perceived a certain way — it happens one way or another. This is because humans are very opinionated, and any sort of inconsistency in any aspect of a brand whispers to our subconscious.
Remember, rather than leaving your business open for interpretation and people perceiving you for something you don’t stand for, it’s wise to cohere this through a process called branding.
Thanks for reading. Hopefully, this prompts you to take your brand (more) seriously. 🤔
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About Ilsmarie Presilia & The Ponder Lab
The Ponder Lab is a Netherlands based Brand Consultancy Studio that specialises in closing the gaps between businesses and their clients. It does so by offering services such as Strategy, Design & Development to elevate brands in an era where strong identities matter the most. The Ponder Lab was founded when Ilsmarie noticed a disconnect between customers and the solutions companies at which she was working were providing. She concluded that while the ideas were great, that their execution was poor, lacking depth and purpose. Now, she aims to ponder with her clients and familiarise them with how humans think and behave, and how to communicate their vision properly. Let’s Ponder!
