The Secret Ingredient to Good Branding
and why it's so hard to get right
In the simplest explanation, a brand is the intangibles that helps people identify a business, product, or individual. In his book The Brand Gap, Marty Neumeier further explains that a brand is “A person’s gut feeling… It is not a logo. A brand is not an identity. A brand is not a product… A brand is not what you say it is; it is what they say it is.” Although when we explore the etymology of “Branding”, we are to understand the Old-English definition is “destruction by fire” derived from Proto-Germanic brandaz to mean "a burning". From this, we applied it to mean marking something with a hot iron to identify a product. In the 1800s the definition developed to include marks made in other ways then shortly after it broadened to also encompass a particular maker of goods to denote the quality. The noun was attributed from the verb and once upon a time, a brand was indeed just a logo.
However, like many other words in our English language “Branding” has evolved to mean something largely divorced from its origins. So much so, experts like Neumeier explicitly renounce the original definition to state that branding “is not a logo.” So, how have we gone from a simple meaning with tangibility to something so deeply nuanced, it is easier to explain what it isn’t? Even reducing it down to a “gut feeling” implies there is a high-degree of intuition without conscious reasoning and in a marketing-era where data is king, how is it that branding is more important than ever given its impalpable nature and why is good branding so scarce?
The original BASS & Co registered trademark and one of the earliest examples of product placement with bottles of the pale ale shown in Edouard Manet’s A Bar at the Folies-Bergère, 1881–82. Images: The National Archives of the UK and Wikimedia Commons.
In January 1st 1876, trademark registration opened in the UK officially recognising BASS & Co’s PALE ALE’s triangle as the world’s first registered trademark, a mark that was already in use by Bass Brewery since 1777. In 1897, the contemporary definition of “marketing” - process of moving goods from producer to consumer with emphasis on advertising and sales - was included in dictionaries. Prior to this, industries were focused on increasing production and marketing was merely product distribution. This was encapsulated by Henry Ford after the development of the first manufacturing assembly line, he was famously quoted saying “Any customer can have a car painted any colour that he wants so long as it is black.”
The concept of mass production came to a grinding halt in the 1930s when the Great Depression had a stranglehold on the world’s economy. Businesses were forced to shift their focus to moving existing stock on a pittance of a budget to a market who couldn’t afford it. Through desperation came aggressive sales tactics - sometimes unethical and misleading - with a prominent focus on hard-sell campaigns.
Soon after World War II, the economy boomed creating greater market competition across all industries. Consumers now had financial buying power coupled with an abundance of purchasing options. The advertising promise was of an aspirational future depicted in imagery of sunlit-backed happy families enjoying brighter days of leisure and relaxation. Businesses recognised the significance of marketing and focused their efforts on how they wanted their customers to feel then attached their products to it.
Eliciting emotions became the standard of advertising and by the 1980s, marketing was geared towards establishing and maintaining relationships with customers instead of one-time transactions. This required closer identification of the customers’ needs while strengthening the ideals that drew the customer to them in the first place and set them apart from competitors. From here we welcomed the brand as we know it today.
“The “gut feeling” is the customer’s ability to discern the difference between a business that genuinely cares about their needs from those that merely offer lip service.”
As Neumeier put it, a brand is what they say it is. So, a brand can not exist without a relationship with the customer. Not dissimilar to the relationships we cultivate interpersonally where we seek emotional fulfilment and to be understood, businesses recognised that a pragmatic approach wasn't enough. As fruitful relationships aren’t determined by the features and benefits of the individual but rather the enrichment they bring into our lives, we no longer bought into “what it does” but rather how and what it makes us feel. Manufacturing advancements and saturated markets ensured our practical needs were met allowing us to base our purchasing decisions on more abstract emotional drivers. Herein lies the most important ingredient in ensuring the richness of any relationship: empathy.
Empathy is the capacity to understand and feel what another person is experiencing from their point of view. It involves having the awareness of the emotional states that drives the other’s needs and motivation behind their decision making. As the purpose of a business is to fulfil the needs of their customers, it is imperative that it has a clear understanding of what that actually is and is wholeheartedly geared towards fulfilling it. Good branding is how accurately the business communicates this to their customers; it is the expression of its empathy. The “gut feeling” is the customer’s ability to discern the difference between a business that genuinely cares about their needs from those that merely offer lip service. It’s the same gut feeling that guides us as we navigate through social interactions, how we choose our friends and life partners and the deciding factor as to whether we bestow our trust upon them.
For the individual alone, empathy as a skill is a learnt behaviour that is challenging to develop. It demands putting self-interests aside while being vulnerable to feel the pain and joy of another. Although we all have the capacity to develop empathy, the challenging nature of it is something we must choose to endure but the selflessness required prevents many from even knowing what it is or that they are lacking it. Empathy is a process of reflection and refinement, not a destination and as such, there is the propensity to not always have it right. With this in mind, we as individuals are also afforded the opportunity to self-correct, a luxury that isn’t often granted to brands. This makes it all the more important that the empathy that is being conveyed is sincere, well-defined and accurate. That said, as brands are created by people, a good brand is one that is brought to life by those who not only have the capacity and awareness to practice empathy but have it as the foundation of their work.
Debbie Millman, self-proclaimed design evangelist, once said “Branding is now a profound manifestation of the human spirit.” As brands have progressively moved from being identification markers to conduits for idealistic self-expressions, we have connected with them as entities with human-like qualities and have invited them into our lives now more than ever. They embody virtues that we aspire to so it is no wonder we brandish their marks and use them as representations of the self. As it is said, you are the company you keep so the better a brand is at connecting to their customers empathetically, the closer the relationship that will be formed with the customer and deeper the trust that will be given.
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