Firebrand

There seems to be two ways people use the word brand, and one is right and one is right, or at least one is the definition I will be using in all posts on this blog. People some talk about their “brand” in reference to their logo and other graphical material their company has. For example: “That ad has our brand all over it.” That is your brand graphics, or your brand look and feel. While originally a brand was a logo, the word has evolved and has a new much more rich and subtle meaning now. The subtleties come across when you get to know the brand cycle.

1) A brand does not exist in the absence of an potential customer.
This is the major point of contention for me. A logo is not your brand. Your website is not your brand. Your advertisement is not your brand. It is the same argument as if a tree falls alone in the woods does it make a sound? If a brand doesn’t have anyone to percieve it that it is not a brand. So when someone says “Company X has a brand problem” they are not saying that the logo looks ugly. They mean they need to change the brand in the eyes of the consumer.

2) Communications is the first part of the brand cycle.
This is the logo part of the brand. It includes everything that is out there about your company to judge: logo, website, advertisement, sales people, store environment, location, associated brands, promotions. Everything from your tag line to the way your employees dress. Anything that the customer comes in contact with that a person associates with your company can effect how they perceive your company now and in the future, ie. your brand. The things that are hardest to control are often the things that have the greatest effect on your brand on a per customer basis. For example, a snarky sales person can put off a customer for life. But it is important to note that this is the only part of the cycle you control as a part of the company.

3) The second phase of the brand cycle is consumer baggage.
All of the communications are filtered through the collective experience a consumer as with your company, other companies and everything else. Someone will see your logo and interpret it in their own way because of their experiences in the past. For example, someone had a great experience with a purchase and it colours the way they see your brand in a positive way. Thankfully, on average people have the similar experiences and you can play on mental associations that are already established in the public. When I do brand graphics, I ask the descriptors that a client wants their brand to be perceived as, and then I ask of example large companies that could be described in that way. Than I use a visual language similar to those brands to play on the mental associations that have already been developed in the public. For example, if there was a jeweller who wanted graphics that were modern and high end, I would look at the brand language of BMW, Mercedes, Jaguar, Hammacher Schlemer, Harmon Kardon, and Sony. Those companies have already associated quality in the consumers mind with their use of san-serif text, white space, geometric lines and black, white, grey and punches of colour. This is because of the associations or baggage that have been built into the consumers mind over time, consciously and unconsciously.

4) The third part of the brand cycle is the viewers projections onto the brand.
We project on everything. Have you ever thought of the personality of a number? Do you think that rainy days are sad days? Do you ever look at a car and think it looks aggressive? Well I hate to break your bubble, but numbers dont have personalities, the weather doesn’t have emotions and cars are not aggressive nor passive. We are hard wired to deal with people, and we treat objects in the same ways. People do this with your brand. They take in your communications, run it through their baggage filter, and then project attributes onto your brand. For example, an ad may come on for Sony’s Walkman brand MP3 players, and you remember that time you had to return that faulty mini disc player that would get loud spontaneosly. Then you project those feelings of annoynce and mistrust onto the Walkman brand, whether the advertised product is deserves it or not. This cycle is rehearsed so much that it doesn’t happen on a concous level. The emotional response is sudden, subtle but powerful in the way it affects behaviour.

While everyone has a different perception of every brand, the aggrogate (or collection) of everyones brand cycle is your brand. So when someone has a good brand, their communications are embued with positive attributes from the good experiences they have had in the past. When someone has a brand problem, than they have built a negative experience in a peoples brand baggage and their brand is attributed with negativity. There is another aspect called brand dissonance. Cognitive dissonance is the feeling that humans have when there is two conflicting thoughts in their mind at one time. This is always an uncomfortable feeling because our brains are working overtime to try to resolve the difference. Brand dissonance is when a customers sees a brand communication that is out of character from their mental model of the brand. We will discuss this in a future post.

So the brand cycle is the communications being filtered through a persons baggage and coming out as projections. Knowing this on a theoretical level is powerful in making decisions that to move your company into the brand you want it to have.

—

By Colin Finkle. Colin Finkle is an industrial designer that works with large brands everyday designing displays for FX Displays in Toronto, Canada. He is the principle designer at Firebrand Creative. He also writes for AMD’s FireUser.com blog.