Logo Does Not Equal Brand

“I have a brand! See? Here’s my logo.”

This simplistic view of branding is as tempting to overworked marketers as it is to the CEO that doesn't want to think about funding a full-out brand effort. It's also a lot easier to understand than the complex art of true branding, which evokes multidimensional meaning and association to communicate tons of information through the placement of simple visual, verbal and auditory stimulie (i.e., messages). Yeah. Like a logo. 

Even though it's understandable to want to simplify complexity, "keep it simple" is not really a compelling justification for a reputable should-know-better industry group that recently hyped a strategic brand seminar this way – “Strategic branding [makes] the tactics of branding work best-from advertising to great graphic design,” implying that branding is a result of hook lines and logo design.

The best brands do use logos and other visual elements to evoke positive and deep associations for their audience, but the professional marketer – like the people who are putting on that seminar above – really should know better than to confuse the graphic design with the associated meaning underlying the brand itself.

Good marketers know that a strong brand evokes emotional associations with its logo, but why is it the logo and other visual elements don’t constitute the brand itself? Where does the experience underlying the association really come from? These are some of the issues B2B Marketing Excellence explores in our professional development courses on strategic branding (next course May 8, 2008), but let’s examine the basics. Come to the course if you want to understand the subject in depth and learn how to make branding work for your company or client base, but absorb the simple meaning of the concept here.

You know how you can smell a whiff of something and a whole sensory extravaganza of memory overtakes you? Images long gone? Forgotten emotions tugging on your heartstrings? Do we call the smell the rich, multi-sensory experience of memory? No. The smell is the trigger, just like a logo or other graphic element can be a powerful trigger for a brand experience – strong associations that remind us of positive or negative feelings we have towards a branded company or product. Equating the evocation of memory with neat smells is as simplistic as saying that a neat logo or graphic vocabulary is all you need to “have a brand”. The logo alone cannot create the experience, but the association of the visual elements of an attractive and appropriate logo with the experience itself - resulting from a combination of sales, use and support encounters - is indeed a powerful combination.

Philip Kotler said it well in B2B Brand Management, “A brand is an intangible concept.” Further, he quoted Michael Dunn & Scott Davis in Creating the Brand-Driven Business: It’s the CEO Who Must Lead the Way in an excellent summary of brand:

• “A brand is a promise.
• A brand is the totality of perception, everything you see, hear, read, know, feel, think etc. – about a product, service or business.
• A brand holds a distinctive position in customer’s minds based on past experiences, association and future expectations.
• A brand is a short-cut of attributes, benefits, beliefs and values that differentiate, reduce complexity and simplify the decision-making process.”

Because a brand promise and associations – of quality, value, enjoyment, productivity, impact or whatever – are inherently intangible we humans rely heavily on the tangible sensory hooks to trigger them for us. Visual, verbal and auditory triggers are most effective at this, but they are only triggers.

The implications for branding of this trigger phenomenon are broad and far exceed this simple article’s ability to enumerate them all. In the B2B environment, they are even more numerous because the touch points that create brand associations with the customer (which is usually an organization comprised of multiple individuals) are so numerous. For example, B2B intangible brand associations are created by the often understood advertising and promotion public communications but also by the more private interactions of sales people, implementation teams and support personnel.

This is a theme we’ll be touching on quite a bit in our courses and social networking community, B2B Expert’s Forum. Join us there to keep the discussion going, but do yourself a favor and don’t waste your money on a training course that dismisses the rich and multi-dimensional concept of brand as an exercise in catchy copy writing and graphic design.