What Is Branding?

Branding is important for all sizes and types of businesses. This is especially important in today’s highly competitive marketplace. Brands that are able to successfully differentiate themselves from their competitors and create value for their customers will be the ones with an advantage.

Before we begin, let’s start with what a brand isn’t. It isn’t the company’s logo and it isn’t about making consumers aware of the company’s product or service. Those are indeed elements of a brand, but they aren’t the sole elements.

So, what exactly is a brand? Originally, the purpose of branding was to identify a product or service as belonging to a certain entity. A simple example would be the branding irons ranchers used to mark their cattle or the engraved signs that existed for thousands of years. Today’s definition goes much further. It has evolved to include everything an entity does with the intention of being recognized and only now incorporates many different kinds of intentional experiences. Interbrand’s Christensen and Hertioga (2018) provide this useful definition:

Ultimately, brand is the perceptions that customers have of that entity and that is gained through all their experiences with that brand. Every single facet of an entity’s interaction with a consumer sends an implicit message that leads to a collective perception—positive or negative—of that entity.

Video 2.1, featuring Ann Rubin, Vice President of Corporate Marketing at IBM, helps place additional context around branding and how entities can build sustainable brands.

The definition points out what people would typically think of when they hear the word “brand”—a logo, a specific typeface, unique colors. These are the tangible manifestations of a brand, the things you can “reach out and touch.” But these descriptions also make it clear that brands also have important intangible aspects. They allow consumers to differentiate between brands for similar products (known as undifferentiated products). Brands also comprise the associations and images that pop into the minds of consumers when they are encountered.

This is a critical point—brands exist in psychological space, not physical space. Products exist on grocery store shelves; brands exist in people’s minds. This distinction becomes critically important when it comes to understanding brand equity, targeting, and positioning.

Because brands exist in psychological space, the most important aspect of their definition is also intangible. That is, the most important definition of a brand is not descriptive, but functional. What is most important about brands is not what they are but what they do. And from the standpoint of someone who is interested in a career in strategic communications, the key question is, “what function does a brand serve for strategic communications?”

In the book Advertising & The Business of Brands, the writers at The Copy Workshop (executive editor Bruce Bendinger [2009]) provide the following functional definition for brand.

This functional definition should make it clear that brands have important impacts not just on consumers but on strategic communicators. By developing and agreeing on a precise brand meaning, strategic communicators can clearly organize and implement strategic plans across the organization. This is more than choosing colors and typeface and tagline. It is defining what a brand should mean in the minds of consumers (the process is called positioning and will be covered in more depth in Lesson 4).

In this functional role, therefore, the brand serves the purpose of focusing all brand-related strategic communications across the organization. If everyone does not have the same understanding of what the brand means, it is very unlikely different elements of the campaign will be integrated. Clearly defining brand meaning facilitates the integration of marketing communications.

In their best-selling book on effective communication Made to Stick (which I highly recommend for anyone interested in a career in strategic communications), Chip and Dan Heath (2007) compare the integrative role of the brand to the idea of commander’s intent (CI). In the 1980s, The U.S. Army began to add a CI to the top of every order. The Army had discovered that complex plans would become obsolete as soon as circumstances in the field didn’t go as expected. And nothing ever goes as expected. The CI (brand) provides a clear, plain-language statement of the ultimate objective of the plan so that officers (strategic communicators) can respond to changes in the field (marketplace).

Heath and Heath (2007) paraphrase Colonel Tom Kolditz of West Point as comparing many plans to writing instructions for a friend to play a game of chess—a friend knows absolutely nothing about the game. As soon as the opponent makes an unexpected move, the plan is worthless. By adding a clear CI, the friend has enough of an understanding to let their instincts take over when the unexpected occurs.

Brand meanings guide the strategic communications efforts of organizations the same way CIs guide officers carrying out military orders. No matter how many unexpected changes are encountered in the marketplace, if communicators understand the brand, they will be able to rely on their instincts to make the best adjustments.

Finally, it should be noted that brand is an exceptionally broad and encompassing concept. Most casual observers think of consumables (things you buy, use up, and buy again) or of durable goods (things you buy but keep for several years or even decades) when they think of brands. But brands comprise anything that can be promoted. Rock bands are brands, as are movies, musicals, and plays. So are politicians. Even purely abstract ideas are brands. The Sierra Club, for example, is dedicated to promoting environmentalism, a purely abstract set of ideas and priorities about how we should interact with the natural world. They are not selling anything other than ideas and ideals.

As you can see, brands mean different things to different actors in the strategic communications process. In the next section, we will take a look at these actors and what brands mean to each.

In the journal article What Is a Brand?, Hertioga and Christensen (2018) help us understand the meaning of a brand and why it is important. They further illustrate the ingredients of successful branding and the implications:

• Clarity of thought: A solid definition helps clarify which of a company’s actions can be classified as branding and which can’t. Not everything a company does is branding.
• Clarity of speech: Avoid using brand when it doesn’t apply, as that creates more clarity for the brand.
• Clarity of method: Good branding should pay special attention to both the entity that created it as well as its stakeholders.