Start-up series: A brand is more than just a logo.
What do we mean by this?
A common misconception we hear from start-up founders, is an over-reliance on a logo to solve the bigger shortfalls of their organisation’s branding. So we decided to set the record straight in the hope it widens the perspective of our audience and they start looking internally.
Essentially, a brand is the customer’s feeling after digesting the sum of interactions – planned and unplanned – with your company, your product, your messaging and all the smaller disparate elements.
This intangibility makes it hard to quantify exactly what constitutes a brand, and clearly there will be differences of opinion between actors in the various sectors whether that’s marketing, creatives, advertisers (especially when it comes to personal brands, but we’ll discuss that another time). The crux of the matter we want to relay, is that it’s more than a logo, a small cross section of it is:
The interactions your customer has with your website.
The language you use.
What your team says about your company.
Your office.
Your logo (it is part of the calculation they make about your brand).
The colours you favour over others.
Your social media.
A memorable / remarkable / irritating tagline, jingle or advert character.
Your rate of adoption or ignorance of trends.
And many more components!
When auditing your brand, it’s preferable to have this done by people or organisations that have nothing to do with your company so you can get a more objective idea of how you’re perceived by others (as long as they’re not trying to give you the hard sell of their services!).
We find it useful to refer to your logo as the shopfront of your business, which means your brand is the interior of the store. You want to know how it feels to your customer – is it nice, is it stale, does it feel luxury, or budget class.