What branding is, what it’s not, and why it needs a new metaphor

Today’s corporate brand is not your grandfather’s corporate brand. Our way of thinking about brands has undergone a sea-change in the last 20 years, but the words we use are the same. Could this be holding us back?

The origin of the word “brand” is pretty easy to trace. Start with brand as a burning stick, then burning a brand mark onto cattle hides, on to brand logos on products, finally arriving at today’s corporate branding.

Corporate branding – in its best-practice form – has evolved into a deeply strategic process. It defines a company’s fundamental purpose while keeping the organization and its operations focused on delivering value to the customer. Brands are among companies most valuable assets, accounting for over half of total corporate value in some cases.

But the term’s history and etymology hang on branding like a wet blanket. For many, branding still hasn’t progressed much conceptually beyond the cattle wrangling days. It means affixing a logo and brand name to the metaphorical outer skin of a company or product. Old-school branding lives on as a surface phenomenon, done mainly for purposes of identification.

Okay, so what is a brand supposed to be?

Everyone in the branding profession has a preferred way of defining what brands and branding are really about. Here’s our shot at it:

Corporate brand: the totality of tangible (products, features, services offerings) and intangible (imagery, desire, impressions of value) attributes of a company, existing as a complex of perceptions and memories in the minds of others (customers, employees, other stakeholders), shaped by a compelling underlying idea and delivered in the form of a coherent experience.

Branding: creating and managing the brand idea in a systematic way that creates the desired experience and resulting perceptions in the minds of others, thus supporting the competitive advantage of the brand and contributing to positive business outcomes for the brand owner.

Or, if you prefer, some low-bandwidth versions:

Corporate brand: it’s not something you (the company) have – not a tool or something you wear on the outside. It’s who you are and what you mean to customers.

Branding: the process of understanding who you are and getting others to understand it the same way you do.

Branding has a branding problem

If branding is really that deep and strategic, it’s fair to say that the cattle-branding image doesn’t quite capture what branding does. It may even be impeding brands from reaching their full potential as high-value assets. We need a new metaphor.

Let’s give ourselves unrestricted poetic license and try crafting a new mental picture of what brands are and how they work. Here are few candidates, graded for power and accuracy as working metaphors:

• Brand as operating system: This pictures the brand as the foundational framework on which a company’s operations and activities are built. So far so good, but a computer’s OS doesn’t really guide it in any specific direction. Grade: D – too mechanical and neutral.

• Brand as constitution: Like the “operating system” image, this pictures the brand as a basic framework, but it has the advantage of suggesting an intended direction – a moral imperative, even. And like a brand, a constitution is meant to be stable over time yet can be amended as necessary. But a constitution is still basically a rulebook; it doesn’t define a nation’s identity. Grade: B – getting there, but too narrow.

• Brand as DNA: This captures the “who you are” concept pretty well, but only if you borrow the already-metaphorical meaning of DNA as “essence of self” (which has little to do with DNA’s actual biological function). Companies already talk about their “corporate DNA”, meaning something like corporate culture. Sort of like brand, but not quite (see below). Grade: C+ — too vague and derivative.

• Brand as destination: Think of a car navigation system. You set the destination (brand proposition), and the system (company) finds ways to get there from any given starting point. Not bad, but a destination is too independent of the path. Brands inform and define every action, including strategic decisions. Grade: D+ – too much about goal, not enough process.

• Brand as culture: Is corporate culture the same as corporate brand, to the point that one can symbolize the other? Not really. Culture is an emergent property, not a constructed, purposeful system. Culture and personality can help define a brand and can help make a good brand more powerful and distinctive. But they’re not the same thing. Grade: D – confusing.

Happy with any of these? I’m holding out for an A grade. Surely the perfect branding metaphor is out there somewhere. Ideas, anyone?

Photo by Mike Gifford