„I want to build a brand! Something people look up to! Like Apple!“ is how the client explains his marketing plan for dropshipping supplements. Soon after, a YouTube link to their newest discovery pops up in the chat. Yup, it’s the 18th time a client has sent you Simon Sinek’s Start with Why TED talk. The client drones on, but his palaver fades into the mental background as you let out an internal sigh and think „It’s one of those clients“.
If you’ve ever been a copywriter, graphic designer or marketing consultant, this situation is probably familiar. Branding is one of the least understood things in marketing.
Performance marketers are like engineers: To them, marketing is building a machine that manufactures sales. And like the cogs in a machine, aesthetics don’t matter as long as each part does its job.
The branding department is like marketing’s faculty of arts. Branding aims to create a magnetic field around a company and its products, to make it irresistible with aesthetically valuable cultural artifacts.
Neither is wrong or right—companies usually need some mix of both to succeed.
Though sometimes belittled (just like arts faculties) brands get more respect: We might yell at our screen when get-rich-quick coaches interrupt us voluntarily watching of Apple’s Think Different commercial.
Unlike the ROAS metric of performance marketing, branding eludes classifications. You can collect typefaces, colors and catchphrases, but those are to brands what street signs are to a vibrant neighborhood. To me, a brand exists when a company has become an independent concept in your mind.
Nike is a brand. Explaining it in terms of running shoes, sneakers or the Swoosh capture Nike. The emergent complexity at the intersection of everything Nike converges to it claiming its own mimetic real estate.
Meanwhile, Dell is not a brand. It has a lease on a sliver of the mimetic real estate of computers.
These aren’t binaries and depend on your level of immersion in a culture or industry. Ford is just another car manufacturer to Europeans, but a brand steeped in heritage to many Americans.
I heard perhaps the best „brand test“ from Seth Godin: Can you imagine what a company might make in an entirely different category?
You could picture the type of bicycle Carhartt might produce, but it’s harder to envision a Trek streetwear collection.
If you want to build a brand—whether for yourself or your company—it’s a valuable exercise to think about how you might capture its spirit in an entirely different medium.
Even if you never intend to actually make something different, you’ll find out something about the essence of yourself or your company.