Brand Tuned

The new rules of branding, strategy and intellectual property

Shireen Smith

• Publisher: Practical Inspiration Publishing
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781788602686
• Topic: Betriebswirtschaft
• Subtopic: Marketing
• Index: Marketing

A brand is more than a snazzy logo – but what else is there to consider when building a brand? Do you really need a brand for business success? And what has intellectual property got to do with anything?

A strong, authentic brand is what makes your business stand out from the crowd – and what drives long term success. But the branding industry can be an overwhelming minefield, full of conflicting advice and multiple disciplines – so how do you navigate your way through the process? That's where Brand Tuned comes in. With the step-by-step TUNED methodology, you will:

• define your brand to drive the business forward and help it stand out

• know what brand promise will attract your ideal client

• pick a name that will put you "front of mind"

• ensure that the design elements you choose are distinctive and 'ownable'

• train your team to live the brand.

Drawing from evidence-based research, interviews with experts, and years of experience supporting businesses, Brand Tuned is the first branding guide written by an intellectual property lawyer who specialises in trademarks and brands. By incorporating the principles of intellectual property law right from the start of the process, branding expert Shireen Smith will show you how to create and build the brand that is right for you and your business – while avoiding the potential pitfalls.

Shireen Smith is an intellectual property lawyer specialising in trademarks and brands, with years of experience in marketing small businesses. Her TUNED framework is designed to guide you to create a brand that attracts sales for the long term.

CHAPTER 1

What is a brand? Why does it matter?

Like ships passing in the night, it is all too common to have a conversation with someone about brands and branding and make little connection. The terminology is too unclear. Even those who undergo a formal branding process, as I did when I first set up in business on my own, can emerge from the experience no clearer on what ‘brand’ and ‘branding’ really mean.

Surprisingly, there is no single accepted definition among experts, so let us start with the origins of branding.

Origins of branding

The word ‘brand’ has its roots in the identifying mark that was burned on livestock with a branding iron. The original purpose for doing this was so farmers could tell their livestock apart from others. As well as the visual and identification purpose a brand also made a ranch’s cattle unique. Sometimes the brand mark told you the name or the symbol of the ranch, or owner of the cattle. If any rustlers stole the cattle, the evidence was right there that they were stolen. In this way, branding served multiple purposes for farmers:

• a legal mark of identification,

• a physical mark of identification,

• a way of linking the cattle to the owner,

• a way to tell cattle apart from those of others, and

• a source of prestige for the ranch.

Just looking at the branded livestock enabled people to distinguish them from other cattle. You were also able to see the connection between them and the farmer or the ranch. People knew who the very strong, numerous, and healthy cattle belonged to. ‘Those are Mr Miller’s cattle. He owns five thousand cattle and one of the biggest ranches around. See how healthy his cattle are? That must be a big ranch to own all that livestock.’

A brand mark discouraged cattle thieves. It would be like stealing a company car with the logo and the owner’s name on it.

Brands or trademarks also identified the source of the olive oil or wine contained in ancient Greek amphoras and created value in the eyes of the buyers by building a reputation for the producer or distributor of the oil or wine.

Defining ‘brand’ in business today

So, the origins of branding are all about identification, ownership, and worth. Does that hold true today?

Nowadays, when asked to define a brand, people might quote Jeff Bezos saying that ‘your brand is what people say when you’re not in the room’ or they will say ‘everything you do is your brand’. Such statements, in my experience, do more to confuse and obfuscate than to clarify what a brand is.

When I was writing my first book, Legally Branded, in 2011, I asked around to see what this word that everyone bandied around so much actually meant to people. The best replies I received at the time were:

• A brand is the face and soul of an organization.

• A brand is more than personality, more than reputation, more than a promise, it is the distinctive DNA of a business.

Wally Olins, a thought leader in brands and branding, defines ‘brand’ in his Brand Handbook (2008):

A brand is simply an organisation, or a product, or a service with a personality… Branding can encapsulate both big and important and apparently superficial and trivial issues simultaneously… Branding is not only a design and marketing tool, but it should also influence everybody in your company; it’s a coordinating resource because it makes the corporation’s activities coherent and above all, it makes the strategy of the organisation visible and palpable for all audiences to see.

I also consulted authoritative texts, such as The New Strategic Brand Management: Advanced Insights and Strategic Thinking (2012) by JN Kapferer, which set out the internationally agreed legal definition of a brand: ‘a sign or set of signs certifying the origin of a product or service and differentiating it from the competition’.

The brand name is often the primary way in which consumers identify products and services and is the ‘sign’ that you would expect customers to use to distinguish your goods and services from those of competitors. Other signs that identify a business include the logo, icon, and tagline – but which of these make up a brand? Can you have a brand without any of them?

Brand vs. product or service or business

In this book, we use the words brand, business, product, or service interchangeably sometimes. It is worth bearing in mind, though, that they do mean different things: your business is your company – the organization that produces your products and services and that makes offers. The business will offer products and services that may or may not be known by separate names. Your brand is the identity and reputation that your business projects – the way consumers perceive your business. In this book, the context often makes it clear whether the distinction is important.

Academic brand experts quibble over the ‘right’ definition of a brand.

There are two broad camps. One places a stronger emphasis on the relationship that customers have with the brand, as the dominant element of the definition, while the other emphasizes the monetary value created by the brand. However, both camps agree that these two elements are significant. Essentially, the brand is how you create attachment, loyalty, and willingness to buy your products and services.

Whatever the ‘correct’ theoretical definition of ‘brand’, I find it easier and more helpful to explain what ‘brand’ means in a more relatable and practical way. Let us take it out of the abstract and consider an analogy to people’s personality and reputation. A brand, whatever else it may be, is an identity – so it is helpful to think about how we form an impression about individuals, how we conjure them up in our minds when talking about them, and then apply those same principles to business branding.

When we encounter an individual, the overall impression we form about them is made up of a combination of characteristics or qualities. Feeding into this combination are that individual’s distinctive identity, their character and personality. As people, we all have a name, a way of dressing, talking, and behaving. We are known for topics we tend to talk about. We have our own distinct physical appearance, beliefs and opinions, and style. Some of us are high energy, others laugh a lot or might be rather serious, some are outgoing, while others are introverted. Gradually, as we get to know someone, we see different sides to them, and form a sense of who they are. We might even be able to predict how they will respond in certain situations, whether they can be trusted to see something through, or are likely to give up half-way, and so on.

We have a mental picture and associations when a person’s name is mentioned. What we think about them derives from a mixture of our impressions of them: it might include their name, physical appearance, our sense of who they are, what makes them tick, how they make us feel. That is their reputation – or, for our purposes, their brand – although in everyday life we do not tend to say we like someone’s brand! Instead, we might say we like their personality. This is shorthand for everything we know and feel about an individual – and when you consider the same thing about a business instead of a person, we call it their brand.

A brand, then, is a perception. It is a territory in the mind of your customers. You can try to influence and define it in positive ways. It is the impression we form of a business through our experiences of it. When we hear a company’s name that we have previously come across, certain associations might come to mind. The name triggers our memories. The memories might encompass their products or services, interactions we had with the company’s representatives, the customer service we received, and so on. What the business says on its website and in content on its blog, videos, and social media posts, and how the business is run in terms of the quality of its products and services and customer service: the totality of experiences of the business go to create the overall impression the world forms about the business. That is what people mean when they say everything you do is your brand, or that every business has a brand whether they know it or not.

As you become more known as a business, you will evoke a certain response in others. Just as with an individual, there will not be a universal feeling or impression about their brand, but there will be some commonalities; some things about them that most people would agree on. In the same way, your business will be noticed by customers and others in a particular way. Although you might try to influence the perception people have of your brand, ultimately your brand is what customers perceive it to be.

Too small to have a brand?

Some business owners believe that the concept of brand does not apply to them, because their business is small. They believe that only well-known household-name businesses have brands, that different rules apply to small businesses than to household-name brands, and that case studies about well-known brands are not relevant to them.

Yet all the big businesses we know today started out as small ones. The businesses that are now household names started out as a product or service that met a market need. With the passage of time those businesses have acquired widespread market recognition for the products and services they provide. They have managed their brands well and built them, so they are now well known. Good brands do not emerge by pure chance. It takes active management of a brand, as the business gets off the ground, to build the brand.

Some brands are just less well known than others. Some may be well known to a micro community and others may not be known yet because they are just getting started. If you are thinking big in the business, then it is never too soon to start considering the brand you want to create.

Designing a business brand identity

One key difference between a personal brand and a business brand, of course, is that people have an existing personality. Their background, values, and beliefs impact their personal brand. While it is possible to manage your personal brand – that is, to control the face you present to the world – by choosing how much to reveal about yourself, and what topics you publicly talk about, it is generally not possible to package an individual up to appear in a completely new light. In other words, people are not blank slates in the way a business can be when it is first started.

A newly created business has no background or history. It will develop a brand that you influence.

What the brand stands for, what it is to be known for, and what brand promise it will make are essential issues to think through, as discussed in this book.

And here is the important thing: rather than letting your brand evolve haphazardly, and get a reputation randomly over time, you should impact the direction of the brand by designing the business intentionally. You can influence the perceptions about your business by thinking deeply about your aims for creating the business. The brand will be impacted by your values and purpose, what you stand for and believe. Your hope is that the brand develops over time and acquires the reputation you would want it to have.

Managing your brand carefully should be an active part of your business journey because branding is not a one-off event you do and forget. It runs through everything you do as you build your business. Not every business will achieve brand status in the sense of becoming a known provider for a group of consumers. While every business may be described as a brand, using the word in its loosest sense, to truly be an effective brand means your name alone acquires pulling power – even if that might be just within a small community initially.

Design is not just how a brand looks

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