Great brand strategy starts with being clear about what you’re trying to build
“What is a brand?” is one of the most fundamental questions that any brand manager or brand consultant needs to be able to answer, and answer well.
At first glance, it’s a simple question – yet there are many different ways to answer it. Over the years, I’ve collected a number of different definitions. There are three I particularly like.
The first comes from Paul Walton, an ex-colleague and founder of brand consultancy The Value Engineers. He defined a brand as a “zip folder of meaning.” As with a compressed software download, brands often incorporate more than is immediately apparent. Despite what some consultants and clients would like to believe, brands aren’t one dimensional.
Volvo is sometimes quoted as an example of a brand that can be summed up in one word – “safe.” Yet this over-simplifies the brand, which also has strong associations with being Swedish, big, boxy, having space, being good in bad weather, being a premium brand, and more besides. Volvo is the shorthand – the name on the zip file. Click on it and you get a myriad of associations.
The next definition comes from another ex-colleague, Tim Kaner. He took issue with the common definition that “a brand is a promise,” arguing that, in its brevity, it missed something crucial. A brand isn’t merely a promise – it’s more akin to a pledge. As he used to say, “A brand isn’t just a promise, it’s a responsibility.”
This reflects the idea that brands aren’t about selling something once; they’re about building and maintaining relationships. Brands are responsible for keeping their promises. How else can they expect to retain customers? It is a definition that reminds marketers about the difference between over-promising and under-delivering, and under-promising and over-delivering.
The last definition keeps it in the family: it comes from my sister, professor Celia Lury, director of the Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies at Warwick University. She defines a brand as a unit of social currency. Successful brand owners create a positive, motivating and distinctive set of associations for their brands. While the perception of any one individual can and does differ, effective brands have a consistent core set of strong and powerful associations. That, therefore, gives brands a mass meaning: a meaning that is, in effect, a unit of social currency. Chances are you know what someone means if they tell you a film is “Disney-esque,” just as you have a good idea what you’ll get in any McDonald’s.
These three definitions, ‘stolen’ from others, raises the question of how I would define a brand. I tend to play off the famous iceberg definition, which states that brands are so much more than their name, logo and communication – but I flip it. Brands are a sand dune. They are multidimensional, have real depth, and are constantly changing. The French philosopher Gilles Deleuze used the notion of multiplicity to describe thought phenomena that are in constant flux, noting that, “Like a sand dune, a multiplicity is in constant flux, though it attains some consistency for a short or long duration.”
We can say the same of brands. They are complex and have constantly-evolving multifaceted relationships with multiple groups of stakeholders. They may be in constant flux, but they have a coherent core.
It’s worth spending some time answering that simple-looking question. It raises issues that get to the very heart of what it takes to build a successful brand.
Giles Lury is a freelance brand consultant
