The basics of the brand

Published November 20, 2013 at 2:26 pm

No doubt about it, the word “rebranding” gets thrown around a lot these days, not in the least on this blog. Like a lot of buzzwords, it can be a term that means one thing when you first hear it but starts to warp once it’s been used enough times, especially if your first encounter was somewhat skewed to being with.

So in order to build a good “brand,” it’s essential to first understand what exactly a brand is. Is it a campaign, a series of images, a logo, a concept? Some combination of these, or none of the above?

A blog post by Fabian Geyrhalter that recently made its way to UpStart business journal raises this question of what a brand actually is and whether we need a new word to take its place. He uses his own key words like “soul” to describe exactly what it is that makes a brand tick, and gets to the heart of the matter, saying that the dreaded noun is “not a four letter word.”

“Despite the negative connotations with the term, branding is more important today than it has ever been before and it is not only consumed, but created and curated by the masses through their very own personal (public/social media) brands,” he writes.

And as marketing efforts get even more sophisticated, the general public will probably become smarter about this along with the advertising and marketing businesses that attempt to put this into action (a Bloomberg post recently mentioned the “branding of branding” in regards to sponsored campaigns. It’s enough to make your head spin).

However you define a brand, your company almost certainly has one to uphold, and others will probably consider your work in these terms along with you.