A love-hate relationship.
Modern sustainable branding doesn't bite and don't give in: make deep connections with selected people and audiences who may be interested in exactly what you produce or can offer. And what do you need to recommend yourself? A logo. The right question now is this: Why do we pay so much attention to a logo anymore?;
Between you and me, if you're not a graphic designer, you don't give that much. There are excellent, good, not so good and bad logos. Okay, maybe even some tragic ones. So, since you can choose, pick something good. Know how the mark matters above the letters and that always in communication the mark has always bewitched people. The letters are there to remind you what the signal is.
The logo is a tiny piece of an original totem - we call it a brand if you like. Small to the eye only. Because both the water pistol and the machine gun are weapons, but no one chose to go into battle with a water pistol.
But what's a great logo without the branding? What's caraway without the souzhki. And you can be sure that no one has ever eaten cumin plain. A symbol that represents a product/service and recommends it to you will never be a brand. As long as you're there you're sitting on the wrong dock.
At its best, a logo is the visual result of a strategic process, that of building a brand, and carries its unique DNA. Any parallel between the design and the brand's DNA is the result of fiction!
Make it my picture.
In the imaginary world of communication there are cells. If an image can capture the brand in our minds, it looks somewhat like a cell or a planet:
Logo.
Your logo is the symbol that represents a product, a service, an idea or a subset thereof. It is not art for art's sake. Nor is it art for humans. It's art for brands.
Includes picture, words, typography and colour. They are usually associated with a tagline or slogan such as Apple's «think different» because it allows us to communicate a verbal message in addition and people love words and remember them. Especially quotes.
Its creation, at its best, comes as an outflow from the strategic process that builds a brand and should never be the goal in itself. For it to be good and to do us good it is not enough to serve visual communication, that's the easy part, it additionally needs to serve strategic communication.
Id.
Brand identity is who you say you are. The messages inside the company, your messages to the outside world, all the visual and verbal combinations that encode them. All your communication with the digital and real world. The advertising, the words, the symbols, their order but also the aesthetics and consistency with which they are chosen for each touchpoint.
Identity can be spread by thousands of means. Directly and indirectly. And it's usually the indirect routes that create the strongest connections between people and brands.
Branding.
The art of directing a complex system as if it were simple and aligning a show that is opening night every time. To drive your totem in a continuous «light-shadow» method. Branding is the over all.
It starts with strategy and ends with every narrative and every story, every experience of the people around the brand, every story you ultimately told or didn't tell, every point where someone contacted you or approached you. The branding system creates a unique DNA.
A totem's reputation is the most layered variable there is, you can't write it with your hand, you can only direct it with your fingers and thus change the feeling, feelings, opinion and perception.
Brands in the land of marketing.
What does branding have to do with design and marketing?This question would not exist if most professionals and organisations did not choose to confuse the terms, at best out of ignorance. Unlike other disciplines, in communications we don't share the same professional terminology.
Design is visual design. Matter. Marketing is short-term planning and implementation through tactics, which must come from a deep understanding first of the brand DNA and then of the different techniques that exist.
Branding, however, is neither a matter nor a technique. It is staging. To do authentic branding requires a good knowledge of various disciplines and an even better knowledge of how to do integration, i.e. unique integration each time.
A good result should be balanced, authentic and not lie. It should not try to sell something it cannot deliver. Nothing. Not even a promise!
Savoir vivre.
Savoir Vivre in brands is as important as people. If you don't have a product that's garbage, then why should your communication be garbage? If you still have a garbage product, change the product and deal with the communication afterwards. Aesthetics in communication is the savoir vivre of brands. It indicates the aesthetics of the product, the company,the people behind it and the people who consume it and the lack of it, more often than not, indicates the overall lack of it and makes brands look like dwarves instead of giants.
Source: www.epixeiro.gr
Anastasia Sapounaki
Strategist & Brand director
