According to the Oxford Dictionary a myth is ‘A traditional story, especially one concerning the early history of a people or explaining a natural or social phenomenon, and typically involving supernatural beings or events.’ In this book we can’t promise very much of the supernatural or even an exploration of naturally occurring phenomena, but we can promise that we will examine the stories and received wisdom that surround the subject of brands and branding.
Before we move on it is probably worth asserting the difference between ‘brands’ and ‘branding’. Brands are traditionally seen as a mix of tangible and intangible assets that act as a marker or identifier and, in legal terms, ‘separate the undertaking of one business from that of another’. Brands are protectable as trademarks and over the years it has become possible to protect brand names, identities, colours, sounds and even different pack shapes. Harley- Davidson has even managed to legally protect the unique roar of their engines.
Brand owners in turn have sought to vest their assets with a distinctive meaning that helps to build appeal and saliency with their customers – this process of creating and managing brands is often referred to as branding – the uniquely challenging mix that is the art and science of brand building.
Brands are everywhere. As well as adding colour, interest and fun, they help consumers to make choices. They can act as a welcome shorthand, speeding up decision-making; they can build affinity and meaning and even help some of us build our own personal identity – the heart of the notion that to some extent ‘we are what we buy’. And yet much suspicion surrounds the science and art of brand building, as though in some way it is a dishonest exercise, something designed to deceive and obfuscate, something weighting the scales in favour of the corporation at the expense of the consumer – and that’s even before we get to the often touted idea that global brands and the corporations that own them are solely responsible for globalization and the death of the high street.
Brands exist because they are in effect the leitmotifs of the human condition. We like to signal ownership, we like to project meaning onto the things that surround us, we like things that reduce risk and act as a guarantor of quality, we like things that make us feel different and special and we love things that fire our imaginations and leave us entertained and exhilarated.
Brands exist because we do.
We will never really be able to accurately pinpoint when the practice of branding began but it seems safe to assume that for as long as people have been producing goods for sale or exchange they have been endorsing them and leaving their mark on them. Brands historically began life as a mark of ownership (for example on livestock) as well as a form of primitive guarantee – attesting to quality and provenance – and over the millennia brands have evolved to become a complex mix of the tangible and intangible.
As late as the 1960s if you had asked UK customers in the high street to talk about their favourite brands, they would probably have referenced a series of consumer brands, for example Heinz, Cadbury’s, Hoover and Mars. Brands as we know them were inextricably linked to the post-war boom and closely associated with improving living standards and increasing prosperity. Brands were there principally to simplify choice, and provide a guarantee of quality and provenance. Some brand owners were experimenting with ways of building meaning into their products – most famously VW with their ‘Lemon’ advertising for the Beetle, but in most instances brands were still acting as identifiers – a name, an identity, a tagline, a jingle.
It wasn’t really until the late ’70s and early ’80s that the concept of brands began to extend into all areas of business. As entities were privatized, markets deregulated and competition became fiercer so the need to differentiate your business became greater. Utilities, telecoms providers, banks, insurance companies and airlines were all now enthusiastically embracing the power of branding. As brand owners fought for space in your mind, advertising became incredibly influential. The focus was on imbuing products and services with meaning so that you as the customer could surround yourself with the brands that best represented you – the very notion of shopping as a form of personal expression. Even businesses serving other businesses began to realize that having a brand was an important business support – even cynics had to attest to the power of the statement ‘No one ever got fired for hiring IBM’.
Brands were now seen as more than just a logo or a tagline; they were seen as opportunities to create meaning.
In the 1990s and early 2000s we saw brands extend their meaning to embrace the experience economy. As we accumulated more stuff, so it became more interesting to seek out unique or engaging experiences. Virgin Atlantic helped customers to feel like a rock star, coffee shops offered a ‘third space’ between work and home, Apple provided an entire digital ecosystem, networks of gyms promised to transform your body and your lifestyle. Brands could now shape or even immerse you in a branded world.
We are now in the middle of a digital revolution, which is still gaining velocity. The ability to instantly find, compare and share information has had a transformative effect on businesses and brands. Today it is increasingly difficult to separate the brand from the business that supports it – they have effectively become one and the same thing. When you can instantly compare price and product attributes, when you can find out who owns a company and how they treat their staff, when you can instantly review and post your comments online, when you can communicate directly with a company via a social media platform, when word of mouth has never been more important, then brands become inextricably linked with how a business behaves.
That is also why customers are no longer just concerned with who you are and what you do; they are also interested in why you do it. The notion of Purpose is becoming increasingly important. Is what you are saying to your staff congruent with what you say to your customers? Are you behaving in a way that is authentic? Do you seek to mitigate the negative impacts that your business may have? Do you operate to a clear set of principles?
As brands have changed so has the practice of branding. What began as naming, graphic design and advertising has morphed into a broader set of activities. If branding began as a way of helping brand owners create clear attribution, it has evolved to encompass an operating system, the process of finding an authentic, distinctive and ownable idea that unites staff and customers and then aligning all aspects of the way the business behaves behind that idea. Whatever your view on brands and branding, whether you see them as a force for good or the bellwethers of a broken capitalist system, we hope you will find something in this book that will challenge your perspective or your thinking.
It won’t surprise you to find out that we are supporters of brands; we see them as an integral part of free expression and free enterprise. They are also increasingly an important way of holding businesses to account. But beyond that, we also see them as intimately connected with what it means to be human.