Branding Glossary

We thought it would be useful to provide a Branding Glossary as an accompaniment to our Brand Series. So here’s the Wisdom skinny on some of the terms we’ve used a lot already, and those which you’ll hear more of as the series progresses.

Feel free to treat this as a wiki and comment with your own suggestions for improving, or adding to our definitions!

Brand

The living, breathing soul of a company, product, or service; the total sum of the tangible and intangible qualities and characteristics of who and what is stood for and delivered. It’s encapsulated in and communicated through the packaging, the colours, the symbols and the typography used, but more than that, it’s the way brand and its people behave, and the experience delivered.

Brand management

The process of protecting, nurturing and growing a brand or stable of brands to keep messaging consistent and aligned with the business strategy.

Brand strategy

The vision set out, to take the brand fulfilling their objectives, which are aligned with the overall business strategy.

Visual identity

The visual representation of everything the brand stands for. This means a brand’s logo, typography, palette, packaging and stores in some cases, but more than this it’s how these elements are used, that brings a brand to life.

Logotype

Or logo, consists of a single graphic element, either a name or a sign and name and uniquely identifies a company, product or service. Sometimes a strapline is included in the logotype.

Icon
The image, the enduring symbol that represents the brand. It can be a part of the logo, or used alone and acts as a signpost that is quickly identified, i.e. the Nike ‘swoosh’.

Typography

A brand’s signature combination of fonts used on all branded content.

Palette

The colours of a brand which are used across all branded material, and in some cases become synonymous with the brand. A good example would be Cadbury’s Dairy Milk purple, or those in the Wisdom London ‘rainbow’ blend.

Logotype guidelines

Outlines the treatment of the logo, word mark and icon – how and where to use them on branded material for consistency and also to protect the brand.

Word mark

Often underestimated, this is a written logo that can be immediately recognized. Think Coca-Cola or Google.

Strapline

A genuine, easy to understand, phrase that becomes a part of the brand identity, so it must add value to the overall message. Otherwise known as a tagline or endline and can be:

• Descriptive: Wisdom London “Creative Communications. Connected” and Accenture “High performance. Delivered”
  
• Action-oriented: Nokia “Connecting people” and Nike “Just do it”
• Evocative or emotional: L’Oreal “Because you’re worth it” and T-Mobile “Life’s for Sharing”
  

Five Essentials of Disruption

I once worked for a firm in the professional services sector whose entire marketing function was tasked with introducing disruptive marketing elements into their marketing activity. A great idea – disruption can after all, bring heightened awareness, drive differentiation and indicate a special kind of boldness and savvy – but let me tell you, it was tough.

We’ve seen many examples of disruption working well in recent times and marketers are getting better at it all the time.  A couple of my personal favourites, for example:

-       Marmite’s “I hate Marmite” campaign: Accepting and even celebrating the fact that your product is genuinely hated by some people is not the conventional way to market. But, by highlighting divided opinion, Marmite managed to make the love Marmite brigade all the more staunch, and in the process be seen as iconic and ironic.

- The Evening Standard’s “Sorry” campaign: In 2009, London’s Evening Standard mounted a huge campaign across the capital which saw buses, billboards and ads proclaim “Sorry” for a host of supposed failings, including being negative, predictable, complacent and out of touch. Honestly, the marketer (and cynic) in me adored this.  By heaping self-criticism and recrimination, they saved anyone else from doing it and suggested that of course, their standards should be – and would be – so much higher.  And more than that, it grabbed attention.  To complete the masterstroke, this was all a precursor to the launch of a new-look Standard shortly after.

I’ve thought a lot about why these examples were successful and yet, we in the corporate world found it such a struggle.  Well, for a start, the above campaigns were part of an overall brand strategy and were pivotal to some powerful positioning work.  We, on the other hand, were working within a pre-defined brand strategy and simply trying to wrap a layer of disruptive marketing across our tactical activity in many cases.  A lot of the time I feared we were simply ‘doing disruption for disruption’s sake’.

It’s not easy to achieve marketing disruption in the corporate world, but it’s certainly not impossible.  So here are Wisdom London’s essential pointers:

1. Make it smart – do your groundwork

Rather than disruption for the sake of it, consider what you can realistically change within your means and the value it could bring.  Disruption in marketing is all about making your audience behave differently by interrupting their routine, expectations or habits. So make sure first of all that you have a good idea of how your audience operates – otherwise how will you know what to disrupt?

2. Bold is beautiful…

There’s little I admire more than having courage in one’s convictions, and that’s exactly what you need to make a bold disruption plan work.  If you’re going to be bold, do it – but be conscious that it takes courage and belief to turn things on their heads and confront or challenge assumptions. You’ll need buy-in, you’ll need internal awareness, and a good storyline to back it all up.

3. Small is beautiful too

We tend to hold up the more dramatic examples of marketing disruption as the successful ones, but small steps are good too.  In the corporate world, business is more transactional and less personal, yet we’re still dealing with humans.  I’m a big believer in ‘humanising’ a corporate brand to achieve disruption (where this is not the norm).  For example, being more transparent about who your people really are (beyond their job title), what makes them tick, and empowering them to overturn convention by venturing opinions alongside regular thought leaders or corporate commentators. Small steps.

4. Disrupt how you communicate

The way in which you communicate your brand and proposition is an obvious area for disruptive marketing. Defy your market’s expectations with a bespoke video instead of a proposal document, develop beautiful infographics instead of a PowerPoint presentation or brochure, harness social media if you have not already, and let this open up a whole ream of new opportunities with which to surprise and overturn expectations.

5. Make sure that Disruption = Added Value

Think about how you can add value to your client through disruption – that’s how industry giants like Apple have achieved it, changing the way we behave for the better and adding services we didn’t know we needed.  Can your service or product do that, even on a micro-level?  What about adding value personally in the way you deliver that product or manage your client relationships?  I often send a client or contact an article or URL that I’ve stumbled across and thought they would find interesting or useful.  It may be nothing to do with marketing, but it adds to the value of our relationship.  (btw: this is not intentional disruption, but just good business practice!) Can you add an invaluable layer of service or tweak what exists, to deliver even more value?

Tell us your disruption essentials and best industry examples…we really want to know what you think!

Kate Spiers is CEO of Wisdom London, a creative marketing communications consultancy. Follow Kate on Twitter for more like this.

Brand communications (your secret weapon)

 

This post was first published in March but to round off the final week of our Branding Series, I’ve dusted it off and present it to you once again, in case you missed it first time.  I feel so strongly about brand communications – such a critical part of the brand’s personality, style and promise. A brand’s messages and the way they are presented, from the language used to the choice of channels, is critical and a genuine opportunity to differentiate.

But to get it right, a brand needs to know who it is, and who its audience it – and to pitch their communications perfectly.

When you think of brands you love, trust, admire, aspire to and welcome into your daily life, what do you think of?

Most likely it’s a series of logos or visual ideas, but stay with the thought a little longer and you’ll probably find that it’s also a series of emotions (could be as mundane as feeling reassured, might be exhilarated, intelligent, cool), maybe along with tastes, smells and sights – and possibly memories too.

A logo or visual identity alone doesn’t engender these reactions – it’s about the brand promise, product and communication style that’s wrapped around it. It’s what makes that brand speak directly to me and you.

Brand communications = really important!

You probably see where I’m getting to by now: I think brand communications are really important. They’re so important that they massively influence what we do at WL. But they are often overlooked in favour of the (traditionally more sexy) design elements, brand strategy and so on.

But by spending time on your brand communications, you’re embracing an opportunity to connect with your target market on an even more meaningful level. An authentic tone of voice that suits your brand and really speaks to your audience adds an additional layer of brand personality and value. Consistent messages that reflect your brand promise add strength to the visual proposition. Adopting a lexicon in common with your audience draws them in, creates intimacy and allows you to develop a way of communicating that’s distinct, direct and genuine – especially if you adopt complimentary platforms and channels from which to communicate.

More than a logo

Consider the success of Innocent Smoothies, for example. Their cute behalo-ed icon is not the reason for their brand strength. Neither is their undeniably accessible and popular product. A large part of the appeal is in how they interact with their audience, bringing a human voice to a mass-produced product, appealing to our sense of humour, desire to belong and to generally feed good.

Take their ‘Join our family’ proposition – the concept is inclusive, the invitation is offered in a familiar and er, innocent. And that’s how they communicate.  Of course we know that above all they are doing this to make money, but it appeals because it’s consistent, stylized and distinctive.  Take away the visual imagery and you’d probably know who’s talking. They have also embraced web, social media and face-to-face (like their Village Fete) as channels to enhance that style of communication. The point is, you know what you’re buying into. And that has surely made diversification into snack foods (à la veg pots) an easily viable proposition.  Ditto Virgin, who’ve been able to achieve a similar feat with really consistent communication styles, no matter what the product is – from music to planes to trains to cola.

B2B’s need to get in on the act

And this principle doesn’t only fly with consumer brands. I could argue that it’s equally, if not more important, in a b2b scenario. I’m not saying it’s easy, or even the same process as for consumer brands.  But if you believe as I do that people do the buying and companies simply pay, the logic follows that a consistent and reliable brand message makes the buying decision a heck of a lot easier. The brand premise is reinforced by the way brand speaks to you, and reinforces the idea of a self-assured and positive brand that knows where it’s going.  It’s worth some thought – ideally a lot of thought.

Here’s the free bit!

Ask yourself:

• What makes your brand different / better? If you had to distill it down to a few key words what would they be?
• Now think about your brand’s way of doing business – is it in a formal, advisory capacity, collaborative and egalitarian, strictly supply / demand?
• What particular value does your product or portfolio offer? What emotions does this value engender?
• Who is your market? How do they communicate and what is their communication style ?
• Consider what your core lexicon would be: What language can you use to convey those values, propositions and the emotions that you hope to engender?
• Now take a look at all the ways in which you communicate – from your web to social media platforms to printed matter, presentations, packaging…are they aligned?

I could talk about this for ages.  But I won’t.  Got you thinking, though? Call me or mail me if you want to talk about it some more!

Kate Spiers is CEO and Founder of Wisdom London, a communications consultancy specialising in communication strategy, brand communications and digital communications.