Branding and Brand Development

What Even is a Brand?

At its root, a brand is composed of everything you feel about something. You don’t like Coca-Cola because of the logo. The logo reminds you of why you like Coca-Cola. 

A logo is powerful because it signifies what you know to be true about the brand it represents, either from direct experience or by way of reputation. Reputation can be what you’ve heard about a brand, either from friends or in the news or any combination of external sources.

These things all work together to create the story you know about a brand. This story is the brand’s identity, at least as far as you are concerned. A brand identity is something that can be actively shaped. If you are in charge of a company or an organization, the act of shaping that identity is your responsibility. 

It is also something that we can totally help with.

How Does Brand Development Work?

When you see the Nike Swoosh or the McDonald’s Golden Arches, or when you hear that it’s Ford Truck Month, your brain loads and outputs the cumulative brand story you associate with the thing you’ve just seen or heard. This is because these brands have well-developed identities. 

The logo and overall visual identity is well-organized and consistent. The brand voice – meaning the tone and personality of the communications associated with the brand – is also consistent over years and years, and, no doubt, millions of dollars worth of paid media. And the product experience across these brands is also consistent over many generations of iterations. Every bit of this is brand development, and it is intentional, done with clarity of purpose. 

The Elements of Effective Brand Development

The visual identity of a brand should be deliberately, meticulously organized in a brand design guide, a document which includes guidelines for every possible use case of the logo and brand marks, to ensure consistency across every possible appearance. This also should happen with tone and voice in a brand communications guide. Where the design guide instructs anyone on the proper presentation of the visual brand, the communication guide provides a detailed roadmap of top-level messaging, language, and personality. 

In many cases, these guides are extensive and govern every detail of structured, planned brand communication, and offer crucial insight in times of rapid response. This is how consistency is guaranteed, and consistency is important because being consistent is how you build brand equity.

Brand equity builds over time. It is extremely valuable and it grows primarily through a brand appearing out in the world, frequently and in consistent appearance and characteristics. Every bit of time and money invested in this effort gets deposited in an intangible, ethereal, ineffably valuable savings account. The brand equity savings account operates on compound interest, which as we all know, is the most powerful force in the universe.  

The last element of branding we regularly work on is online identity management. This describes the process of detail-driven curation in which we ensure the algorithms and robots that govern the internet’s ebbs and flows – often from monolithic sources with obscured rules and practices – understand the true elements of a brand’s identity as well as any human can. 

This is good for search engine optimization (SEO) as well as for the overall technical, mechanical structure of a brand’s identity. The primary, driving purpose is to make sure that the robots and machines know the right things about your brand well enough to show the brand to people who are looking for it, even if they don’t know it yet.

Branding Services at Swash Labs

Branding is not a magic trick, and no part of the work I’ve just described requires some secret alchemy.  It is work, though, work that involves a knowable, reproducible craft and skill process – a process we have mastered. 

All of this combines to form what we know as modern brand identity development, or branding, for short. Branding is core to our work, and it should be central to your thinking about advertising and marketing, no matter the size of your organization.