Build an Exceptional Brand Without Knowing Anything
A thoughtful way of building an exceptional brand.
Jul 9, 2024
Thoughts
5 min
One of the most difficult disciplines in marketing is building a brand. The abstract nature of brand makes it particularly challenging for many marketers to understand how brand really works. In the following paragraphs, you will find two alternative ways to think about brand that help you build an exceptional one even if you never studied what brand is or how it works.
Marketing is Communication
The first thing to do when something is an abstract concept is to delve into the territory where we understand what the matter is. So how do we do that? The way I see it, the best approach is simplification, not to think about marketing or brand, but to think about communication.
Communication is not an abstract concept for us. People like to talk, and you can talk.
People talk, you talk, and people like to tell stories. Communication is not an abstract concept for us. That’s why it is so easy to just change the word brand to communication. Think of brand as communication, just a talk with somebody else, e.g., your customer.
What You Communicate is Crucial
Even though I really like to think about marketing as a conversation between me and the customer, it is unfortunately more complicated than that. Communication has many other aspects than just people talking. That doesn’t necessarily mean we have to reject the idea of conversation.
Let’s just imagine that when we converse with the customer, he sees and perceives more aspects of communication than just our words.
The basic perceived aspects could be what they see - our expressions, the sound - our tone of voice, smell - what perfume we used this morning. And all of this is creating our communication too. Silly as it is, this imaginary situation explains the core of creating a brand very well.
Communication is rarely a monochromatic scale, there are many perceived aspects of it.
What we communicate matters: words we choose, verbal cues, colors we use, from the design of our packaging, visual elements, including logos, typography, patterns, imagery; additionally, our actions, decisions, and the way we interact with others, authenticity, and trust.
In essence, every detail, from the tone of our voice to the design of our spaces, can contribute to brand communication. What I would really like you to take from this chapter is to think that basically every aspect of communication that a customer can perceive creates your brand as a whole.
To avoid overcomplicating everything, the following concept will serve as another simplification for building an exceptional brand.
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Build Brand Up Like a Picture
While we have that mental model of just talking with somebody and really just communicating our thoughts as our brand effort, imagine a painter. To create an oil painting, the painter basically uses many layers stacked on top of each other to create what they want to express.
As we learned communication is rarely a monochromatic scale, there are many perceived aspects of it, and it's a variety of colors that are making a brand picture. Similarly to a painter, as someone building a brand, we are building it in layers, one after another until the artwork is done.
Create a brand artwork. Stack your brand layers one after another like a painter.
How we build up our brand picture is also important; it's a matter of technique. When you are creating artwork with oil, first, we grab a canvas and apply layers of acrylic gesso, clear acrylic medium, or oil primer to prepare the canvas. What primer we use is a choice and it will affect the final result too. Same goes for our communication.
There are two notes to take from this thought exercise. First, there are many layers of a brand picture, and we are building them up one after another. Second, what tools or channels we choose matter. What I think is really important and makes the great marketers stand out from the average ones is especially this concept of stacking up layers.
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Build an Exceptional Brand
With these two simple analogies to brand building, I had great success understanding how detailed brand is yet to not get stuck in the head when trying to chose where to start building a brand. I hope you will too. It also really helped me to understand the concepts of a brand better. I encourage you to try thinking about brand simply, as communication with a customer.
What would he ask, and how would you respond? What would you choose to wear in that situation to communicate your brand? What words would you choose to get the correct message of your brand across? Would you maybe offer him some other source of information? How would that look like?
And don’t overcomplicate building a brand. Pause. Think of a painter and how he creates his artwork layer after layer and not all at once. Choose carefully what you are going to start with, plan what tools or channels you are going to use, conquer them, focus on them, make them great, and then take on another one.
If you follow this journey patiently, there is guaranteed success at the end, and you will create an exceptional brand.
