By Josh Orum on Jun 14, 2011 in Brand and Identity Design, Branding Fundamentals, Business Strategy

A major challenge in the world of branding is the variety and vagueness of the field’s lexicon. Every expert seems to use a different set of terms and definitions, few are specific, and understanding often seems to depend on the audience’s intuition.

Several years ago, we set out to synthesize established concepts about branding, what others had written, and what we had learned through our brand practice into a new mental model of branding that would be internally consistent, comprehensive, and accessible.

We’ve used the model internally for several years, and it’s evolved in response to questions from clients, input from other experts, and changing patterns of interaction between organizations and people. I’m sure it will continue to evolve, but it’s time to share it.

What is a brand?

When many people think of “brands,” what often comes to mind is a company’s name, logo, and “style”. These are important, but are only part of the overall brand model – contributing factors, so to speak.

A brand isn’t something specific and solid. It’s both more encompassing and more ephemeral, emerging at the intersection of an organization’s presentation of itself to the public and the public’s perception of that presentation. A brand is the emergent, shared perception of an organization. Neither party directly controls the brand, but both participate in creating it.

How do organizations present themselves?

Organizations present themselves to the public in two ways: through how they look and what they say, and through what they actually do.

When thinking about branding, many people think about the way an organization looks and sounds: its name, logo, tagline, messaging, visual style, and marketing materials. These considered visual and verbal pieces are the company’s brand expressions, and the public’s perception of them becomes the organization’s image.

In addition to the way it looks and sounds, an organization also presents itself to the public by what its employees do: the style of its products and services (do they spend too much or cut corners? are they easy-to-use or have a lot of functionality? glossy or functional?), the tone and type of its customer service, and how it and its employees behave in public. Taken together, these compose the organization’s performance, and the public’s perception of them becomes its reputation.

Strong brands are built when brand expressions are aligned with the organization’s performance, and when its image is aligned with its reputation. Brand expressions make promises; the organization’s performance keeps them. When these are out of alignment, an organization is making promises it can’t keep.

Organizational performance is a result of organizational culture.

Organizational performance doesn’t happen in a well-defined manner, but occurs organically, created by the business decisions and actions of individual employees, from the top of the org chart on down. The environment that leads to these decisions is the organization’s culture.

Organizational culture is the values and norms shared by employees of an organization. It governs the way they interact with each other and with those outside the organization, how they make business decisions, how they create products, and how they deliver services. An organization’s performance is the public manifestation of its culture.

An organization’s brand expressions are built on its brand platform.

While performance is the organic result of culture, successful visual and verbal expressions are considered and defined. Brand expressions that are created organically are typically inconsistent and often reflect only one aspect of an organization’s culture.

An organization creates consistent expressions that successfully reflect its entire culture by creating a brand platform, which distills its core elements and describes its ideal state.

The organization’s core identity statements describe the mission, vision, and values of the organization: what the organization is doing, where it’s going, and what principles it follows while getting there. The brand platform also includes a positioning statement – which describes what makes it unique in the marketplace – and its brand attributes, which describe the organization’s personality, voice, and other associations.

A brand platform can help re-shape culture.

While a brand platform is based on the organization’s existing culture, it describes the organization’s aspirational goals and an ideal culture. The brand platform is an opportunity for an organization’s leadership to look deeply at who they are and who they want to be — what their values are and what they should be.

Often, an organization will find that existing culture is removed from its ideal culture, and needs reshaping to align with its new brand expressions.

The mission, vision, and values articulated in the brand platform first need to be communicated inwardly, to the rest of the organization, through internal brand expressions (employees also see and are impacted by public brand expressions, but these are specifically designed for use internally). Once communicated, the brand platform serves as a lodestone for the organization, guiding new business decisions that reshape the organization’s culture and transform vision into reality.

When internal brand expressions and business decisions reflect the core identity, they help create a strong culture that  positively impacts the individuals making the products, delivering the services, and offering customers support, and align the company’s performance with its new brand expressions.

When a company walks its talk, and talks its walk, it builds a strong, valuable brand.

Building your organization’s brand.

The brand platform is the cornerstone to a successful brand: it documents who you are and where you’re going, and provides solid, unified direction for expression and performance. Of course, the hard work comes next: articulating what you’ve written in your brand expressions,  and living up to that day-to-day in your organization.

In future articles we’ll take a closer look at the details of the brand platform, the process of creating them, and examine the other side of the brand equation: the conversation the public is having and how organizations can influence that and ensure their brand is relevant.