Is It a Brand, or a Logo

What Is "Branding"

Clients sometimes ask a designer to "come up with a brand" for them. What they usually mean is they want a logo for their business - and a brand and a logo are not the same at all. It's difficult to design a relevant and effective logo unless the business already has a marketing "style" or at least a marketing plan in place.

Logos

Let's start by talking about logos. A logo is generally a graphical symbol. The symbol may include words, and sometimes may be only words, or even stylised initials like "ABC". Logos are shorthand used exclusively to represent the owner of the logo and to authenticate and differentiate them from other individuals, businesses or organisations.
Of course there are millions of logos used around the world today, and each of us probably recognises hundreds of them. As soon as we recognise a logo, we know what it represents. An example of a logo almost everyone knows is Facebook.
What comes to mind when you see the Facebook logo? Probably things like :

• social networking on the Internet
• friends and family that are on Facebook
• your own Facebook page (if you have one)
• how long since you last checked your Facebook page
• a huge and powerful Internet company
• Mark Zuckerberg (creator/founder of Facebook)

That's what a logo is intended to do - make you think about something (usually positive) connected to the logo. Wikipedia has a more refined definition for logo. So - if that's what a logo is, what's a Brand?

Brands

In a marketing context, a Brand is what an individual, business or organisation is or is seen to be! It's how it wants to be perceived by others. A brand is about the culture, image and style of the organisation :

• who we are
• what we do
• why we do it
• how we do it
• where we do it
• when and how we can do it (for you)

These things should be the heart of any enterprise, all wrapped up into a general image intended to create a feeling of trust, loyalty, reliability, quality and other positive perceptions. Once a brand has been determined, it will usually become part of a marketing plan, and part of the marketing plan will be about the strategies used to give the brand a profile. This brings us full-circle, because a logo is a key part to help in the process.

So, there's a lot more to branding than some might think. And understanding a client's branding message is essential to creating a relevant and effective logo.

As they say, a picture is worth a thousand words, so for more about branding, check out the following video from The Financial Brand.