What is branding, and what the word is actually covering

Three words, three different things

Most confusion about branding comes from three words being used interchangeably when they name different objects.

A logo is a mark. It is an asset, it is drawn, and it can be changed on a Tuesday. An identity is the whole controllable set: the mark, the type, the colour, the photography, the tone, the way a form is laid out and the way a phone is answered. A brand is none of those; it is what a person already expects before any of them are shown, and it lives in their head rather than in the folder.

The practical consequence is uncomfortable. An identity can be redesigned in eight weeks. A brand cannot be redesigned at all, only influenced, and mostly by what the organisation actually does. Every disappointing rebrand in history is a case of the first being sold as the second.

What branding can and cannot change

Branding can change what an organisation is recognised as, how quickly it is recognised, whether the recognition is consistent across places, and what a person assumes about it before they have any information. That is genuinely a great deal.

It cannot change whether the product works, whether the price is right, or whether the last experience somebody had was a bad one. Where an identity project is asked to solve one of those, it will produce a better-looking form of the identical problem, on schedule and within budget.

The three questions before starting

What does a person believe now? Not what the organisation wishes they believed. This is answerable cheaply, ask twenty of them, and it is skipped almost every time.

What do we want them to believe, in one sentence? If it takes a paragraph, the identity will take a paragraph to explain, and a paragraph is not available at the point of contact.

Is the gap between the two an identity problem? Sometimes the gap is that nobody has heard of the organisation, which is a reach problem. Sometimes it is that they have and were disappointed, which is a product problem. Only sometimes is it that the organisation looks like something it is not, and that is the one branding fixes.

Consistency is the mechanism

Recognition is built by repetition, and repetition only accumulates when the thing repeated is the same thing. This is why consistency is not a stylistic preference in branding but the actual mechanism by which any of it works, and why the entry on consistency is the longest in this section.

The trap is reading consistency as sameness. Some things must be identical every time, and some things must vary or the whole system becomes unreadable through monotony. Deciding which is which is most of the craft, and the checklist sets out the split.

Where the mark fits

A logo is the smallest, most repeated and most abused part of an identity, which makes it both less important than clients think and more important than designers like to admit. It is the only element that appears at every single point of contact, so it carries the recognition load alone in most of them.

That is why the tests on the logo side of this reference are about survival rather than about beauty. A mark that fails at sixteen pixels fails at the majority of the places an identity is actually seen.