Anatomy of Brands
Notice how you feel a certain type of way about everybody in your life and everything you interact with? That feeling you have towards people with their Apple ear pods on, everywhere you could possibly imagine, that gut feeling you get when you see someone pull up in a Mercedes, or how you’ll feel towards a black church building, that’s what branding does, and that’s what a brand essentially is; that feeling. Sometimes, you’re in control of how people feel about you and most of the time you’re not in control of that narrative. But that’s another conversation for another day.
Before we begin, let’s first get this out of the way; branding is not designing your logo, neither is it coming up with a product or procuring your website. While all these things are slices of the full cake, branding is the everlasting process of building a certain narrative that creates a certain perception in the minds of a pre-defined group of people and everybody else.
Today, we’re breaking down how brands are built in three basic forms, likening it to the human being because that’s what we all are right? Unless you identify as a Coconut tree which is also totally awesome because this breakdown could apply to you still.
The anatomy we present today is the Spirit, the Soul and the Body.
The spirit is the central idea for why you exist, as well as your product which is essentially what you need in order to start a business or anything anyways.
Once the spirit is in place, we need to then think about how this spirit is going to live, act, react, behave, communicate, coexist and thrive in its world. Basically the personality, purpose and how that is going to be expressed, it’s beliefs, it’s tribe and where it belongs in the world. This is the Soul, The ‘Who’ you are and ‘how’ you are. That is your Brand Strategy.
Now once we have that in place, we need to put this life form into something visual. A vehicle that is going to carry the spirit and the soul and help identify and differentiate this person, the last piece of the puzzle; a perfectly built body with all the bells and whistles. Now this, is your identity; your visual identity. This does the job of piecing everything together and better expressing the other two parts. The type of spirit you have informs the type of soul you build and these two things heavily influence how fat or how ripped the body should look. A strong product coupled with a solid brand strategy only means a beautiful story expressed visually which will connect with the right people and build trust in them over time.
This is how we look at branding projects before we begin. Breaking down the brand and building it as a person gives you a better perspective on things because people relate better to people than ‘corporations’. Branding is a long emotional game and those who play it right sometimes get to become celebrity brands. This implies that a lot of work still needs to be done with the person (the brand) after it has been birthed into the world. Strategies need to evolve and morph over time to meet the ever dynamic marketplace but also, staying true to who you are and what you stand for, builds a certain level of trust and brand affinity which is what we’re all looking for as brands.
We’re probably sure you already have an idea of what type of brand this human person would be. Take a good look, clap for yourself because you probably got it right. 🙂
Thank you for reading and we hope you learned something valuable today and we’ll see you again next week. But before we go, we’d like for you to share with us some of your favorite brands and why you love them. Ours is Panda because they’re really soft and they treat our cheeks right ;D
