Your Brand is More than a Logo and Advertising Tactics
Posted by Brian Rhea on Fri, Sep 11, 2009 @ 01:15 PM
I had the opportunity to attend "Disney's Approach to Brand Loyalty" at the Disney Institute in Orlando last week, and this is the first of what will be a series of posts relating to the many interesting topics we covered.
The image to the left is branding. Imagine the emotion in the cow's eye ... that's your Brand.
It goes without saying that ideally you'd love for the consumer's experience to be something a little more comfortable than being imprinted with a glowing iron rod, right? Although, couldn't we all provide a list of companies who seem to be perfectly fine with that option?
In general, we're all becoming more and more aware that a Brand is not a logo, it's not an advertisement, it's not a mascot; it is the intangible collection of your customers' experiences. Every experience at every single touch point. It might even be worth arguing that the apostrophe should go before the s. Your Brand is not your customers' experiences, it's your customer's experiences. Might just be semantics, but in an age where consumers use Social Media to research products it's certainly worth considering that you have as many Brands as you have customers.
I used to work in graphic design and we'd get calls all the time about "rebranding" projects. Most of the time it was that the aesthetic truly needed an update, but sometimes the company wanted to distance itself from a negative reputation they'd developed. In those cases, what the client was asking for (rebranding) and what they needed (to rebrand) were two different things. As a designer, I was only able help them with the first (and less important) part.
Hopefully, you're not in that difficult situation that requires you to strategically remove a scarred imprint and replace it with something that reflects a character your organization can be proud of.
Hopefully, you're in a better place. A place where you have time to wonder, "Ok, we've got a good reputation. But do we have a great one? What more can we do for our customers and do we treat them like valued guests?"
To bring it back to Disney and to bookend the post with another image that says it all, I'll leave you with a picture that represents the Disney Brand more accurately than a logo ever could.
