What is branding? Marty Neumeier, an author who helps companies like Apple, Adobe, and Google to build their brands, gives us a crash course on branding.

brand, management, strategy, identity, positioning, market, competition, customer, loyalty, communication, advertising, promotion, reputation, influence, perception

The term branding, people use it interchangeably with logo design, identity design, or even sometimes typography. And maybe we need to set the record straight. I know you're the best person to tell us what is branding, Marty. Yeah. So let's start with what branding isn't. Okay. It's because it's not a lot of things people say it is. It's not a logo. Okay. A logo is a very useful tool for business, but it's not the brand. It's a symbol for the brand. A brand is not a product. So when people talk about this brand, buying this brand or that brand, they're really talking about buying one product or another product. The brand is not that. People say the brand is a promise the company makes to customers. And there's some truth in that. I mean, it does end up acting as a promise, but that's not what it is either. Advertising people like to say, well, it's the sum of all the impressions that a company makes on an audience. Well, if you're trying to sell a lot of impressions, I can see where that might be useful to you. But from a business' point of view, why do they want that? And how does that help creative people understand what they're doing? So none of those things are really what branding is. A brand is a result. It's a customer's gut feeling about a product, a service, or a company. It ends up in their heads, in their hearts. They take whatever raw materials you throw at them and they make something out of it. But they're making it. They're creating it. And so in a sense, when you create a brand, you're not creating one brand. You're creating millions of brands, like however many customers or people in your audience. Each one has a different brand of you. So a brand is like a reputation, right? So it's your business reputation. And everyone's going to be a little bit different about what that reputation is. And that's okay, as long as you've got it corralled mostly where you want it and that it's beneficial to the company. So we tend to look at companies and designers tend to look at branding from our point of view, like this is something we're doing. We're telling a story. We're making a claim. We're making a pitch. And that's what we do. But that's not what a brand is. A brand is the result of that. And if you don't start there, you don't know what you're doing. You actually don't know it. You think you know what you're doing, but you don't. So from a designer's point of view, I mean, I always tended to be this way. It's like, I just had a, it was my gut feeling about whether this is going to work or not. And then I would sell it as hard as I could get the client to sign off on it. From the client's point of view, they're going, well, it's a checklist. I got the logo. I got the tagline. I got the ad campaign. Click, click, click. And they think they're done. Right? None of that's right. You know, what's right is what happens in people's heads? Like, what have we achieved? Like, what's the reputation that we've created through the products we're putting out, like the design of the products, the messaging we're putting out, the look and feel of them, our culture, you know, how does that affect people, how our employees behave, you know, how's that affecting our reputation, all that stuff counts. So it's a big world. And it actually takes in almost all of business. Not so much finance, but finance is involved too, because finance has to green light all these things. But almost everybody in a company is, you know, affecting the brand, doing something with the brand, doing it for the brand, or hurting the brand. So you got to think of it that way. I do want to say one word because that was perfect. This is unscripted. Marty's just talking from decades of experience and writing and articulating this. It's very clear to me.