Personal bias is a weird thing to overcome, especially when you are a small business, or even the leader of a small business. The stuff in our heads is not always right. Sometimes, because we feel “a bit shit”, we begin to believe the negative things that get thrown around. They are usually thrown around in order to make us buy more, consume more, be more, make more etc etc. It is called “advertising”, or as we now know it, “social media”.
Design, as a trade, seems to have been decimated over the years. Design is not just about use of software, it is about emotional intelligence. It is about reading a product creatively, and knowing how to express it. Software may be able to help you lay clip art on a page, stick a few drawings on it and call it artwork. But artwork does not make a brand identity. That may be the problem many businesses now have, employing someone who can use software, is not enough to build a brand.
Branding is not design, it is much more complex. Branding is a holistic overview of a business. Brand is customer experience, sales, content, brand story. Design touches all areas of this, but should never be allowed to take over, as it can make a business lose its soul. When this happens a business can lose its story, the very thing that made it valid, and interesting, in the first place.
Whilst chatting with another website engineer the other day, I realised that even seo is now tricky to read. How do we know that if 5 million hits have been made on a specific search term, it is not people looking for work, rather than people buying the product? Or even people trying to work out what business to set up? It depends what you are trying to measure, which is why SEO is so complex. You need to know all the “why’s”. And of course recruitment has skewed SEO even further. It is like trying to measure stars in the sky from a moving jet plane.
Maybe brand does matter, maybe now we are approaching another tide turn globally, it matters more than ever? Maybe the problem is that consumers don’t really understand what brand is. Maybe that is the point of great branding, when it’s done well it should be almost invisible. You should be able to feel the story, sense the product, understand that it’s great. I guess Gucci is a great example of this.
When I was marketing manager in a local college, somebody said to me that I should never market with truth, I guess at the time, I sort of believed them. But now I think they were wrong. The only time you should ever do that is when you know your product is weak in some way, if that is the case then you should get off your arse and sort said product out, make it the best it can be. Then your marketing will glide off the page. You will be like a proud parent.
If we lose the trust in our own instincts to know when something is great, then the machine has won. We are all just pawns in a giant game of internet.
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#branddevelopment #brand-storytelling
