What Is a Brand and Why Is It Important?

We’re a branding company, right? But is it really that obvious what a brand is?

‘Brand’ is a word everyone in the marketing world throws around flippantly. But how many people really understand its history and what it means in a modern sense?

If you google “what is a brand?”, Google is going to tell you that it’s a mark, graphic or name that identifies a product, business or individual. Many think it’s a company logo and perhaps fonts and colours. This is partly true, although today we know it to mean so much more.

A brief history of brand

The word ‘brand’ is historically derived from an ancient Norse word ‘brandr’ that means ‘to burn’, which, in the 1500s, was the literal process of ‘branding’ live stock with a unique mark, using a hot iron, to signify ownership and origin. This was the first manifestation of a ‘trade mark’ in its most literal definition.

As industrialisation, product production and competitiveness scaled throughout the centuries, the requirement to identify and categorise products has become more significant. Marks evolved to signal quality, rather than simply ownership. In 1870, it became possible to register a trademark, ultimately providing legal protection against competitors with similar products.

Industrial innovations, such as the printing press, and later radio and television, gave rise to new means of communication and mass media - ultimately providing new opportunities to generate awareness, sales opportunities and demand for products and services.

In 1928, the nephew of the renowned neurologist and psychoanalyst, Sigmund Freud released an outrageously popular book, ‘Propaganda’, suggesting that a product, organisation, or person's mass affiliation could influence social behaviour. It wasn't long before marketing teams were adopting mass media channels to build affinity with their products, focussing on emotional connection and benefits to the consumer, over functional services. 

By the 80s, technical innovations and globalisation meant companies had greater reach and consumers had greater options than ever before. This only furthered the importance of separating one's products from the competition by any means necessary, investing in organisational reputation and recognition, above and beyond simply advertising the product they were selling.

It’s understandable why most people think of a brand as simply a company's logo or trademark. In the modern era, however, a brand is a much larger concept than simply a name and a company's visual identity.

Fast forward to today, where the internet is king, and we’re saturated in more digital communication channels that you can shake a stick at. Things have evolved again.

It’s no longer simply about pushing a product or service wrapped in a logo. Today’s brands focus on creating meaningful interactions, engagement and familiarity. Today’s marketing is a constant conversation between consumers and organisations, where loyalty and community are valued above transactional relationships. A brand's audience now plays the most significant role in its credibility and is the curator of its reputation. 

The art of storytelling

Projection, participation and perception. This is a mantra at Obvious and the foundation of our dynamic branding principles.

• Projection: The outward marketing communications from the organisation or individual, recognising various audiences
• Participation: Interactions and engagement with a brands products/services and communications through different modes and media
• Perception: The interpretations and affiliation developed through interactions, forming the foundations of a brand's reputation and market position.

A person, product or organisation's ‘brand’ is the dynamic mix of projection, participation and perception. What’s said behind closed doors, the experiences had, and emotional responses to them are equally as important as what's seen at face value. This makes a brand an intangible element of a business, but when built correctly, can have tangible outcomes.

Brand recognition requires presence and context. The more exposure a brand gets in relevant environments, the greater the association of that context to the brand.

How you engage with your audience matters. The way you answer the phone, write and sign off an email. The content on your website and social media. Interactions with staff. It all builds an impression of your brand and what sort of company you are. 

At Obvious, we refer to the wider engagements and applications of brand communication as ‘extended branding’ - going beyond the basics to consider the different channels, modes and media that your audience is going to interact with your brand and designing appropriate solutions specific to them.

Social platforms such as Meta’s Facebook/Instagram, Twitter, Linkedin and Tiktok are the current status quo for user-generated content, and brands of today invest in these spaces to engage and propagate conversations that build emotional connections and consumer loyalty. However, these digital environments change quickly (as does their popularity) and can not entirely replace the human experience of engaging with a brand in real-world settings.

The importance of design strategy

In today’s day and age, there are endless means to generate a simple visual identity for a company - but the art is designing it to effectively communicate the important values and characteristics of the organisation, and know the channels and context to design for in order to engage the right audience, with the right message, at the right time.

This is where design strategy comes in.

Obvious is known for its empathy-led design approach. This is because we understand and prioritise people in our processes. We’re not marketing to robots (yet) and so must develop an emotional connection with our audiences.

To effectively tell a story, we must understand who we’re telling it to, and have the ability to curate our message accordingly. Effective brands know their audience and take time to consider not only their demographics but more importantly, psychographics. What do they care about? Why are they going to engage? How are they going to behave? 

Knowing your audience enables crafted communications that project curated messaging appropriate to them. 

Take Unilever, and its ‘Heartbrand’ logo, as an example.

As a global company, and the largest ice cream manufacturer on the planet, Unilever operates across multiple continents, and in many languages. If you’re going travelling, keep an eye out. The Heartbrand logo is everywhere.

As a parent organisation, Unilever respectfully celebrates the original name of the local ice cream company it has bought under it's umbrella, recognising much of the brand equity exists in its heritage. However, operating at a global scale and managing unique visual identities introduces a huge challenge - one overcome by a simple design strategy that consolidates the brands under one familiar icon, globally synonymous with ice cream. This means wherever you are, you associate the mark with ice cream, yet it feels local and familiar. This allows Unilever to operate global marketing and sponsorship initiatives with ease while remaining loyal to local ice cream lovers.

In New Zealand, we associate the Heartbrand logo with ‘Streets’ ice cream. As a kid, you couldn't have told me this wasn’t our national ice cream brand (it's actually Australian). It brings back memories of sticky fingers on a beach in Golden Bay. 

Brilliant brands do more than advertise their products. They resonate on an emotional level and convey a sense of experience, purpose and belonging. The most effective create a sense of investment and loyalty to the brand - favorability in it over competitors. Unilever wants you to 'Taste Joy', while Coke invites you to 'Open happiness’.

This sort of reputation isn't something you can design overnight. It takes time and commitment. The brands of today are investing in their audiences and building loyal communities around them. 

We call ourselves brand partners because we know good things take time. We know the value of loyalty. The brands you trust are those that have stood the test of time and have adapted to maintain relevance. They build unspoken meaning into their visual identities and projected messages, allowing their customers to do the marketing for them through a positive reputation and the development of shared perception. Our work as brand partners is to understand the emotional and practical needs of the audiences that our partners engage and to design branded communications that build affinity and association to the cause of their business. 

Love and loyalty aren't things you can easily measure. The value of a brand should ultimately be evaluated by audience perception and other business performance metrics. This is why many organisations place such importance on locality, community and user reviews. 

As a graphic designer by origin, I assign a huge amount of value to an organisation's visual identity as part of its collective brand. I’m a visual thinker - so when I consider a company, business or product, an image usually springs to mind. If I want ice cream- it’s very likely I’ll choose one with the familiar Heartbrand logo, regardless of which country I'm in.

It’s the same reason you know what you're signing up for when you want a burger and you look for those golden arches - the consistent, reliable experience of chomping into a burger from a brand you know and trust.

Brands depend on familiarity and a consistent experience, while also being dynamic and able to adapt to the environments in which they’re carefully placed. As branding strategists and designers, we need to understand these contexts, and design visual communications that convey the emotional and functional characteristics of the company and the experience of their products and services appropriately. Certain aesthetics, colours, graphics, typography and language can carry different meanings in different environments.

With the rise of platforms like Canva, anyone can easily whip together a design in a matter of minutes - but this doesn't make them masters of marketing or builders of brands. 

When we’re designing brand frameworks, we consider the following:

• Audiences + behaviours
• Channels, modes + media
• History + future
• Values + Benefits
• Products + Services
• Brand ecosystem + hierarchy
• Market  + Competition
• Logos + Positioning statements
• Colour + Typography
• Images, Graphics + Textures
• Tone of voice
• Tools + Platforms
• Extended branding + Merchandise

As brand partners, our value is the strategic thinking, positioning, design and ongoing communications that ensure that the brand is positioned and engaged effectively. The production of brand guidelines is a default in our process - ensuring that strategy is documented and that our clients are informed on the effective and sustainable utilisation of their brand and its components. When this strategic work is done, we’ll happily support our partners in using tools like Canva because it empowers them to invest in their brands and create timely, dynamic messaging suited to today's fast-paced digital world while remaining ‘on-brand’ and furthering their presence. Additionally, effective, empowering brands motivate staff and help steer company direction.

When tasked with renovating the historically significant BATS Theatre brand, the last thing the team at Obvious were going to do was dismiss the value of its heritage in favour of a new look. Instead, we celebrated this and built a wider visual design framework and created assets that honoured its reputation and greater enabled its audience engagement - powered first and foremost by the BATS theatre team.

Some final advice from our design team

What is one piece of advice you’d give a client building a brand?

Knowing what you stand for, your values and your unique point of difference is so important to the design process. Even more so is knowing your audience and what they truly resonate with about you. This gives us the fundamentals to design something truly unique to you that we know will really connect with your audience.Trust the branding process. Sometimes it can feel like you are going over things you already know because you are so familiar with your business. When we are branding we are looking at it from all different perspectives to curate an identity that fits you perfectly and hits the sweet spot with how you are perceived.

What is something often overlooked in the brand-building process?

The importance of your values and what you really stand for. This is what makes you unique and acts as a north star for what we want to project. It is top of mind when making design decisions.Your audience is key. You might personally really love the way something looks but if it doesn’t connect with your audience then it’s not a good design solution for your organisation.

What makes branding important?

Your brand isn’t just a logo, typography and colour scheme. It’s how someone talks about your business when you’re not around. Branding allows you to curate what is really important and strategically project it in the best way possible. It’s like visual PR.

Our name is Obvious because that’s the effect of our work - deliberately and clearly building understanding and affiliation with the brands we partner with.

We’re building brands with purpose. Over the years, we’ve found focus working on community brands and the education sector because of our mutual alignment in communication and sharing knowledge that empowers others. 

If you’re reading this and want to build a brand that connects more effectively with your audience, flick us an email. We’d love to hear from you and make your message obvious.