Branding. What is a brand? And what isn’t it? A brand is not a logo, nor a trademark. A brand is a character, and people instantly recognise what it is; it is a person’s gut feel about what the product or service or company is about. It’s everything about a company. Yes, the logo is important. But so is the way you answer the phone, or how you dress when you go to a meeting – every point of customer contact. There’s no point in having a smart, professional visual identity and then turning up at an important meeting wearing torn jeans and trainers. Having a funky, modern, young visual identity and turning up in a suit and tie is equally self-defeating.

Fairly obvious stuff, but so many people fail to look beyond the logo. In order to create a successful brand identity, the designer needs to really understand the company. But first, the company really needs to understand itself. To really analyse what it stands for, what its personality is. And if the company hasn’t done that, it’s up to the designer to ask the right questions.

Once everyone’s agreed on what the real ethos of the company is, hopefully distilled down into a pithy sentence or two, then the brand can be built. The misconception is that a brand is built from scratch. It isn’t. The designer or marketing expert should merely be taking what’s already there and enhancing and amplifying it.

So why is it important? Well, there used to be a thing called a ‘USP’, or ‘Unique selling proposition’. It was the essence of a company, the thing that made them different to their competitors, and it was this that the advertising gurus of the day would try to sell. The problem is, there are now so many companies in every area, it’s very hard to find a really unique thing about what they actually do. One beer is pretty much like another, even cars are all fairly similar nowadays. The brand is what differentiates them, gives them a personality, makes them appeal to a particular target market more than the next identikit euro-mobile or tasteless lager. Sometimes, the brand personality is completely spurious, based on nothing more than a random thought plucked from the air by a marketing executive. Those brands don’t tend to last long. The ones that succeed are the ones that are based on something more tangible, a real personality or company ethos. Virgin is an obvious example, being based on the actual personality of Richard Branson, but there are plenty of others. Nike – another fairly obvious example – have built a really strong brand based on serious sportswear for serious athletes – the trainers live up to the hype, otherwise those famous sportspeople wouldn’t be wearing them, right?

The internet has also changed things when it comes to branding, particularly social media. Twitter, Facebook etc can be great for enhancing  your brand positioning, but they can also spread negative stories incredibly quickly. Apparently, the average consumer mentions specific brands over 90 times per week during conversations with friends, family and co-workers.

Sounds fantastic for marketers. But here’s the problem: not all of these messages are positive. What’s more, dissatisfied consumers are typically more vocal, taking to platforms like Twitter and Facebook to complain. Companies that aren’t quick to respond to these messages can find themselves overwhelmed with negative mentions, rapidly losing control of the situation… and their reputation. Brands that don’t live up to their promises are found out quickly, making it even more important that the branding is right, that is doesn’t overpromise and underdeliver, and that it’s saying the right things to the right people.

A good brand will deliver whatever message you’re trying to put across more clearly. It should make a company appear credible – assuming it’s an appropriate brand for that particular marketplace (back to the suit and trainers again). It should connect in some way with the target audience, and providing the reality lives up to the brand, it should bring them back again.  It’s a promise to the customer. A brand isn’t just something cooked up on a computer by those guys in skinny jeans and rimless glasses. It’s the essence of a company. The branding should simply reflect what the company already is. So what’s your brand?

Those ads might be a bit irritating, or extremely irritating in fact, but they work. They put the brand top of mind when it comes to making buying decisions. Why? As the title says, ‘repetition’. A catchy jingle or tagline, no matter how annoying, heard enough times, sticks. Just like a good pop song. Now self indulgent advertising types who want to sin awards (of which I was one not too long ago) will scoff at this kind of advertising. They’ll prefer esoteric, clever ideas that nobody on the street actually understand, but that doesn’t matter cos it won a yellow pencil. We need to remember what our job is. Not to create art, but to sell stuff. And like it or not, these kind of ads sell stuff.

There’s another point to be made here. Continuity. You can’t have repetition if you keep changing your brand message all the time. The problem is, marketing directors aren’t really there to raise the profile of the brand they happen to be working for. They’re there to raise their own profile. So they get a job, sack the agency, employ their mates down the road to come up with a bold new strategy, show it to their boss, put it on their CV, then either get promoted out of marketing or move on to another client. Then a new marketing guy comes in, sacks the agency… etc etc. Muller is a brilliant case in point. They had a great ‘Life’ strategy. Lovely ads, feelgood music, lots of exposure, everyone had seen it and associated that song with Muller. Then all of a sudden, they decide to completely change tack and throw a massive amount of money at a risible incoherent retro cartoon inspired bag of shite. I don’t think it’s any coincidence that they’ve now parted company with the marketing director responsible (who’s probably got a new job on the strength of orchestrating such a ‘massive’ campaign) and also the agency who managed to convince him to waste all that money. ‘Creative differences’ apparently. Not only that, but they’ve gone back to their existing campaign. If I sound angry, I am. There are a load of people wasting a load of money on a load of crap that was obviously a load of crap from the very first moment I saw it. How does that happen? Long lunches and group tossing off over how great everything is.

These people forgot one thing – they’re meant to be selling product.

Muller rant aside, there’s a serious point here. repetition, and more importantly, continuity. Remember ‘A Mars a Day’? What does it do? Helps you work, rest and play of course. Which is the World’s favourite airline?

All great campaigns, all left alone for long enough to sink in. In the old days, marketing directors and agencies cultivated their relationships, learned all there was to know about each other and left things alone when they were working. Now, the agencies try and spend as much money as possible as fast as possible before the marketing director moves on to try and impress a different boss. What’s the Mars strapline nowadays? What’s the British Airways one? (It probably appears on the end of that terrible smug, self congratulatory big budget pile of bilge they’re currently using to advertise themselves. Not the best strategy in a worldwide recession). If you can remember the straplines, which I doubt, well done.

I’m not saying the GoCompare ads are a work of genius. But they do something that Muller Ad or BA ad don’t – they stick in your mind, and they sell stuff. The agencies involved in the other two would probably say “Ah, but these are brand ads, they’re not meant to sell stuff.” To which I would say bollocks. That’s our job. Brand advertising is a myth created by agencies to make themselves less accountable when sales don’t go up. All advertising should be brand advertising and all advertising should sell. Online is just as bad, but for the opposite reason – that can be tracked and analysed to death, to show how many clicks or likes it’s had. Again, great for marketing guys trying to show off to their bosses, still rubbish if it doesn’t sell anything.

So am I advocating we all give up and write a catchy jingle every time? Not exactly. But there are definitely lessons to be learned. Be creative, but make sure it’s on message. Get the message right, and stick with it. Don’t keep changing things just because you want a promotionor you want to employ your mate (he might not be the best man for the job…) – I would imagine sticking with and evolving a winning campaign will gain more brownie points than blowing a huge budget on a self indulgent heap of toss. As WeBuyAnyCar.com has proved, repeat it often enough and people will listen. Imagine the effect if you repeat something worth saying and you repeat it with a bit of wit?

I’ll finish up with a campaign I think does all this brilliantly, sometimes with humour, sometimes with wit, and sometimes with charm – Mastercard. It’s been going for ages, it’s still great and they’d be mad to change it. Of course, they will one day. And they’ll be wrong.

It’s a marker rendering font designed for lazy Art Directors. Not that we know any…