Why should you care about brand and branding?
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What I'm about to tell you will change how you view the world. I'll tell you why everything is a brand and why branding is everything. It is the fundamental way we make decisions as humans.
Full transcript:
One of the things that we do a lot of as humans is make decisions. A number that's floating around the internet is 35,000 on average, and a doubt human makes 35,000 decisions every single day. And that's a lot of decisions to be made. Although we don't know a lot about how our brains think. We know that it tries to be as efficient as it can.
And Daniel Kahneman an award winning psychologist, actually a Nobel prize winning psychologist proposed a way or a mechanism in which our brains think. There's two systems: system one and system two. System
one is quick. It's almost involuntary. And system two is deliberate. It's focused. It takes a lot of effort. And so when we make these decisions, when we go through our thinking process, the brain really defaults in most typical situations to system one. System one leads most of the time.
And that means we make very quick decisions. It proposes a recommendation to system two to take action. And how does system one do it?
It's through feelings, intentions, impressions, using associations to knowledge and memories that form. And that's the realm of brand because at the end of it, a brand is that feeling and the perception your audience has about a company about a product, about a service, really about anything. When you think about all the things that you come across, a pit bull, milk, they all have brands because they all conjure up a feeling and a perception.
So when I say Nike, when I say Patagonia, Oprah Winfrey, the Ritz Carlton, a feeling and an image comes to mind and expectation comes to mind, and these brands are built intentionally.
But if it's not done intentionally, you have what you call an accidental brand. Accidental brands are unhealthy and subpar. Think about the DMV, for example. And for those of my, my non U.S. friends, the DMV is a place where you get your driver's license. And it's not about the logo. It's not about the color palette. That's not what a brand makes. It's the experience. Every time you go through that process, you cringe because you'd never wanted to ever again, the infinite lines, the really slow arduous process to get your driver's license. It doesn't have a good brand. And if you view it through that lens, in that context, brand and branding will exist as long as that's how we as humans make decisions.
So how do you make an intentional brand? It's through branding. Branding is that intentional process of going through the research to create the strategy, but eventually building the visual, the verbal, the experiential. It's every touch point. Again, it's not just the logo, not just a specific piece of ad. It's everything. It's the zoom call. It's how your customer service rep picks up the phone. It's what they say. It's the way a sales person shakes your hand. All of that encompasses your brand. And so branding is so important, but it also means that it covers a lot of ground. Is marketing branding? Yes. Is communications branding? Yes. It's all of the above. And so when you're thinking about building a brand, please think about all the different touch points. It's not just one thing. It's not just a specific style guide that you're trying to build. It's that, but everything more.
So there you have it. Everything has a brand and branding is everything. So the next time when you're making a decision or someone is trying to convince you of something and influence you as something, think about whether you want to be led by system one, which is more of a brand decision–very quick. Or is it something that's really important to you that you want to dive deep and you want to conjure up system two and put some effort into it?
And if you're trying to influence somebody else of something, think about how that brand is being perceived. Did you do a good enough job in branding to make sure that that whatever you're trying to sell has a great brand? That it conjures up a specific feeling and perception that you want to have?
Brand and branding is important because that’s how we humans make sense of the world to help us make decisions every day.
Ways I can help you
Download free guides (Healthy Brand Blueprint & Branding 101) to help you build healthy brands
Work with me as a fractional CMO/CBO or through Healthy Brand Consulting (Schedule a 15 min intro call)
References:
Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman: https://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/27/books/review/thinking-fast-and-slow-by-daniel-kahneman-book-review.html