Communicating Your Brand Identity

Face it, mood boards are some of the best props to come out of design studios. But your brand is more than a mood board or a list of attributes. It’s more than your logo or tagline, and it is definitely more than all the agency conversations you’ve had about how to communicate your brand.

Brand is something intangible, but nonetheless powerful. It is, in a sense, the real essence of your product or service – a set of associations based on the public’s interactions with your product.

For years the common wisdom held that brand identity was an image you could carefully craft. It was the impression you wanted customers to have of what your products or services stood for. So brand managers tried to create this idealized identity and then advertising whizzes tried to persuade customers they wanted or needed exactly what was promised by the brand. But it’s increasingly hard to pull that off.

The days of simply running a catchy campaign for a completely mediocre “New and Improved” product and then watching its subsequent meteoric rise are long gone. The reality is that you have much less control of your brand identity than you might like to think. Customers now have the ability to talk back – more easily and more publicly than ever. They won’t just talk to you. They’ll also talk to each other.

This means the reality behind that carefully crafted brand identity will be readily apparent. So those who fill a real need, make a totally great product or offer a truly unique service, can grow their business – sometimes very quickly – based on word of mouth alone.