There are tons of books on branding.
The problem is that none of them clearly explains what branding is all about in simple words. Each time you read one, you feel as if you’re reading the words of a magician who doesn’t want anyone to steal his secrets.
At Hyperstonk, that kind of mentality pisses us off.
We want the real thing.
We want truths.
We want facts.
That’s precisely the aim of our introduction to the basics of branding: to explain simply what branding is, what it’s for, and what’s meant by the various complex terms that brand strategists use carelessly to say anything and everything.
Branding is simple... when you explain it simply.
We only need to look at the term's origins to do that.
<aside> ⚡ A bit of history:
When Jean-Jeremy saw any cow in the cowboy days, he sometimes took it home to chow it down.
One day, Michael-Fred got fed up and got an idea.
He decided to brand all his cows’ asses with a red-hot iron to prove that it was really his cows that Jean-Jeremy was feasting on solo.
This practice worked so well that the activity of “branding cattle” - so that’s where it came from 😱 - stuck and gave its name to branding today.
</aside>
So, basically, branding is the activity of branding cattle to prevent them from being stolen or, slaughtered and eaten by others.
Branding is creating one or more distinctive signs and affixing them to something to change the behavior of people who see the thing in question.
With our brand, we want our modern Jean-Jeremy to stop when he crosses our path rather than continue on his way... and to give us his trust.
That’s all there is to it.
To teach him this new behavior, we’re going to associate something he doesn’t know at first (our brand) with things he already knows, which are positive and rewarding.
To build a brand, we have to pair things that Jean-Jeremy doesn’t know (our logo, our tagline, our company) with things that he does know and that are positive to him.
The simplest way to understand the concept in depth is to see our brand as a bouquet of flowers:
Independently, a single flower is not strictly speaking “a bouquet.”
However, when associated together, several flowers form a bouquet.
A brand is a bouquet of entities that we associate together.
Having a logo, typography, and precise colors doesn’t mean you have a brand.
All these captivating symbolic elements simply allow our brand to be recognized. These elements create a recognizable flower in our “brand’s bouquet.”
If we summarize what we've just seen clearly and effectively, it goes like this:
Our brand is our bouquet of flowers.
It’s a meticulous gathering of entities.
In our analogy, it’s the flowers.