What is a Brand?
“How do I make my brand stand out?”
We hear this question all the time. It’s a noisy world full of TikTok videos, push notifications, buzzes, dings, and chirps all vying for our attention. How can a small or even medium-sized business stand out in today’s overstimulated world?
Your brand’s ability to stand out will rise and fall on one question: What problem do you solve for your customers?
In our inaugural episode of Growing a Fruitful Brand, we tackle a fundamental question “What is a brand?”
Is it a recognizable logo like the Nike “swoosh” or the Apple…apple? Is it the messaging on your website?
While a great logo does make a brand visually distinct, a brand is more than just its logo. Your brand is the overall perception that customers have of your company from first awareness, to doing business with you, all the way to the moment they recommend you to a friend.
A recognizable and memorable brand incorporates three important elements; visual identity, messaging, and customer experience. In episode 1 of the “Growing a Fruitful Brand” podcast, Raj and Ben break down what makes up a brand’s identity and how these elements work together to do good and add value for your customers, your employees, and yourself.
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Ep.1: What is a Brand?
Automated Transcript
Ben Lueders 0:00
Hey, welcome to Growing a Fruitful Brand, where we discuss how to create and grow a brand that makes the world a better place for you, your customers and your employees.
I'm Ben Lueders, Founder and Art Director of Fruitful Design & Strategy. I'm joined by my business partner and Brand Strategist, Raj Lulla. Today, on our very first episode, we want to tackle the question: what is a brand?
But before we do that—I just want to address the potential elephant in the room. (I know we have an actual elephant figurine over there on the shelf. That's not what I'm talking about.) But obviously, inflation is going crazy. Lots of people say that we may be going into recession. Some say that we're already in a recession. Why are we launching a show about branding as we go into a recession?
Raj Lulla 0:59
Yeah, it'd be reasonable to ask if we were crazy for doing this!
Ben Lueders 1:04
But isn't this a non essential?
Raj Lulla 1:06
I think a lot of people might think that, but the truth is that tough economies focus great companies, they help great companies decide what they're best at, innovate new products, and reach customers in new ways. And so branding is actually more essential, during difficult economic times. Because companies need to really get to the core of what works about their company, so that people don't lose their jobs. So that, you know, you can continue to drive value and still treat your customers well, all at the same time.
Ben Lueders 1:39
Absolutely. And it’s a time when a lot of other companies tend to get this wrong and start going backwards. They cut back on marketing. They cut back on branding. And so this can be a really cool opportunity to stand out in a crowded field.
Raj Lulla 1:57
Adversity accelerates the evolution in the market. And so it's an opportunity for you to look at what works in your company and what doesn't, and decide how to evolve for the future. This is the same thing that we saw in the pandemic. But it's different, because in the pandemic nobody can get outdoors and buy our product. And now it's more that people may or may not have the same amount of money to buy our product. So similar challenges, but different circumstances. And so your response to them has to be different as well.
Ben Lueders 2:31
Well, I just wanted to get that out of the way—we had to deal with the elephant. But now I'm excited to dive in. And you know, in order to have a whole show about branding, we need to talk about what a brand is. It may seem a little bit nebulous, or ethereal, or maybe even a little bit pretentious to some that don't deal in this world every day. And so I just want to open it up, Raj, what is a brand?
Raj Lulla 2:56
At the most basic level, your brand is your company's identity. And another word that you might want to swap in there for identity is reputation. A brand is an identity or reputation. And it combines your visual identity, your messaging, your customer experience. And these are things that span the entire life of your customers journey from being first aware that your company even exists, through your marketing, through your sales, through your purchase through your delivery, all the way to the point where they recommend you to their friends, or don't, your brand, your reputation, your identity extends through that entire process from again, awareness all the way through recommending you to their friend, because they had a happy experience with you.
Ben Lueders 3:42
So, Raj—when I hear words like “reputation” or “identity”, it just seems hard to put your finger on it. Maybe hard to control. We like to be able to control our outcomes. And it seems pretty clear to me that there's kind of this conflict between these seemingly internal things, and maybe these external things that we can actually manipulate and control and understand that can change the way that people perceive our brand identities.
Raj kind of already alluded to some of these. The three that we want to tackle today. These are the things that we interact with every day running Fruitful Design & Strategy. It's your visual identity, your messaging, and your customer experience. So let's just take them one at a time and talk about them.
The first one, of course, is the best one. This is the world that I live in. When you think of a recognizable, famous brand like Apple or Nike or Starbucks, immediately there's some images that pop into your head. Because we are visual beings. Image is king. The Nike Swoosh just flashed in front of your eyes! The apple in the Apple logo. The siren with Starbucks. And so this leads a lot of people to falsely think that a brand is a logo. It's not. It's a very important part of your brand, though. And it's a very important part of, particularly, your visual identity.
Raj Lulla 5:16
Yeah, the fact that you can just mention those brands—we don't even have to put them up on the screen for somebody to get that mental image—means that those brands are taking up real estate in our brains completely for free. No matter how many Nike boxes we've seen or swooshes on the side of the shoes, or driven by so many Starbucks on the road, all of those impressions have created in our mind, this icon, this image of what this company is, and they don't have to pay for that. It's like a billboard in your mind. And that's pretty darn impressive.
So, it really does matter for how your customers remember you, especially when you think of scaling that down to smaller brands. Even companies that are successful, but in comparison are small. You can be a $10 million company and be really small compared to Apple and Starbucks. For smaller brands, having your customers remember you is really, really important. Because if they want to do business with you, they may see your storefront or they may run across an online advertisement. And then the world gets distracting. And if they don't have a way to mentally capture who you are, then it's just going to be like ships passing in the night, you maybe had a chance, but it's moved on.
Ben Lueders 6:34
When we said earlier, it's a reputation, that immediately implies remembrance. It's like: what you think about it, when it's not around—you remember when it's not around. And this is one of the reasons why as a graphic designer, by training, we always cringe when someone reaches out and says “Hey, I just need a quick logo.” There's a way in which you could make a logo that is fast or cheap, potentially, but it's such an important thing that has such an amazing potential to convey so much about who you are. If it's your identity, if it's your reputation, that mark alone can really help just set the tone for how you want to be remembered.
Raj Lulla 7:25
It'd be somewhat similar to asking for your barber to give you a quick, cheap haircut. And it's like, he can do it, but it's gonna look like you just got out of boot camp, probably. Your face is part of how people remember you. And if you want them to take a little bit more time and be a little bit more thoughtful about the image that they're creating for you, then asking for fast and cheap might not necessarily be the best approach to it. Now, if you're part of the buzzcut crew, great, good for you!. Nothing wrong with it—but that's part of your brand.
Ben Lueders 8:00
So related to your actual logo mark are some other things that, if you're not a designer or a brand strategist, you probably don't notice as much. Things like fonts, colors, textures, imagery choices, (even the way that imagery and video is edited) all these things. I was thinking before we started recording: I say “Apple” and immediately the Apple logo flashes in your mind. But if I were to ask the common lay person what font Apple uses, most people probably wouldn't be able to articulate it exactly! However, I bet if you saw a font that is completely different, then it would stand out. Not everyone may be able to articulate why, but it's interesting how some of those visual aspects as simple as the typefaces, the colors, etc. can really help convey a certain identity and reputation for your brand.
Raj Lulla 9:10
So, logos really matter. We talked about them taking up real estate in your brain, but also how the logo was formed matters a lot. It communicates a ton about your brand. For example, it can communicate whether you are a b2b company or a b2c company. Something that is on the shelf at Target is going to look a lot different from an IT solutions company. The audience demographics: are you going after somebody young or somebody older? Are you going after a specific gender? Are you in a particular industry? Whether it be groceries, agriculture, medicine— all those things. I bet even just me saying those things, brings to mind logos that you've seen. Whether it be the major hospital system in your town or the people who fix your computers, they all have logos that just kind of make you think that they're in the industry that they're in. And it communicates a ton about the industry that they're in and who they're trying to reach, and sometimes even the quality of the product itself—whether it's a lower priced product, or a higher value product, all can be kind of determined through choices in the shape, style, fonts—all of those things—in the logo.
Ben Lueders 10:33
Yeah, it's interesting how when it comes to visual stuff, we all subconsciously, unknowingly, are playing an association game, right? We immediately think, “Oh yeah! This brand reminds me of this other brand, or this other thing I've seen”. So, I know that it's going to be this kind of an experience, or it's this kind of a thing. And again, for most of us, it's a totally subconscious thing. And for some it may seem like that is really how it works. But this is happening on a really, really deep level. And it does inform our buying habits. It informs who we do business with. It may seem somewhat unimportant, but it actually can drive and inform a whole lot with our business.
So that's visual identity in a nutshell. Now, it's time to look at the next part, which is arguably Raj’s favorite part of external brand elements: that’s messaging. Raj, what do you mean by messaging?
Raj Lulla 11:37
So all of your marketing should come from a clear statement about the problem you solve for your customer. In fact, it was purposeful that I said messaging here instead of marketing, because with marketing, we can get lost in the tactics of it. Are we running Facebook ads? Are we doing search ads? Are we doing TV commercials, all those things? Now, each of those has questions about budget and style, and kind of all those things, but all of them really boil down to What message are you communicating to your customer. Now, certainly those media do affect the message, they have their place and you communicate in different ways across those things. The way that you'd run a Superbowl ad is a lot different from the way that you'd run a social media ad, sometimes. And, the amount of time that you have, whether it's visual, or just audio, all of those things affect how you put your message out there. But at the end of the day, your brand needs to have a clear story that it's telling about the problem that you solve for your customer, and how they can experience success, based on doing business with you. And so that's why we chose messaging instead of marketing here.
There are other things that go into messaging, like your brand position, like the value that you drive, all of that determines the words that you say to your customer, and the images that you put out there to accompany those words as well.
Ben Lueders 13:06
Absolutely. So Raj, one thing that comes to my mind when it comes to branding—what helps convey trust a lot with a brand—is how consistent they are. What comes to mind when we think of messaging is having a consistent brand voice. How would you talk about that? How do you explain that?
Raj Lulla 13:28
There are a lot of different types of brand voices out there. You have the Red Bull kind of voice where it's the cartoon and it gives you wings, and it's kind of silly and irreverent. It's not the kind of brand voice that you get from Starbucks. So two different drinks, both caffeinated but, Red Bull wants to be sponsor of extreme sports and have the car with a giant red bull can on top. Starbucks wants to be more associated with you grabbing a cup of coffee on your way into work, or maybe treating yourself after you put the kids down to bed and you want to meet up with your friends and have kind of another living room type of place to gather in. So very different voices, very different images for each of those brands.
Ben Lueders 14:24
Similar to the visual identity part, if you heard a brand that you're familiar with, suddenly talking in a completely different voice, if you saw a Starbucks ad that sounded like Red Bull or vice versa. It's probably one of those things that you wouldn't be able to say exactly what's wrong without thinking about it a lot. but it wouldn't feel right.
Raj Lulla 14:51
It would be like Apple—like a real extreme here—It'd be like Apple, speaking in Walmart's brand voice. If you drove by an Apple store with these giant beautiful glass windows, which if you read the Steve Jobs book, you know that they actually had to specially manufacture hinges to hold doors that were that heavy and have that thick of glass.
Ben Lueders 15:19
In Walmart stores, they did not do this.
Raj Lulla 15:21
It’s a whole experience that was completely designed and manufactured. And if you drove by there and saw that giant yellow smiley face on the front of the Apple Store, and it said “everyday low prices” you go, “what, are they going out of business?”
Ben Lueders 15:38
If Apple lowered its prices all of a sudden I'd be there—but it's probably never going to happen!
Raj Lulla 15:44
Speaking with the wrong brand voice would very much confuse customers and could do a significant amount of damage to your brand.
Ben Lueders 15:52
So here at Fruitful, we take messaging very seriously. I started the company as a graphic designer creating visual identities and partnered up with Raj a number of years ago. And since that time, we went all in on this StoryBrand messaging framework, do you want to explain that a little bit Raj?
Raj Lulla 16:13
StoryBrand is a marketing framework that uses the power of story and the same principles that have been used for 1000s of years to tell heroic stories, everything from Star Wars to Harry Potter to Hunger Games, pretty much any movie you've seen, or book you've read, follows some version of the hero's story- especially if it's a hero's journey. And, it just makes it easy for you to distill the seven pieces of your messaging that need to be right for your customer to know that they're shopping in the right place, that they found the right business to work with. It takes your customer and places them as the hero of the story. A lot of times businesses will center themselves as the hero of the story, they'll talk about how amazing they are the intellectual property that they have, or how much experience they have, or how many years they've studied to be a surgeon or whatever it is and they should be proud of those accomplishments there's nothing wrong with them.
Just like in a great movie, the hero is somebody like Luke Skywalker, who is on a planet that's dirt and he's farming with his uncle. And then he gets called to a journey. He gets called to this heroic story, and he needs the help of a guide: Obi Wan Kenobi. He's the one who's got all of the credentials. He's the one who studied to be a surgeon, he studied the force, he has all of the skills that Luke needs to go on his journey.
That's where you are in relationship to your customer. Your customer is more of the Luke figure, he wants to be a hero, he wants to fight the Empire. He wants to just get off this planet and have an adventure. But there's things that hold him back—his family holds him back. His Uncle wants him to stay on the farm. There's the fact that he doesn't really know where to go or what to do. And then he meets this guide, who tells him, “Hey, I've been there, I know exactly the problem that you're having. Here's this lightsaber, and here's a plan, study the force to become a Jedi, then you will become the hero that you've been yearning to be.” And when you position yourself there, as the guide, you actually position yourself in more strength than when you position yourself as the hero, because heroes are weak. Luke is weak. In fact, one of the biggest criticisms of Star Wars is that Luke is pretty whiny—especially through the first couple of movies—in dealing with all his problems. So you want to be that guide, not the hero. Let your customer be the hero, and you can help them get to where they're trying to go.
Ben Lueders 18:52
So, first of all, I love that Raj always takes the StoryBrand conversation right into Star Wars, because we're huge Star Wars nerds! And I'm sorry if anybody was left out of that, Star Wars is definitely worth the watch if you haven’t seen it.
The second thing is, it's crazy to me just how counterintuitive this really is. It is so hard to sometimes take a step back and try to see things from someone else's perspective. It's just so easy to try to center ourselves as the hero of the story because that's what comes naturally. Recognizing that others think that way, and if you're able to get outside of that and recognize that, it's amazing what can happen when you position your messaging in that way.
Raj Lulla 19:35
We're actually experiencing the same thing our customers are experiencing. Right? And we get up every day, trying to provide for our families, trying to do the best we can at work, trying to be good people in our community. We want to be the heroes of our own stories. And then where we get tripped up is that we think, “Great! These customers can help me on my journey. If they give me their money, then I can go do the thing that I'm trying to do!” Whereas, nobody wakes up in the morning, thinking about how they can make Starbucks more money or how they can make Tide more money. What they're thinking is, “I need to be energetic at work today” or “I need the kids to not have grass stains on their soccer uniforms because that's not the kind of parent that I want to be” or “that's not the kind of worker that I want to be being sleepy at work and struggling.” So they use those things to go on their heroic journey, just like they should use your business to go on their heroic journey. And so the real trick is getting them to understand how you help them go on that heroic journey. What problem are they having? Are they sleepy? Do they have grass stains on the uniform? Do they have problems with their IT? Do they need surgery? What things do they need that you can solve for them? That's how you get them to identify that you can help them on their heroic journey.
Ben Lueders 20:52
That's messaging in a nutshell, let's move on to the next brand element we're going to talk about, and that is customer experience. So obviously, you know, your visual identity, your messaging, it all plays a part in your customer experience. But you know, customer experience is a little bit broader than that.
Raj Lulla 21:13
We talked about brand as identity. Another way to say that is: what promise you're making to your customers? Then we asked the question: do we keep that promise? And if we do keep that promise, in what way do we keep that promise?
A good example here is when you take the car to the mechanic, and they fix the problem that's under the hood. And that's great. But the mechanic that also vacuums out the car, and maybe sprays some air freshener in there—so that your car's nicer to drive after you've dropped it off with them because they understand that, yes, that you came for a specific problem, but it's not always just enough to just fix the problem. They want you to enjoy driving again. They want you to be in your car, so that eventually your car will need new tires, or maybe you want to enhance your car in some way. And the better they make driving for you, the more business they'll get from you and the happier that you'll be to give it to them. That's keeping your promise in an excellent way and going above and beyond.
Now, that's not true for every brand. Sometimes you're a value brand. And part of that promise is a no frills experience. This is what you get at Costco or Aldi and things are out on pallets and you don't want the above and beyond experience because you want the price. And that's okay, that's a great brand position to take. But if you're promising a premium experience and delivering a value experience, then people are not going to like the way that you keep your promise.
It almost never goes the other way. You can always over-deliver. Costco having delicious pizza and frozen yogurt for insanely cheap prices to feed your kids who maybe got cranky in the store is a value-add. That's another experience that they can give to you. But if you're promising a high value experience and delivering a low value experience, then your customer is going to feel let down. They're not going to return for business, they're not going to recommend you to anybody else.
Ben Lueders 23:30
Absolutely. I was thinking about the analogy you gave earlier about the experience of going into an Apple Store and the doors and the hinges and the experience. You get talking to someone at the Genius Bar…or their checkout experience. Those all contribute to your overall feeling and the overall reputation that company has in someone's life.
Raj Lulla 23:57
If you went to the Apple store, and you got that CVS receipt that's a mile long and it's got 30 cents off a Snickers bar and a free flu shot— it would not fit the Apple experience. They wirelessly shoot you an email receipt that's already tied to your Apple account.
Ben Lueders 24:21
It's not even necessarily a good/bad thing! We've all experienced this. My wife loves to start her grocery shopping at Aldi and Aldi has its own kind of thing. You know you've got to bag your own stuff and you know what you're signing up for.
Raj Lulla 24:40
Sometimes you need milk and rain boots in the same trip and you want both of them to be very affordable and that's okay! It's great. It's just what that experience is. It would actually be weird if you went to Aldi and meat was $8 a pound, organic and grass fed. That's the Whole Foods brand. And that's great. Whereas, if Whole Foods had $2.99 rain boots sitting next to their $8 pound meat, then it would be confusing to the customer.
Ben Lueders 25:15
As we said earlier, your brand is your identity, it's your reputation. And although you can't make someone think a certain way about you, there are certain elements, these external elements that you can control that can help steer people in the right direction. And so just to recap, we have your visual identity, your messaging, and your customer experience. So to close, Raj has a little challenge for us.
Raj Lulla 25:44
So a lot of times with branding, we get just kind of stuck. Like, what do we do with this information? We agree our visual identity matters, our messaging matters, and the customer experience matters. So what do we do with that? I'd recommend two things to take stock of your brand.
Number one: try to put yourself in the shoes of your customer. Load up your website. Maybe don't do it at the office, where you're kind of in your element, maybe do it at home, after the kids have gone to bed. Fire up the laptop, and just look at your brand. Look at your website. In fact, it'd be a good idea to look at your laptop and your phone. Is your website good in both of those places? And just try to look at it with fresh eyes. If you didn't know everything that you know about your business, what would you think about this business? About the way your logo looks, about how fast your website loads, about the words that are being said. If you were your customer, if you didn't know everything about IT solutions, or if you didn't know all of the ins and outs of surgery, or being a mechanic, or whatever your industry is. What would you think about reading this website? Would you be confused or would it be clear what problem you solve?
Now, here's the challenge to take it to the next level. Actually ask someone who doesn't work for you. Someone who isn't your wife or your husband that sees you every day. You can ask your parents, you could ask somebody you go to church with or another parent on the PTA or whatever. Say, “Hey, you're not in our industry. You don't do what we do for a living. If you read our website, what would you think that it is that we do? What problem do you think it is that we solve? And do you think that we would actually do it? You can even ask questions like, “How much do you think that this would cost?” Get some fresh eyes on your brand. There's so much you can do after that to rehab that image, if it needs anything, and to tweak all those kinds of things. But getting that fresh information, having the willingness to be honest with yourself and take stock of your brand. That's the first step to building a fruitful brand.
Ben Lueders 28:11
Thanks so much for joining us on our first episode of Growing a Fruitful Brand. If you like what you hear, please subscribe, follow, like, drop a comment or review!
We're so thankful for you coming along on this journey. Share this with someone else that knows that leading a business is more than just making another dollar, it's about growing something good in this world.
