What is your brand about?

In all the jobs that I have had and with everyone that I have worked with, there comes a moment when the folks who make the important decisions and who ultimately sign my paycheck ask themselves a variation of the same question, “How does this fit within our brand strategy?”. It doesn’t matter what it is they’re talking about; it could be a new brochure, an internal newsletter or something less tangible like a new service. The answer to that question usually leads to frustrating conversations about how many times a logo needs to appear on one brochure or that “the logo needs to be bigger”.

What makes these conversations so frustrating for me are not the decisions that are being made, but the fact that these decisions are being made on the inaccurate idea that a brand or branding begins and ends with a logo or a color scheme.

So for the record, branding is not your logo; it is not your color scheme or your tagline. Branding is the idea of who you are in the minds of those you come in contact with, and so, a brand is made up of every experience and interaction that others have with you or your service.

If this is true with companies is it also true with individuals? I suggest, yes! We all have our own personal brand and it is not just the labels that we wear in public (Artist, Musician, Christian, Muslim… etc.). These are labels that describe our character the way we see our character, but our personal brand like that of a company is not so much about who we think we are, but who others think we are, and it too is made up of every experience and interaction with us. It is not the label we use to describe our character; it is our character itself that makes up our personal brand.

I couldn’t help but think of several companies that have redone their “brand” in the past several months, some have been successful at it, others only time will tell, but like all of these should we examine if our personal brand needs a facelift?

What is your brand about?