In recent decades, many businesses of all sizes and segments have grown increasingly attuned to the value of developing and maintaining strong brands, and support industries such as marketing and advertising have altered the way they do business accordingly.

Today there is hardly a marketing, advertising, or public relations agency anywhere claiming to be “full service” that doesn’t offer its clients robust, long-term branding services on the strategic and tactical execution level. After all, why rely solely on the merits of a product or service (one that others may or may not do better than you, depending on who’s being asked) to sell that product or service, when in fact you can articulate an identity that will, eventually, all but pre-sell it for you?   

Here, however, we’re getting ahead of ourselves. To start with, the broad notions: That brand exists, creates distinction in the minds of consumers, can add value to a business’s bottom line, and increasingly is articulated by marketing professionals, are ideas that few executives today would dismiss out of hand. Far trickier is understanding just what a brand is and what it isn’t – where it comes from, as well as what it can do for you.

Before addressing the shoptalk (closely related terms such as brand identity, brand essence, brand development, integrated brand marketing and more) or establishing any universal principals of branding, and by way of setting some parameters - it tends to be helpful first to establish what a brand is not.

To start with, a brand is never an end-user product. Your brand can never be something, some good or service, that you sell. It makes no difference how closely your products, even a marquee product (consider the ‘90s fad of upscale restaurants advertising a “signature dish”) is associated with your company; that still is not a brand. For example, take Coca Cola, the most recognized brand in the world. They make everything from bottled water to yogurt. The caffeinated, carbonated, sweetened drink known as “Coke” is their best-known offering, but not their entire brand.    

Likewise, a brand is not a selling campaign, business event or grouping of such items. An anniversary sale, the executive summary of a high-level company retreat, or grand opening of a new store do not constitute brands. Rather, these events (hopefully) take into account and/or help articulate the precepts of your brand and use them as guidelines for greater success and accurate enhancement of the company’s image.

Another common misconception: A brand is not your logo, corporate colors, script on your stationery, or any other commonly seen hallmark. Rather, in the context of one’s branding, these items are the most superficial trappings of your brand, of who your company is, of what their visual imaging must therefore be. When such items are accurate and reflective of a true brand, they become a manifestation of a brand’s traits; a surface reflection of a much deeper identity that pertains to the entire organization – in fact, for better or worse brand is that organization!

Finally, a brand is not what your company or organization claims to be on paper, in theory. In terms of establishing the true brand of any organization, this is frequently the greatest point of institutional resistance, because it calls into question the success (or lack thereof) of the organization’s operational efforts up to that point in translating codes of conduct, operational standards, customer service ethics, etc. into parallel results. Frankly, this can sometimes be threatening to those charged with achieving these results!

For the record, however, this should not be taken to mean that a brand is merely a kind of operational checklist or litmus test for quality. Nor should delving into the components of a brand be seen as a time to scapegoat for past shortcomings. It’s not. Nevertheless, branding must start with an honest assessment of how things are across the board. What we’re really saying is that how an entity interacts (in practice, not theory!) over days, weeks, even years with all its audiences - that is the start of getting to a company’s brand!  

Finally, then, we can begin to comprehend what a brand, any brand, truly is at its core. A brand is the overall promise that your group or organization delivers over time, to all its audiences. Taken together, these vast clusters of experiences, of interactions, form the nature of this collective promise. Remember, promises can be negative, too.

To who are the audiences we refer, the ones having these accumulating experiences with your organization? Anyone and everyone it touches! Audiences are internal (volunteers, part-time employees, full-time employees, junior staff, senior staff, vice presidents, janitors, CEOs on down to interns) or external (customers, certainly, but also vendors, potential customers, peers in your field, allies, competitors, and also any kind of media – including media who have yet to experience your organization at all!).

When these accumulated experiences are examined objectively, a collective picture of the most commonly recurring results begins rounding into shape (when done formally, in conjunction with marketing professionals whose job it is to use the findings as the basis of future initiatives, it’s called a brand audit). This picture is best expressed in the form of carefully chosen, key descriptive traits, known in marketing circles as the brand essence.

From this point, we can begin to grasp the organization’s essential brand identity: the essence of the emerging brand, coupled with an understanding of the mission of the company in terms of market space, and the nature of its internal workings. Taken together, this brand identity describes what the company is at heart, in terms of both goals and characteristics.

These are often the most exhaustive parts of the brand discovery process – with good reason. Assuming the methods used are accurate and thorough, these keys to a company’s brand can then be used like a kind of DNA blueprint of fidelity and effectiveness of future sales and marketing efforts regardless of channel, application or tactic.

In other words, the accurate brand, applied consistently, ensures that future sales and marketing are speaking from the language of who the company is, what it delivers every day. It’s therefore honest. It’s to the point. It puts the organization’s best foot forward every time, because it starts by reflecting the best characteristics you have.

As these brand development efforts build, leveraging time honored sales principles of time, budget and measurable benchmarks for success, any future branded materials, be they deliverables like press kits, outward manifestations such as a re-branded logo, or a new marketing campaign, can all easily be pulled together into unified efforts, known as integrated brand marketing.

This simply means that your organization can now roll out its many different methods to sell and tell the company’s product, newly confident that each effort will now adhere to the brand and thus do its job with adherence to the best core values that are really driving your organization. Meanwhile the brand remains, through growth, operational expansion, and changing economic cycles, to act as the organization’s unchanging soul and roadmap.