By Aimee Woodall
In my office, we put a lot of effort into words. Words are precision; they are the difference in being retweeted once or several hundreds of times. Words cause a guest to RSVP yes or a journalist to hit “reply” when we email them.
It should come as no surprise, then, that our office had a roiling debate over how to describe ourselves. Yes, in the fashion of the mechanic with a clunker or the famed shoeless cobbler, we were looking to abandon the outdated tag proclaiming us “a marketing and publicity rebellion.” For, while this one thing is true, we’ve grown up a little since then and we’ve expanded our vocabulary, so to speak.
Finally, we settled on “A Strategic Branding Agency”. That prompted an idea for a piece on how the word “branding” is inaccurately and inexplicably used to describe the strictly visual portion of a brand and how we should do something about it. As a result, this is that article:
In its more traditional, designer-y sense, “branding” is a combination of permanent visuals that accompany a business or organization — the logo, the type treatments, the color choices, treatment of photography, graphics, and any combination thereof. In reality, however, branding is any feature of a business or organization that makes it different from all the others.
Think about Target, or TOMS, or Warby Parker. They didn’t stop with a color palette. Heck, these brands haven’t stopped for a second. They travel; they support; and they have friends, fans, and followers.
But you don’t have to be worldwide to have a great and effective brand. If you support children’s charities in a monthly fundraiser at your restaurant, that’s part of your brand. If you distinguish your cleaning service from other cleaning services by only hiring staff who sing opera while they vacuum, that’s branding. If your tweets come from the point of view of a delightfully sassy jelly donut named Marisol, that’s hilarious. And that’s branding!
The new “branding” isn’t a logo or even a graphic design. The new branding is strategy. The new branding is the owning of your company’s presence online and offline. It’s a force of personality that shows up everywhere your audience is. It’s being memorable. It’s relating inward and reaching outward. It’s inclusive and aware and all about doing good things.
And if it isn’t, you need to find someone fast to fix that for you!
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Aimee Woodall is the owner of the Black Sheep Agency, a Houston-based “Strategic Branding Agency” specializing in non-traditional public relations, social media, and experiential marketing. Contact Amy by phone at 832-971-7725, by email at [email protected], or visit the website at www.theblacksheepagency.com.
