Let’s Talk about Feelings and Brands

Careful, you’re about to be knee-deep in buzzword territory. It’s unavoidable, no matter how much I consult my thesaurus. We’re going to have to talk about brands. You’ve been warned.

Identifying your brand is critical, vital even to your marketing strategy. It’s the foundation of everything you will publish; it’s the cornerstone to your identity. A brand is pretty all encompassing and vague, but when we talk about a brand or brand identity here, we’re referring to a company’s message, look, voice, and platforms being in synch with their target customer, product, and customer experience. The coordination of all these elements to project a single message or to achieve a single purpose is the whole point of having a brand identity.

Customers and potential customers can recognize your business by any one element and automatically associate it with your key products.

Take a look at Disney. Chances are you or someone in your immediate family can identify the company’s handiwork by font, by the hair on a princess, by the way a sparkle is drawn, by the types of characters in a story, or any small element that alone means nothing, but even as it stands alone, it conjures up associations with all the other pieces and ultimately the whole company. As your mind is putting these pieces together subconsciously, you automatically associate a feeling with the brand as well. This is where the magic happens (I’m using Disney as an example. I had to say it).

Your brand needs to not only include the message you want to get across but the feeling you want to elicit from customers.

Whether you want them to feel charged up and ready to take on the world, brilliantly intellectual, or like a child again, everything that goes into your brand has to work together to evoke that specific feeling.

So, when you’re looking at your company, your motto, your logo, or color scheme, or any part of your business’ outward projection and interaction with the world, and you don’t feel anything stir in you, know that your customers don’t either. Unless you’re selling apathy, you’ll probably want to start working on that re-branding project you’ve been putting off.