Your Logo Isn’t Your Brand
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): TomKin Consulting, LLC
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2020
Brands come with logos, and vice versa, but the brands are the big picture of which the logos are a part. A logo is the icing on the cake, the paint on the plane, the sugar on the surface of the frosted donut – sorry to any diabetics. How about this one? It’s not the Metformin, but the packaging label of the Metformin itself. It makes the organization more presentable, immediately recognizable, but only in superficial ways. In essence, it is the difference between substance and style for the brand and the logo, respectively.
What is a brand?
Some will use “logo,” the name, as meaning the brand or, in particular, as the brand in and of itself. This, in my opinion, is a mistake, a category error. The reality of the matter, the brand is the larger organizational principle.
It’s the big picture, the overall representative identity of a company. It’s what the organization means, not how it looks. And meaning only comes from customers who imbue it with meaning, so a brand is an extension of the company’s full self in users.
What use is a billboard without people driving by in cars? What is the point of an internet advertisement for the company without internet users? Why have a marketing ploy on The Steve Harvey Show without an intended audience who recognize and connect with it? You get the point. To make a connection, to get a meaning, and to develop a sale, you need a brand to channel to a customer.
Investopedia defines a brand in this manner, “A brand is an identifying symbol, mark, logo, name, word, and/or sentence that companies use to distinguish their product from others.” It’s something like this, but not exactly like this. I think Investopedia has it mostly right, though.
When I think of a brand, truly, I am not thinking of the “logo” of a big computer technology company’s symbol – solo. Its brandishing mark, as if cattle for sale. The thing making it stick out and stick in memory and then everything else around it. It’s the deeper content.
What does the company mean to the user? What is the experience for the customer? What colors, images, experiences, feelings, and technologies come to the front of the mind’s eye? That’s the brand, not the gimmicks.
What’s a logo?
It’s all of that stuff mentioned above encapsulated in one run. It’s partly the gimmicks, sure. Fine – but it’s also the ways memory associations of the brand can be recalled or recognized on a simple trigger.
Or, “A logo is a graphic mark, emblem, symbol or stylized name used to identify a company, organization, product, or brand,” Investopedia stated. That seems bang on, couldn’t agree more this time with Investopedia.
Think of the billboard, the internet advertisement, or the commercial in-between The Steve Harvey Show, these are specific, targeted, and concise.
A billboard jams only so much information. An internet advertisement is seconds to a couple minutes long if a video or a little pixelated image with low fidelity audio. The Steve Harvey Show only runs 22-24 minutes per episode, so the advertisements have to be to the point. You have to make the point quick.
In any case, you’re dealing with something like a “.zip” file or a movie trailer version of the brand. It’s, again, the style and not the substance. Or, maybe, look at it this way, a logo is the style that makes the client think of the substance.
You’re bringing the entire company’s history to the front of mind to the individual customer, whether driving on the interstate highway looking at billboards, searching for videos and coming across a short movie clip, or seeing some advertisement in-between commercial breaks of The Steve Harvey Show.
You’re making another person think of the company. At bottom, traditionally speaking, and more straightforwardly, a logo is an image. Every major brand has a logo. Those logos are on every product, container, and advertisement for the brand. They’re inescapable and indispensable. Use them.
Why make the distinction between brand and logo?
The deal is, a brand and a logo aren’t the same. You ever accidentally open an audio file in Microsoft Word, or a corrupted file in some audio player. It’s completely incoherent, and either jarring to the eyes or the ears. To mistake a logo for the brand, that’s what it is like. It’s just wrong.
It’s also what it is like when a customer has a bad experience with the brand and now the logo triggers that in them. Do you want that for your company? Didn’t think so, so don’t ‘act a fool,’ the brand and the logo serve different, though unified, purposes. This is so important.
That’s why they need to be mentally separated and organizationally integrated: Don’t mix them in mind, bring them together in practice. Keep them in the hands pointing in the same direction, to the heart of the matter, they’re pointing to what the company means to customers, clients, and users.
As noted at the outset, without consumers of a brand or a logo, a company means nothing. They – the brand or the logo – mean zilch, nada. Whether multibillion-dollar multinational corporations or mom-and-pop shops on the corner of the local community village of 3,400 people, all have a brand if not a logo.
You will have a brand as a base. You can have a logo, and most will have them. But they’ll both be pointing to an experience. An experience the customer can rely on repeatedly. A logo triggers it. A brand is where the bullet ends up once the trigger is pulled.
Every purchase, customer relations experience, payment, advertisement, and product point to the brand. Each logo is aimed at the brand. To make this distinction can be a distinction between, not necessarily failure and success of a company but, the flourishing and the withering companies, it’s, once again, important.
What’s the take-away, chief?
Here’s the bottom line: If there is no distinction between a logo and a brand, then there is no difference between the shallow end of the pool and the deep end of the pool. It’s to say an image of a company is the company. It’s to make the complete representation of the organization in some pixels or a title as if the full breadth of it.
It’s can’t be done. Every organization comes with a history. They exist in a moment. They represent something. So, they’re trying to get that something as a message. A message of that something delivered across to potential clients, customers, or users.
The something on offer is everything every single person who has ever interacted with the company collectively identifies with the company. That’s the brand. And the mark that bears it is the logo. It’s the insignia of a religious sect, the logo of a major corporate technology innovator, or the home state baseball or football team.
The take-away is thinking of the logo as the key to the experience of the brand, where the brand is the lock to be opened. An experience opened at the hint, whiff, and sight of the company for everyone in its history or prospectively interested in it.
So, what is truly in a name, a logo, dear reader? Answer: The trigger to everything. And what is in a brand? Answer: Everything.
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
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