Key takeaways
- A brand is what people think, feel and expect when they meet your name. The logo is only its signature.
- Treating brand as logo turns a strategy question into a taste question, and money goes on redesigns instead of the promise.
- A shared vocabulary of 10 ideas, from purpose to brand value, helps a board make brand decisions faster.
Ask a board what its brand is and someone will point at the logo. It is the most visible thing the company owns, so it is an easy mistake. It is still a mistake, and an expensive one: it turns a question of strategy into a question of taste.
What is the difference between a logo and a brand?
A brand is what people think, feel and expect when they meet your name. You influence it with everything you do; they own it. The logo is the signature at the bottom of that letter. A good one is quick to recognise and hard to confuse. It cannot, on its own, make anyone believe anything.
You influence the brand. Your customers own it.
Why does the confusion cost money?
When a leadership team equates brand with logo, it spends on redesigns when the real problem is a promise the business no longer keeps. The new mark launches, the old complaints continue, and the brand is blamed for the failure of the operation.
The fix is a shared vocabulary. Purpose, values, attributes, personality, positioning, architecture, equity and value each answer a different question. A board that can tell them apart makes better decisions in less time.
Where should a board start?
Our brand primer sets out the 10 ideas in plain words, each with a worked example from Halden Group, a fictional textile group we made to show the method. It is free to read, quote and use in a board pack.