There’s more to building a brand than “putting a logo on it.”
We’ve all become accustomed to receiving goods essentially on-demand, without accounting for the “how” behind it. This goes beyond Amazon. Takeout food, replacement devices, streaming content. They arrive at our front door or on our screens (often minutes after we click “order”), and we think nothing of it.
We lack any awareness of how the product is manufactured, how it gets to the warehouse, and how it’s then loaded onto the truck and sent out for delivery. The same is true for digital content.
Our experience is the immediate gratification of object-in-hand—or “in-eyeballs.”
Brand objects (logo, tagline, look and feel) are no different in how they arrive to their audiences.
Where do they come from?
To the average consumer, they arrive out of the ether. Your fans are completely unaware of the work that goes into creating these things. And to make matters worse, some brands want to arrive at these objects without putting in the time and effort to give them lasting meaning.
The truth is, you can create some pretty brand objects without doing deep conceptual work. “Put a logo on it” is not just a short-sighted directive, it’s a widespread cultural phenomenon. You can land on a logo that looks nice without doing much thinking about the “why.”
So, where’s the problem?
The thing about a brand logo, which we’ll take as our catch-all for the sake of argument, is that if you can’t explain how you got there, you probably don’t know where you’re going, either. You don’t have the foundation required to thoughtfully evolve the logo when it comes time to do so. You don’t have the reservoir of self-awareness required to create other brand materials.
Most importantly, you haven’t gone through the exercise of understanding what your brand actually is — which translates to:
- All of your content
- All of your collateral
- All of the ways in which you engage your consumers
- How you talk to your funding partners
- How your employees understand the brand for themselves
This is one of our key reasons for doing what we do at DO:BETTER. We’re not interested in just “putting a logo on it.”
We know it’s an extended process of self-discovery that defines your brand, and while that process varies broadly for our clients, the final product is always a reflection of hard work. It’s always something that brands can look at and say, “We know how we got here.”
We love the final output from our exploration sessions with clients, but it’s the work leading there that sustains us.
The adage goes, “It’s the journey, not the destination.” Let’s revise that for our purposes: The journey IS the destination.
Let us do the heavy lifting to build your brand. And while we’re at it, let’s thank the delivery drivers who’ve made our front stoops a portal to whatever we need, at all times of day. They are the unthanked faces of the brands we love.
