What is a Brand?

In your mind, you have an infinitely complex, multi-faceted representation of every person you can recognise. Your best friends, your worst enemies, your family, co-workers, neighbours. You might generally like them or generally dislike them, but you also have an intuitive, detailed map of what it feels like to be with them. That exact same feeling applies to every business you can recognise. That is a Brand. It is your expectation of experience.

It’s shaped through every experience you have had with that entity (business or person). In that way, Brand is a kind of loop. It is the expectation of experience, which is determined by experiences with that Brand.

Let’s imagine you see a new coffee shop opening up on your street. You walk in and see a modern logo, sit on soft scandinavian chairs, speak to a friendly and funny Barista, taste delicious if slightly burnt coffee, see Impressionist art on the walls. Every experience is shaping your representation of that coffee shop. And when you leave, those experiences leave a residue of what the next time will feel like.

We can therefore say that Branding is the act of trying to shape your customers’ expectation of experience.

What it isn't.

Other definitions of Branding out there are not necessarily wrong, but they are near misses. They talk to aspects that are adjacent to the truth:

Individual elements:
Both your visual and verbal identity are not your Brand. Your name, tagline, logo, typography, etc. All these elements are contributors to the Expectation—Experience loop, but they themselves are not the whole Brand.

A promise:
A promise is an external or internal line aimed at keeping the company aligned on how they deliver to their customers. It is a valuable initiative, and it will contribute to consistency, which in turn contributes to the Brand. But a promise is issued by the company, and an expectation is held by the customer. It forms whether the promise is kept, broken, or never heard at all.

Reputation:
Your reputation is a public-facing assessment. What you're known for. For a stranger it can be the only input they have, so it does real work. But notice how often you feel a certain way about a business that is at total odds with its public reputation.

A gut feeling:
Marty Neumeier has come closest to defining Brand when he said it’s a ‘gut feeling you have about an organisation’. But mechanically, it is incomplete. A gut feeling is an isolated instance. Brand is an expectation of experience because it points forward. The mind always imagines interacting again with ‘that entity’. Even if you never plan on interacting with a business again, your mind imagines it.

In the end, you can’t reach into someone's head and set their expectation. You can only leave evidence and let them put the pieces together. Which means anything that leaves evidence is Brand work. The logo yes, the words yes, but also your pricing, your spaces, and everything said in between.