nathan williams | simiant.com

Currently I’m faced with the challenge of answering the questions ‘What is a Brand’ and ‘What what will Branding be?’ both big questions. Branding has moved on a lot in the last ten years as a result of ‘digital’ (though I am fed up with that term so for a change may start using the Welsh: Digidol). Defining what actually constitutes a Brand these days is quite difficult: do for example the manifestations of a ‘Brand’ found online that are not originated by the Brand itself, but by it’s customers or community, actually count as part of the Master Brand or overall Identity? Something we need to answer. Initially I’d say yes, the challenge there is how the Brand influences this.

Anyway, a post on Forrester blogs, slightly un-relatedly, talks about how ‘digital thinking’ should span into other areas of corporate communication such as media relations and investor relations. Though I’m slightly stumped by the overall tone of the article which implies that digital or interactive thinking in these areas would be new. Uh, what do you think we’ve been doing for the last ten years Sherlock, pretty banners and ‘wizzy micro sites’? Anyway, back to Brands and Branding…

I guess the point is that, and sorry to state the obvious, that digital is now so critically important in practically every aspect of doing business and communications, that the art of Branding needs to move bloody quickly to re-define what we mean by ‘a Brand’, and how we articulate it across these channels. This is especially critical as to a large degree the deliverables of Branding exercises are still largely focussed on the non digital, in a visual rather than behavioral way. Branding agencies need to re define their deliverables away from what a Brand looks like, and spend a greater time focusing on how the brand behaves, the challenge with that, is how we articulate to our clients what behaviour actually means.