What is branding? (And why does it matter?)

The most valuable things are sometimes impossible to quantify. Love. Good music. The feeling of sitting on a clean public toilet after ‘holding the fort’ for the last 2 hours because you didn’t want to miss seeing Iron Man face off against Thanos.

In business, perhaps the most valuable of all things is this: Trust. Trust transcends hard numbers, and the best branding agencies offer you the opportunity to portray yourself so well that Trust knocks at your front door and offers itself as your dutiful servant.

How will it help your hotdog stand if your old, poorly-designed sign board communicates, “I care about my sign board about as much as I can about the quality of my hotdogs”? In other words, how well will your business fare if would-be customers question whether they can trust you?

Communication and design shape your reputation, and your reputation is directly proportional to how easily and quickly others trust you. Any public touchpoint either makes a deposit or a withdrawal from your 'trust bank'. We are here to ensure that only deposits are made. Because we at billy generally do not like withdrawals. Of any kind.

According to Martin Neumeier, branding is the gut feeling people get when they think about you. It’s not what you think; it’s what they think. Everything you do brands you, whether you like it or not. Of course, we can't control every factor, such as your eye colour, where your company is based, or the fact that your colleague chews with his mouth open. However, you need to ensure that the factors that can be controlled - from your social media presence, to your identity systems, down to design and word choice - are maximised so that your trust bank remains healthy and growing.

The end goal is to take yourself a step further to becoming a business about whom others will say, "For some reason, I have such a good feeling about this and I'm totally confident in you.”

There’s money out there to be made and lives to be impacted. The question is: will they be made and impacted by you?

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For more in-depth explanations and expansions on the subject of branding, here are a couple of engaging, easy-to-read, and mind-blowing books for you:

The Brand Gap by Marty Neumeier
ZAG : The #1 Strategy of High-Performance Brands by Marty Neumeier