Here's a quick experiment. Think of the small business you recommend most often: the café, the mechanic, the accountant who always calls back. Now try to draw its logo from memory.
Most of us can't get past a vague shape. And yet we'd recommend that business without a second thought.
That's a clue. Whatever it is we carry around about a business, it mostly isn't the logo. It's something bigger, and that something is the brand.
So what is a brand?
A brand is the picture of your business that lives in other people's heads. It's what they expect before they walk through your door, open your email or land on your website. It's built from everything they've seen, heard and experienced with you.
Notice where that picture lives. It isn't in a file on your designer's laptop. It's in your customers' memories. You can shape it with everything you do, but you don't fully own it.
Think of someone you know well. You recognise them by their face, but you trust them because of everything they've said and done over the years. A logo is the face. A brand is the reputation behind it. The comparison isn't perfect, but it's close enough to picture the difference.
How do we know a brand is more than decoration?
In 2004, researchers at Baylor College of Medicine in the US asked volunteers to taste two colas while a scanner recorded their brain activity. With the labels hidden, preferences were fairly evenly split. When people were told they were drinking Coca-Cola, more of them preferred it, and brain areas linked to memory became more active.
The drink hadn't changed. What changed was what people knew and remembered about the name on the can. The study, published in the journal Neuron, suggests that a brand does real work inside our heads: it changes how we experience the thing itself.
There's no reason to think this stops at soft drinks. Your customers bring their memories of you to every new encounter, too.
What is a brand made of?
If a brand is a picture in someone's mind, it helps to know what paints it. Five things do most of the work:
- Your promise. What people can count on getting from you, every time.
- Your personality. How you sound in an email, a social post or on the phone.
- The experience. How easy and pleasant it is to deal with you, from the first click to the final invoice.
- Your look. Logo, colours, typefaces and photos: the visual cues that help people recognise you.
- Your reputation. What customers say about you to each other.
The logo is on that list, but it's one part of one item.
Where does the logo fit, then?
None of this makes a logo unimportant. A good one works like a coat hook: it gives people somewhere to hang their memories of you. On day one the hook is empty. It fills up, visit by visit, with what actually happened when they dealt with you.
Which gives us the one line worth keeping from this article: a logo is something you design; a brand is something you earn.
A beautiful logo attached to slow replies and broken promises soon comes to stand for slow replies and broken promises. A plain one attached to great service comes to stand for great service.
Why this matters for a small business
You already have a brand, whether you've ever thought about it or not. Your customers have a picture of you right now. The only question is whether you're helping to paint it.
That's good news, because the most powerful brand-building tools cost very little: answering when you say you will, sounding like the same business on your website and on your invoices, keeping the promise you made on your home page.
Three questions will get you started this week:
- What do we promise? Try to say it in one sentence.
- How do we want people to feel after dealing with us?
- What do customers actually say about us? Ask three of them. The gap between this answer and the first two is your to-do list.
The short version
A brand is the picture people carry of your business, built from every encounter with it. Your logo helps them recognise you; everything else decides what they think when they do. You design a logo once. You earn a brand every day.
In the next articles in this series, we'll look at how to shape that picture on purpose.