Brand Theory for Engineers

When I was younger, I had the privilege of working with a company founded by Clement Mok. Clement Mok was one of the original Apple Creative Directors who worked on the Macintosh. He was an early pioneer in “non-linear” design and author of a beautiful book called Designing Business (unfortunately it was a bit too non-linear for me - sorry Clement…)

As a fresh faced engineer, I really had no idea what design and brand was. I knew code, I knew bytes and I relegated brand theory and information architecture into a bucket I labelled “marketing”. This was synonymous with “bozo bin”.

Luckily, one of the project managers was able to set me aright and give me the dummies version of brand theory. He told me (as best I remember):

“Brand is an expression of values, identity and message. It’s a promise of what something will offer you as a consumer. Everything has a brand, you personally have a brand, companies have a brand, products have a brand.”

He proceded to draw three concentric circles.

“Everyone thinks that brand is the outer circle here. They think that brand is basically the fonts, the colors, the logo design and the shape of the box your product comes in. This is actually the most superficial aspects of brand that we call brand identity.

When you define a brand you start from this inner circle. You start from the inside out. This inner circle represents your core values. Core values are the set of beliefs, ideals and principles that are at the heart of who you are and what your company or product stand for. These are short, one word values such as

Honesty

Community

Style

Trustworthy

Diversity.

If you had to boil everything you stood for down to the raw ingredients, you would be left with your core values.

This middle circle is you brand personality. Basically you can think of these as adjectives that add flavor to your core values. Two different companies might have the exact same core values but express them in very different ways. For example, both Snapple and the New York Times might have the same core value of Honesty, but they express them differently. One is very playfully honest, the other is much more serious about their honesty.

Finally, you can work on your brand identity. Your choice of colors should reflect your personality. Your choice of font should show whether you are a playful honest or a serious honest. Your logo reflects your core values and brand personality as well. Because we’re working from the inside out, all of these superficial outer things are in sync with the inner things, we can say we’re on-brand.

There one last thing that we talk about with our brand and that is the brand message. The brand message is a one sentence summary of the promise that you give to the consumer. Your message might be as simple as "We serve you hot food, fast.”

If you’re able to convey this message with your all of your tools - copy, letterhead, voicemail greeting, website… - then you’re on the right track.

At the other end however is the brand perception. This is the actual message that consumers of your brand are getting based on your identity, personality and core values. When the brand perception is different from the brand message, something has broken down in the process and we have a disconnect.

Our job is the make sure that this disconnect doesn’t happen. Our job is to deliver a wholly consistent brand message to the customer.“

I’m sure he dumbed things down for me but something clicked in my engineer’s brain that day. Ever since then I’ve found that a lot of that touchy feely, liberal arts, soft science stuff that was in the bozo bin…. has had to be re-filed.