Thoughts About Brands

What is a brand?

There are probably as many answers to that question as there are brands and people and companies engaged in branding.

For me, a brand is an impression in our brains that can help us remember what we think and how we feel about a company, a product—or a non-profit organization.

It’s a form of shorthand, in other words.

A brand eliminates the need to Google or do research to help us know what we think of Walmart, Toyota, the Toronto Maple Leafs or World Vision.

For each of those names above, you felt something. It might be positive or negative, or even just neutral.

Whatever it was, it came immediately, without having to work or think about it.

For companies, arts groups, sports teams, churches, non-profit groups and many others, creating a positive brand impression is the goal.

It’s hard work. It’s like a train. It takes a lot of energy to get a brand, or a train, rolling.

Once it is rolling, it requires constant effort to keep it going. If you unhitch the locomotive, the cars will keep rolling for a while. But eventually the train, and a brand, will roll to a stop.

(While a brand takes hard work to get and keep going, it can be derailed very quickly—think Tiger Woods, Bill Cosby or Jian Ghomeshi.)

If it was just a matter of catching the attention of your target audience, it would be easier. 

But everyone and everything else is trying to catch their attention, too.

MikeTennant is a brand expert. He is also co-author of the book The Age of Persuasion, with Terry O’Reilly, and worked with Terry on the CBC Radio One show of the same name. 

Mike and Terry tried to figure out how many ads the typical Canadian might be exposed to in a day (TV, radio, print, billboards, the sides of busses, websites, etc.)

If you Google that question, you will get answers ranging from 250 to 5,000. Mike and Terry figured it was about 600 a day.

If that’s the case, that means we see 219,150 ads a year, or 18 million in a lifetime.

And of those 600 ads we see each day, Mike says, we might retain six and remember two.

Into that blizzard of information is your tiny non-profit group, with no money for advertising, which is trying to catch the attention of potential supporters.

What this means, as Mike put it, “is that while your brand looks like a beautiful snowflake to you, it is part of a blizzard to the rest of the world.”

In my line of work—international relief and development—there are 1,600 competing brands, all trying to create a positive impression in the minds of potential donors.

But I’m just not competing against other development groups. My agency is competing against every other product, company, issue, cause, political party, entertainment option and much, much more that is trying to catch the attention of Canadians.

Making an impression is hard work, in other words. Which doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try. 

But it does mean you need to target your efforts, keep your message simple, and be realistic about what you can accomplish.