How lasting brand work actually happens

Your brand is not a jumble of new design patterns, pretty channels or trendy social media posts. Your brand is perception. An experience people have with you and your products. A feeling that is different, memorable and hopefully unique. If you still think in channels, colours and patterns today, we want this article to offer you another perspective on how you can perceive and shape your brand so it lasts.

In the past, brands were static constructs. Simple, interchangeable one-to-one communication. Modern brands are closer to a living being. They have a character of their own, with strengths and weaknesses, which we treat as such, and judge and measure by how they feel.

Today's brands are different. Open, collaborative, networked and adaptable. They take responsibility, and they are an important part of the communities around them that they interact with every day. Only if your brand stays authentic over time and keeps its promise will it adapt to this change and ultimately hold its ground.

Brand is perception

Before you read on, take a moment to answer this question for yourself. What is a brand, yours included? What makes it? If we met tomorrow to talk about developing it further, would our conversation go beyond a new look?

Most people first think of the mark, the website or the catchy advertising line. That is not wrong in itself. But there is more. A brand is not only a logo, a website, an illustration style, a typeface and colours. All of these are essential elements of a brand. Tools to express ideas. Media to tell the story behind them. But those elements are only as good as the decisions we make in how we use them. Only as good as the promise they embody. So what is a brand? Brand is perception.

Our behaviour reflects what we believe. Our decisions are not made on a whim. They rest on the values we believe in and stand for. Modern brands today are like a living organism. They are like us. Why should we expect anything else of them?

Today's brands rest on collaboration, creativity and focus. Your investment in them is the foundation of your product, your design, your marketing, your sales, the partnerships built from that, the support for your clients and the community they form. All the more important to understand that building a brand, yours included, is not about imitating a trend. It is about the emergence of a shared feeling. Perception on the outside, and on the inside.

Brand is ongoing investment

If everyone sounds the same, looks the same and behaves the same, who gets our attention? Who wins our trust? Competitors have always copied each other. That is normal, and even part of progress. We would be lying if we claimed all our concepts and designs came from somewhere free of outside influence. But the intention is different. A fine line between inspiration and copy, between making it yourself and plagiarism.

The aim has to be to make something else, something true. Something that embodies you, your intentions and your values. Something that, even under outside influence, comes back to what is inside and stays steadfast and authentic. If that succeeds, we speak of brand, and of something unique. Brands cannot be copied. You can imitate their function, copy their style or look. The feeling and the perception, the connection their surroundings have with them, remain inimitable.

Investing in brand means investing in the feeling it can set off: How might it feel when I use the product or the service for the first time? What story do I tell myself when I interact with this brand? Which details do I still remember days later, when I tell my friends about it?

You remain the owner of your brand

To build is to decide that progress is possible. Planning, foundation, shell and fit-out: building a brand has plenty of parallels with building a house. Whoever you take this project on with, and whoever supports or advises you along the way, you are and remain the owner, and at the same time the author of your vision and the ideas that come with it. Instead of a house, you are building new companies, products, services, brands or communities.

Unless your name happens to be Martin Djollard (we can only warmly recommend his YouTube channel), building, whether a house or a brand, is something collaborative. What unites people who build is their vision, the chance of failure, curiosity about the new, and finally their imagination and creativity to make something unique.

Building also means creating change over time. The development of a brand is not a single event, but an ongoing iteration. Good brands keep evolving. They learn, they find resonance, they receive and use the feedback of their clients and so they drive their own development.

As an agency we are a sounding board for your ideas and the values of your brand. We take a fresh look at your plans and, if needed, we knock a wall down. With the aim of creating lasting room for your vision together with you, and of winning others over to what you are building.