A Designer's Perspective: Branding & Brand Management

Branding. It's a term that is bandied around quite frequently these days, especially in the world of social media and viral marketing. It's something that has been on my radar for quite a while, as I've been working to "brand" myself and my freelance work to a broader audience. That alone is the reasons I found last week's lecture so useful.

I'm always interested in how others have used branding to help: create successful corporate identities; launch new products; and build successful careers. One thing I've never considered was actually what went into MANAGING those brands. That's were Dennis Pitta's portion of the lecture came in. Dennis pointed out the importance of not only creating a viable brand (which he explained was not limited to goods, but included ideas, services, and people as well), but nurturing that brand through what he called "Brand Equity," a.k.a. value.

The two parts that make up this value were awareness and preference. The goal being to make your brand be the first thing that comes to a consumer's mind (the awareness part), as well as the first thing that comes to that consumer's heart (the preference part). Another important aspect of brand management that Dennis pointed out was a simple as choosing a name.

Although I would think this was a common-sense activity, I actually found myself looking back at a few of the brands I have worked on and realized that I could have used some of the simple, sage advise that Dennis imparted on us. He pointed out five guidelines for choosing brand names. A good brand name should:

• suggest product quality,
• suggest product benefits,
• be easy to pronounce, recognize and remember,
• be distinctive, and
• lack poor foreign language connotations (if at all possible).

Quite simple in concept, but I'm sure more difficult in execution. The second part of the lecture feature designer Bob Shelley taking us through his process for creating a brand identity. He pointed out his approach-which consisted of investigation/research of the brand, pencil sketching and finally bringing the concept to the computer- and his philosophy-which included such pearls of wisdom as "Don't get hung up on one approach," "Be Diverse," and "Design with Depth."

Although he brought a tremendous amount of information to the presentation, the examples he used to demonstrate really helped to put everything from the lecture into perspective and helped to see the potential of good branding.