From the course: Advanced Branding
What is the brand system?
- We've done a good job working through the conceptual elements of a brand. And now we're ready to talk about the pieces that we typically find most familiar, the physical ones. I'm talking about your office or store, products, packaging, collateral, digital media and so on. Anything that your user can encounter as part of your brand system. And it's a system because all of these touch points are connected. Together, they form a complex representation of your brand and I don't want to use the word complex lightly. This system is incredibly intricate. Think about it with me for a minute. At the surface, you have all of these easy to understand physical touch points, a business card, the signage out front, the color of the packaging, you get it. And we can build each of these pieces independently and look at them and say, okay, yeah, this is on brand. This represents who we are. But take it a step further and think about the social interpretation of these pieces. We, as people come from different cultures and subcultures. We've had different jobs, educational experiences, lived in different places and on and on and on. Because of this, we all interpret things differently. And this adds another layer of complexity to your brand system. Take it another step and think about the order in which people encounter brands. What if I find a business card and then go to a website? What if someone sees an advertisement and then stops by a storefront? What about Googling for a review or checking out the latest brand mentions on Facebook? And just like that, we've left the comfortable and understandable world of physical things and ended up back in this conceptual realm. There's really no way around it. The system exists and it's complex and that's okay. We don't have to have an answer to how to navigate this complexity. We just need to be aware and sensitive to the fact it exists. It's a way to truly reinforce the need to have your branding exist end to end. Every touch point is a reflection and a contributor to the brand experience. We can't control the manner in which people explore brands but we can be diligent about reviewing our touch points from the perspective of our target market. To do this, think of your system existing as three pieces, the physical, the mental and the socio-cultural. The physical is your product, buildings, vehicles, marketing, communication and so on. The mental is the representation of what a customer experiences and how the brand contributes to that experience with all the physical pieces. And finally, the socio-cultural is any force that shifts a person's perception, trends, opinions, demographics, communication methods and attitudes. Commit this to memory and reflect on this over time as you look at your existing physical touch points or as you create new ones. Again, the idea here is to get in this mindset of your brand as a system and not as a bunch of individual elements.
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