Branding?

Branding - What is it?

It's a multitude of things - and its representation will come across to people and companies differently. In the consumer's mind - a brand will mean a diferent thing to how the company thinks of itself. Yet both worlds collide.

This branding, or a perception, of a company, determines the outside view that a consumer thinks of a partiuclar product or brand.  Logos, slogans, catch-phrases and colour schemes are all considered in representing a company through a brand. A label. An identity. In a way, brands are a way for consumers to filter through all the diferent logos to identify and find the one they want.

For me, Brands are made up of two components -

A designed logo - their label or identity.

A proposition or offer the company gives - like a slogan

A company's brand gives the consumer a view. This view however, can easily be distorted by many external extraneous variables. For example, just because Tesco comes across as having the best food - consumers might not nessesarilly believe that due to experience with the food, their personal  opinion, influence from other people such as celebrities or other variables [Perhaps even distance to the nearest store!].

Where and how a company presents its brand is a big factor too. If a company wants consumer awareness of their products, they need to express themselves widely - through a variety of ways - namely advertising. Companies can create posters or Tv advertisements to showcase their product in a 1 minute time frame. However, they must keep up with the world as well, i mean, with the sudden boom in social media and technology capable of connecting to the internet. After all - if this is where we all are now, us, we, i the consumer(s), this is where the company is going to want to invest in advertising their brand in order for us to perceive it.

Branding for companies is a very competitive race. Whilst companies vary across many different products in many different areas - many clash and compete with one another, such as the big bad super market chains or the big bad fashion retailers. As such each is continuously trying to get the upper hand on the other, through slashing their prices or producing a totally unique product to sway consumers into their tide. This is also done with advertisements - and therefore their branding. We all do it - talk of certain adverts when the time is right, like the dancing pony or the Mafia panda biscuit boss. If an advert is popular, it has more reputation, status and therefore will have more consumers flock to its product.

Therefore, branding, an identity, a label - is as symmetrical to our personal presentation - as we are when show casing ourself in a job interview. First impressions are key in both situations. If the branding is sharp, clear and respectable, we feel that way about them, and feel we can trust them from first appearances. The same is applicable in the job scenario.

 However, the theories of branding go back far into the past. There are Philosophical foundations to the art of Branding, which has transformed over the ages.

"No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man."

-- Heraclitus

 During the foundations of reasoning, many Greek philosophers were struggling to come together and form a universal fact or basis which we could all agree upon. They wanted to understand the world. They wanted to understand its physical nature.  They wanted to understand what everything was made of - the one, continual material from which everything was sown. That everything was simply a transformation of this same thing.

Two Greek Philosopher's in particular who debated over this was Heraclitus and Parmenides. Heraclitus believed in that which i mentioned earlier, that everything is in a constant cycle. That things become another endlessly. For example, fire dies and becomes air and that air becomes water and so forth. However, it is not a processed - as this goe sin both ways, not one continual direction. This would apply to us in human nature, that regardless of our stage in youth, we are one and the same, living and dying.

Parmenides on the other hand believed that the world remained like a cube, the same. There are no changes and that if we were to observe form a distance, we would see the world in a unchanging box. Any 'changes' would only be by appearance and that underneath it in true nature, it had no changed at all. Such a theory actually contorts all others into paradoxes.

We could apply this to Branding. Identity has been a conical, eternal thing. We have always associated things with another. We continually cycle through trends, our lives, everything, everything in this every changing loop. Old trends may 'disappear' but they aren't truly gone. They seep subtly into other things or often, such as fashion, make a sudden come back, cycling through again. We constantly look to the past to avoid future mistakes or for inspiration - such as art movements for stylistic influence. Such examples could include surrealism or futurism which could effect future styles of colour or form in media.