Branding 101: What is a Brand?

As you seek to grow your beautiful business, it's important to consider the power that comes from cultivating a strong brand to represent it.

Every business comes with a brand, and the ways you choose to shape and nurture your brand is what will ultimately help you to stand out from others, and connect with your dream customers.

But what exactly IS a brand? And what is branding? Is it something more than a logo design?

I think that because the concept of branding is often used so broadly by business owners, anyone who’s unfamiliar with the term might find it tricky to nail down a clear and concise explanation of what a brand actually is!

In this blog post, I want to help clear up any misunderstandings about branding by defining a few key terms: brand, branding, and brand identity. Although these terms tend to be used interchangeably, they each have some key differences worth pointing out!

Brand:

A brand is your business's reputation. It's the perception that someone holds of your business in their mind and what people use to assign value to your goods or services subconsciously.

Although it may be tempting to see the word brand as a corporate, distant, or icky term, let me encourage you to shift your paradigm a little bit. To me, a brand helps to offer an outward reflection of the heart and soul of a business.

A brand should not be curated as to deceive or mislead; instead, it should be approached with honesty and care. In our upcoming course, we show you how to refine your branding efforts so that incoming customers’ perception of your business (aka, your brand) is good and true and welcoming to your ideal customers.

Branding:

Branding is everything you do to mold, shape, and elevate your brand. It involves all the activities you do to help your business continue putting its best foot forward in the world.

Although branding does refer to the creation of logo designs, color palettes, and typography, branding isn't only limited to designing beautiful logos.

Branding also has to do with the many other action items involved in cultivating a memorable brand. Branding includes the way your business shows up on social media, what your customer service experience is like, the website you've built, the emails you send, the kind of product imagery that you shoot, etc.

Branding isn't a process that anyone can complete overnight; rather, branding is the gradual, fulfilling mission we embark on to nurture a brand over time. With that slow process comes room for evolution and change, which is super liberating and exciting.

Brand Identity:

Lastly, your brand identity involves how your brand is presented to an incoming customer. It involves the pieces of your brand that someone will experience in a sensory way - the look, taste, smell, feel of your brand.

Your brand identity involves traditional design elements like logos, a color palette, and typography. It also involves package design, the distinct smell of a brick + mortar shop, the style of a hotel lobby, the song at the beginning of a podcast, etc.

When used intentionally, the many facets of a brand's identity come together to help reinforce and enhance the brand (aka - the perception of a business). The brand identity is also what helps a brand stand out from other businesses, and what will make the brand recognizable and memorable in the mind and heart of a customer.

In Summary

As I mentioned at the beginning of this post, every business is a brand, so it’s important to spend time and intention thinking about the way your business is presented to the world!

When you can see branding as an opportunity to cultivate a beautiful first impression on behalf of your business, that’s when the magic happens.

Here’s a recap:

A Brand is the perception of a business.

Branding encompasses all the activities involved in shaping and nurturing our brand. 

Brand Identity is the sensory presentation of our brand. It's what comes into contact with a customer, which informs their assumptions about the business. 

The effort we put forth to cultivate our brand with care helps us better impart the vision and mission of our business to our incoming customers and offers the potential for deeper, more lasting connections with our business's community!

I hope you enjoyed this blog post! If you're interested in building a heart-centered brand to represent your business, be on the lookout for our upcoming course, The Chez Núñez Branding Blueprint.