Something that I learned when I transitioned from freelance work to an in-house position, was that the corporate space is regularly characterized by some degree of constant displeasure—usually inextricably linked to your results. If you work in sales, it doesn’t matter if the quarter was good—come the next quarter, you are hoping to do better. If you work in operations, it doesn’t matter if costs were lower, or that logistics were the most efficient they have ever been. Come the next quarter, the expectation is that these things will be as good—but ideally better—than the previous quarter before it.
Being someone that works in design and marketing, the displeasure I am privy to pertains to the overall quality of a company’s content creation efforts, or the inner machinations of the customer-facing brand. I have worked with companies that have spent tens, as well as hundreds, of thousands of dollars on brand initiatives that either don’t reflect the tastes of their target audience, don’t stand out, or are simply not representative of the services being rendered. Everything I just said, of course, is with the assumption that any supporting graphics don’t just straight up look terrible—after all, the world of branding is cursed by having ugly shit everywhere.
Something that I have learned over the years, however, is that most people treat brands as the sum of their aesthetic parts—and just as much as this includes customers, it also includes many who own and run businesses as well. In reality, however, looks are only one dimension of how a business articulates what it is. While looks can play a factor in communicating quality, I would be remiss to not suggest that looks can, at the very same time, be irrelevant. I can think of a few brands that have generally under-thought corporate identities, who have successfully moved from being single shop houses to being multi-billion-dollar global entities. All the same, I have seen companies spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on brand development, only to have their chief stakeholders still feel like “something is missing” despite having something that seems to be comprehensively thought out. In truth, people in this latter group of entrepreneurs could spend two-to-ten times as much money as they currently are spending on brand development, and in the end will still be unhappy with their resulting brand identity. Why is this the case? Let’s talk about that.
If there were ever a reason for why some are impossibly dissatisfied with their brands, I would say that it is because much of branding is driven by a prevailing “logic,” that people believe can serve as a viable rule of thumb for the process of branding itself. The problem is, however, that there are plenty of places where logic can fail you—which is why the process of building good brands is just as much strategic as it is creative and “thinking practically about it.”
The Industry Standard Fallacy
One place where I have seen logic fail brand managers time and again is when observing the ideation process of a new brand: instead doing what allows for a brand to be unique, they subscribe to a set of visual norms and industry standards that serve as psychological cues with their target demographic. To be clear, there is a reason why people do this: because somewhere along the way they have been convinced to believe a narrative that these are the things they are supposed to do. Instead of creating a brand that is reflective of the people running it, as well as those whom it appeals to, branders focus on creative considerations that make their corporate identities fit in as opposed to stand out.
In construction? Then why not brand build around safety yellow, black, and a logo with a hard hat? Into gaming? How about incorporating acid green, Mario red, black and a joystick? Cutting out on your own as a law firm? How about blue, white, and a picture of a skyline? Keep in mind, of course, that all of this is with one goal, and one goal only in mind: to create a brand that comes off as “convincing” or “believable” enough to a target demographic of consumers—
never mind the fact that literally asking for money in exchange for your services, is what renders them as believable in the first place.
This is what I refer to as the “industry standard fallacy” or the erroneous belief that taking visual cues from competitors in your industry niche or segment, will make your brand “believable” despite actually offering nothing unique with its presence. The fallacy is that for as much as you have done all of the necessary things to make your brand professionally fit in to be taken seriously, now you have nothing left that allows for it to stand out as unique in a depressingly “samesy” marketplace of service providers. And at the end of the day, is it surprising that a company suffering from this issue will have upper management that is regularly, perpetually, dissatisfied with their current brand presence? Abso-fucking-lutely not. If this person is you, your dissatisfaction stems from the reality that you are chasing someone else’s brand, instead of creating one of your own.
The False Equivalence Fallacy
This brings me to the my next subject. Even more frustrating than the seemingly endless—and futile—pursuit of contrived industry standards is when company founders make their organization the subject of some bold comparison that shouldn’t have been made in the first place. This practice of drawing false equivalencies between an organization one admires versus an organization that one operates is what I call the “False Equivalence Fallacy.”
Luckily, this method of thinking is so woo-woo on its fucking face, that if someone is talking like this you can thank your stars for being able to spot their delusions from a mile away. While there are many ways to spot the false equivalence fallacy, one basic signifier that false equivalencies are running amok is when a company founder starts comparing their organization to apple, tesla, or some other Fortune 50 tech company that Is audaciously out of niche. More times than not false equivalencies that are absolutely delusional can take on an aspect of believability, and simply because of the degree of nonchalance founders can have while sharing opinions that are just so comically untrue.
At this point in my career, I have sat across the CEOS of produce companies, case fabricators, breweries and CBD labels who have all tried comparing their business in some way, shape or form to that of apple computers. Aside from the fact that none of these companies even occupy the tech space, all comparisons like this ever really seem to do for founders is give them a misinformed understanding of what their brand needs—as well as what it is that their brand is even capable of doing from a promotional standpoint.
And it should be clear at this point why someone who makes these wild comparisons can also be someone who has serious brand image problems: Because first and foremost, if the person is inclined to making unrealistic comparisons—then what is this to say about other things? If a company’s leadership is willing to entertain comparisons to companies that are so wildly out of industry, that such comparisons should be jokes, then how can this very same leadership effectively identify when their brand is experiencing issues? After all, if an assessment of your strengths is not predicated on reality, then an assessment of your weaknesses isn’t either. I have seen companies literally turn down everything from profit generating business models, to brand collaborations, to endorsements—all because of some contrived comparison to apple computers that the higher ups can’t seem to shake, while at the same time, having no real bearing on reality. I get it: Apple and Tesla make cool shit, and they have interesting founders—which means that if your company is like the apple or tesla of your completely non-technology related niche, then by extension, that would have to render the shit you make cool—and your unabashedly squarish personality interesting, right? Perhaps, but I’ll just leave this here: Steve Jobs was a terrible husband, father, and all-around human being up until the last decade of his life, and Elon Musk is a documented market manipulator that helms an organization of misogynists and racists—I think entrepreneurs can pick better heroes.
The Aesthetics Over All Fallacy
In a similarly odd mismatch of presentation, ever seen a corporate identity that was attractive, but feels in so many words as if it was created for entirely the wrong business? The feeling for anyone who builds and develops brands professionally is much akin to watching an individual wear a clothing style that clearly clashes with their personality. Brands—in so many ways—are like this: If your business is the person, then your brand like its clothing. How you choose to dress up your business, thus, should be consistent with who your business is trying to reach, what your business is, as well as what its intentions are.
The alternative to this approach is taking into account how your brand is developed solely from the vantage point of how elements within that brand look and are presented. This is to say that it is entirely common for people to develop their brand from the stance of what looks good instead of what best resonates with their customer. This is what I call the “Aesthetics over all fallacy,” and no: you shouldn’t do it.
To be clear, when people build their corporate identities off of what looks good, this should not be taken as some kind of mark of ineptitude, stupidity, or lack of qualifications—despite whether or not such observations are intrinsically valid. Instead, it should be understood that when people develop brands and corporate identities primarily off of aesthetic principle, most people—like the industry standards people—have convinced themselves that this is something they are supposed to do. That by paying inordinate amounts of time and holy shit sized amounts of money on the way things look, they are not only doing the job that brand building inherently calls for, but that they are doing it well.
In some ways, it makes a lot of sense why people feel this way about brands as they are developing them: because brands are usually these very large, memorable, corporatized experiences—the most significant details of which tend to be visual in nature. The problem with thinking about a brand in this way is that it tends to overlook some of the more communicative details of brand development—such as brand voice and brand personality. Additionally, a purely visual understanding of branding runs the risk of overlooking some of the more nuanced details of brand development—such as color choice, and logo symbology.
And here’s the thing: you may already be someone who has done a good job of souping their own head up to believe that what I am saying is a crock of bullshit. All the same, there is also a good possibly that you’ve chosen your brand’s customer-facing colors and symbols based on some contrivances like, what your favorite colors and symbols are instead of the nature of your business and who your customer even is. No, its not that your brand looks bad: Its just that the brand you have chosen actively gets part of your message lost in translation.
The reality is that no matter how much I wish to sugar coat it: when aesthetics are the driving force for people’s branding decisions, people make stupid fucking decisions. No, that doesn’t mean the people themselves are stupid—but the outcomes that they are responsible for could have been prevented if only the details of their brand were handled with greater care—and less superficiality.
The Rules and Principles Fallacy
But what if you have the brand that has already done all of these things? A brand that bucks industry standards, avoids frivolous comparisons, and treats the details of its corporate identity with care and nuance? Well hot damn, it sounds as if this is the point where I tell you the shit that you want to hear: that it sounds as if you have a well thought out corporate identity. Hats off to you. And like well thought out corporate identities, your brand now lives in a world of hard and fast branding rules and principles that inform how it is presented to the public.
The problem is that for as much as rules and principles are the cornerstone of a process-driven corporate identity, there are going to be times when rules do not—or simply cannot—apply, and for the fact that the rules need to be made as you go along. The rules and principles fallacy, thus, is when branders and creative professionals use the guidelines that determine certain visual—or communicative—elements of a brand as brand law instead of what they actually are: guidelines.
The reality is that even the best brand books in the world cannot anticipate every possible application of a corporate identity as it can and will potentially exist. Furthermore, I don’t think this is the goal of quality brand books. If anything, a quality brand guide will tell you brand-specific, application generic, rules and principles about how to use colors, font faces, logos, and various assets in order to maintain a degree of visual consistency—no matter what the medium is. From my personal experience, it is the brand guides that go through the motions of how to design specific media line items that are more times than not, categorically pieces of shit. This is to say that your brand book is supposed to give you guidance on how to deliver certain generic looks—some of which, may be things you do not yet need. However, rarely is your brand guide ever supposed to go into bleeding specificity about how to design everything, and it certainly isn’t supposed to be fucking Nostradamus.
While brand rules provide a qualitative baseline for producing brand assets, something specific that adhering to these brand rules cannot do is tell us if the rules themselves are working—or god forbid, hurting the business. For example, the existence of brand rules will never tell you if the demographic you are branding around is even interested in the shit you have to sell—just as much as they won’t provide you with more nuanced insights, such as whether your chosen symbols make any sense, or whether your brand voice is annoying as fuck all. What they will do, however, is get you to commit to a slew of ideas across a wide spectrum of mediums—and god forbid if you have shitty ideas. This is to say that the presence of governing rules and principles surrounding a brand does not immediately protect said brand from being a figurative and literal dumpster fire. It is just as possible for dumpster fires to be the end product of “consistency,” ‘brainstorming,” and “highly meticulous processes.”
The goal is to produce a brand that is governed by enough rules to be recognizable, but is flexible enough to allow for looks that expand your overall catalogue of supporting brand assets. Ultimately, you want a brand that enjoys consistency, but you also want a brand that expands upon its own look in ways that are interesting, meaningful, and are additive to the greater understanding of the brand itself. Not observing this leaves you open to creating assets that feel intended for other mediums. So if you want for your business cards to look like they are supposed to be placed on your packaging, then feel free to ignore everything I said in this last paragraph.
In the end, while people can hate their brands because they are indecisive, picky, or inclined to shit money on branding no matter what, people can also hate their brands because they believe a lot of fake shit about what their brand is supposed to be. I think to some degree this is harder than being someone who is picky, or discerning in the brand making process—because while having a discerning eye can be an asset to building a discerning brand, having unrealistic expectations will always be the foundation of any true dissatisfaction. In the end, however, it is up to you to decide what your brand needs.
And hell, who knows? Maybe the reasons I listed aren’t why you hate your brand. If that is the case, then maybe you can actually benefit from a consultation. While some of you reading this may feel like that is a shameless plug, I never said there wasn’t legitimate room for people who needed a little extra help.
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