What is a brand?

We at Tortoise made our careers at companies that called themselves branding agencies or brand consultancies. One thing these companies weren't very good at was defining their offerings. Nike and its customers know what shoes are, Apple and its customers know what computers are, but surprisingly few branding agencies or clients can put their finger on what exactly it is they're doing.

We want to acknowledge this upfront: there is no consistently agreed-upon answer to what brand means. For better or worse, this is a term with many different but closely-related meanings, which can be frustrating when it's part of your job title. Is it a symbol, business, product line, reputation? Or something else?

What we're going to do here is look at the many ways it is used, and tell you which one we find most useful for folks who are part of "the brand team" to focus on.

And, fair warning: this is nerdy as hell, even for Tortoise. Buckle your seatbelts.

Brand as Symbol

If you wanted to know how the pros define brand, it would definitely make sense for you to start with the American Marketing association, who say:

AMA: A brand is a name, term, design, symbol or any other feature that identifies one seller’s goods or service as distinct from those of other sellers.

This is a prominent definition, appearing in slightly different guises on Wikipedia and Investopedia. What's most important to understand here is that, while the AMA and other organizations state this definition, they don't actually use this definition. Ever.

An easy example of this inconsistency comes from the Wikipedia page linked above. In the sentence immediately following their definition, they say: 

Brands are used [...] to the benefit of the brand's customers, its owners and shareholders.

Does this sentence make sense if we replace the term brand with terms like name or symbol? Does a symbol have customers or shareholders? We don’t think so—Whatever Wikipedia means here, it is definitely not the definition they've given. When the AMA talks about “global leader brands like Nike, Dolce & Gabbana, Nvidia, Hyundai, and Coca-Cola,” they aren’t referring to the word Nike or Hyundai.

So what are they referring to?

Brand as Business

Let's look at a headline and sub-head from a Fast Company article:

Brands are starting to add carbon labels to their packaging.
Several companies are now offering consumers a way to see the full footprint of the product they’re using—but an accurate measurement can be hard.

Or this, from Ad Age:

Facebook gives brands new weapons to fight pirates and counterfeiters 
New tools allow rights holders to claim money from videos and find knock-off goods with image searches

In both of these headlines, as well as the Wikipedia and AMA examples given in the last section, brand is being used to refer to an entire company. And this usage is extremely common—when people on Twitter joke about loving to ‘engage with brands,’ this is the sense they’re using.

But this obviously isn’t the scope of the word in most professional contexts: there’s a world of difference between a Brand Manager and a Chief Executive Officer, though this definition would indicate they were almost the same. Concepts like brand architecture don’t make any sense, but they make even less sense with this definition, since they’re usually meant to organize offerings within a company.

We think this is an example of a tactic called metonymy by those in the academic poetry world: using one part of something as a metaphor for the whole, like calling the U.S. government “the White House” in a newspaper article.

Brand as Product Line

When someone says "Nike launched a new brand of sweatpants," or “We’re hiring a brand manager for MacBook,” what do they mean?

In both of these contexts, Brand is referring to a product line: a new line of sweapants, or a person to manage the marketing activities related to a line of laptops.

But, as with the “business” definition, this doesn’t describe what most brand teams do: they’re often concerned with a scope far beyond an individual product line, and their influence over products themselves is often minimal. So what is it?

Brand as Reputation

Jeff Bezos is widely quoted as having defined brand as "what other people say about you when you're not in the room". Others often use brand in this way, especially when talking about brand-building. 

This is a useful definition, but once again, has a scope far, far beyond what a brand team can encompass. Reputation is shaped by marketing and branding, yes, but also by things totally beyond their control, such as leadership’s actions, competitors’ actions, the company’s product quality, and public rumors.

Brand is a piece of the reputational puzzle, but it’s not the whole thing. So what is it?

Brand as... Brand?

All of these definitions share a commonality: brand is standing in for another term. Folks could just as easily use the term symbol, business, product line, or reputation—they use “brand” instead to sound cool and in-the-know. But there's one sense of the term that doesn't lend itself to a good synonym, where “brand” really is the only word that will do, and that's in the context of the term "rebrand."

"Altria—that's what Phillip Morris rebranded to, right?"
"Remember tronc? What a disastrous rebrand."

When Phillip Morris becomes Altria, or Tribune Publishing becomes tronc (and then changes back), what changes? Is it (just) any of the things we just talked about? Or is it something else, or more?

Symbols change, yes, but not just symbols—we'd just call it a rename or a logo refresh otherwise, not a rebrand. When Pepsi changed their logo recently, it wasn’t reported on as a rebrand. The business still exists as it did, it still has the same product lines, and because it's tied to its old company, much of its existing reputation comes with it. So we can't be referring to any of these ideas when we say "rebrand."

A redesign, not a rebrand

When a company does rebrand, it is trying to change its entire reputation through specific means. It is trying to set new expectations, and it does so by introducing not just new symbols, but a new way of presenting itself, a new way of acting; by introducing a new brand.

When people talk about brand strategy, we think this is what they mean:

Brand: The set of symbols you use to set expectations
Branding: Creating symbols and imbuing them with meaning to set expectations

This set of definitions work because it accurately defines the remit of most brand teams. They aren’t running the company, or creating a product line, or directly mind-controlling audiences to manipulate their perceptions — but they are managing a set of assets, namely symbols, and putting them to use.

Operating in ambiguity

The thing about language is this: individual words can have many different meanings. When I say he drew a card, you picture a person lifting a playing card from a deck, but that sentence could refer to an artist illustrating a family holiday card. This ambiguity can be frustrating, and it’s can be root source of a lot of poetry and bottom-tier jokes. One thing it can not be is avoided.

If there’s one takeaway you have from this article, it’s this: when somebody says brand, you should be ready to ask, “What exactly do you mean by that?”

Thanks for reading.

If you have a different idea of what a brand is, or want help setting expectations for your own audiences, drop us a line. If not, you might like to read our primers on other hairy concepts like strategy or names.