Defining brand

Brand is an overused and often misunderstood term. Everybody has one and every company is one. While this is true, a brand is not determined by the individual or organization – but by those that interact with them. A brand is the perception of how well an individual or organization keeps the promise it makes, by those that interact with it.

Let me give you an example.

When I started my businesses, I decided that everything I did would have four key values – affordability, accessibility, transparency and measurability. These were the core values that would underpin everything I built. As I established first THINK DIFFERENTLY and then COMMS.BAR these values became the brand promises for both organizations. It’s the first thing that anybody visiting the COMMS.BAR homepage sees.

As I founded THINK DIFFERENTLY and began to look at building an alternative business model from the traditional agency retainer – which subsequently became COMMS.BAR – these values were what everything I developed were measured against. If something compromised any of the four main values it was not pursued. It’s been the guiding policy for the development of our methodology, the tools and resources we’ve developed – and our price list.

But the brand of both businesses is not how I perceive it; it’s how it is perceived by the people that experience it every day – our team, our customers, our partners. A brand promise is only as accurate as our ability to demonstrate it through everything we do and everything we say – and its recognition by people that are critical to the success of the business.

Quantifying brand has always been a challenge, but as part of the work we do, I believe we have developed a way to help organizations to quantify brand and calculate its value in a scientific way.