By: Luke Farnum
“Your brand is the DNA of your company”. Growing up that’s how I was taught what branding was and having watched my Dad working in marketing my whole life I thought I understood it by proxy. It took working in branding to really understand what that meant.
Just as there is more to you than your headshot, your brand is not just your logo. A solid brand builds, and runs, through the whole system. It shapes how something looks, how it functions, how it reacts, and how people recognize it.
A lot of companies still treat brand like a marketing function. One team writes the messaging, designs the visuals, and manages the social feed. Everyone else keeps making decisions on a separate track. Product goes one direction. Operations goes another. Sales tells its own version of the story. Leadership makes calls that may or may not match what the brand says it stands for.
This fractional thinking is where your company’s reputation begins to crack. People build their opinion of your brand from the full experience of dealing with the company. Sticking with the headshot example, people make their judgements of you not just by your picture, but your personality, and the accumulation of your interests, thoughts, beliefs, social circle, career, etc. (I’m sure you’re lovely). What your brand promises on the outside has to match how you operate on the inside.
Say a brand positions itself as sustainable, ethical, and responsibly made. That can’t live only in website copy or ad creative. It has to show up in sourcing, product quality, partnerships, financial decisions, and even how the company talks about consumption. If the message and the business practice don’t align, that’s where you begin to find yourself between a rock and a hard place.
A strong brand gives people inside the business a clear point of reference. It gives everyone the same answer to: who are we, and what are we here to do for the people we serve? This clarity makes decisions easier. You stop chasing every opportunity and stop trying to please everybody. No longer is your company a “spray and pray” group, but a focused, aligned team who knows what it is there to do. If you’re everything to everyone you’re nothing to anyone.
The best brands know who they are and are disciplined about their identity. They understand who they are for and they make decisions accordingly. When every function is working from the same core idea, a company starts to move differently. Like a boat with a coxswain, everyone is rowing to the same beat, and everyone is rowing in the right direction.
Brand is not a back end marketing tactic, but should shape your business.
If you want a stronger brand in the market, the harder question is the internal one: are we really operating like the company we say we are? The brands that make the biggest impact are the ones who can honestly answer that question with “yes”.