Rethinking Branding in 2024

It used to be building a brand meant creating a strong logo, color palette, visual guidelines and ensuring it was consistently applied everywhere.

Today, a brand isn’t just what it looks like (although that’s still critically important), it’s what it does. It’s how it behaves. It’s about change and transformation.

Polish and perfection, brand purpose, one-way communications and passive audiences were the cornertones of this approach to brand development. Now it’s about orchestrating creative chaos, embracing experimentation, cultivating communities and collaborators. It’s about brand energy which transcends brand purpose.

It doesn’t mean chasing the trends styles and colors and fonts. Those quickly fade whereas a good brand endures for years. It’s also not an excuse to be sloppy and haphazard. It’s about using the power of language and craft to connect with your people (or your tribe as Seth Godin has long espoused) both visually and in writing. Dare I bring up the word ‘story’ again?

You might also think brand building and design is only for the marketing department. But it’s not. It’s for the whole business. It’s creating an end-to-end experience that sets you apart from everyone else. Creating that secret sauce that makes you you. You build your brand to make sure you’re not becoming a commodity and that takes everyone.

This requires alignment across a company. For a start-up, that’s a lot easier because you’re small and everyone usually wears many hats.

But as a company grows and departments are created, it takes a lot more coordination. You have to educate the so-called ‘non-creative’ groups why they need to get onboard the brand bandwagon. You need to create meaning that the finance department can understand and see the impact they have. Same with product and shipping and HR. There's a place for creativity in every department.

AI may be making it easier and easier for anyone to create visuals and write basic copy. It’s never going to be worse than it is today at this. Sometimes it’s surprisingly good. Yet there’s a sterile sameness that threatens to homogenize everything since it draws on what it knows. In fact, we're in the Age of Average . Coffee shops with concrete and white walls and wood anyone? Building a brand in the AI age requires sharp differentiation. It requires the counterintuitive magic that humans bring to the party.

This new dance requires you to be nimble yet steady. Timeless but timely. It may seem contradictory, yes. But that’s where the art comes in to ensure everything hangs together.

I go back to a quote from Buckminster Fuller:

Driven by curiosity, it’s time to reimagine what makes an engaging brand and build transformative businesses.

This week’s kickstart

To get you thinking differently about what makes your brand special, here are a couple of different angles to try.

1. Imagine your brand is a person. Describe their personality, style, and the way they interact with others. How does this 'person' reflect the values and essence of your business?

2. If your brand were a piece of music, what genre would it be? What instruments would be prominent? Describe the rhythm, tempo, and overall mood. How does this musical representation capture the essence of your brand?

Afterwards, reflect on whether you see your brand in a different light and how it might change the stories you tell.

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