Who Are You? Description, Clarification and Definition in the Visualization of a Brand

July 8, 2009 9:36 AM

By Tim Woods, Senior Creative Director, The Halo Group

What is a brand?

The word brand is thrown around these days wildly and erratically, like wet pigskin on a rainy autumn Sunday. It seems that the word serves as a catchall – nebulous and mysterious. Certainly it falls into to the category of most used, but least understood terms, not unlike, say, social media or even Wall Street.

So what is your brand? How might you define it?

First, the brand is not separate from the business – it is the business. Companies often overlook truly defining exactly what or who their brand is. For the record, a brand is your personality, philosophy, culture, design aesthetic, social responsibility and, of course, your products or services, all of which create a foundation from which everything else can be built.

Once defined, you need to reflect that, or those ideals, to your employees and customers, ensuring that your staff understands and embraces this. Some think a logo and a tagline can do this. Certainly the logo is vital brand signature, and yet, a signature mark could never impart the details that give a company personality, like, for example, the importance of a company’s customer service or its commitment to renewable resources.

The idea then, would be to create a physical representation of a brand – a singular piece that could make you feel what a brand is all about. We call it a proto-brand. It’s like a brand prototype, but much bigger. We are talking about the creation of a microcosm of an entire brand, something that conveys all those important brand attributes; all wrapped up like a tasty burrito.

So why is it important? Who cares? Well, you should. First, it serves as a brand’s touchstone. It is important when a company considers new ideas and new directions, and the proto-brand serves as a northern star, a reference piece.
Creating something tactile and dimensional gives a brand substance. It offers a simplified view of a company’s culture and personality, so that both newcomers and veterans alike, who work for the brand, clearly understand what that brand stands for.

To demonstrate how Wedgwood, the 250-year-old manufacturer of fine china, would adapt to the new generation’s demand for more flexibility in their dinnerware, Halo created Wedgwood’s Universal Table, redefining today’s casual luxury dinning experience. One table mixed and matched, combining the lowest to the highest priced products, illustrating unlimited versatility, modern elegance and timeless style for the consumer. It is the ultimate mash-up of fine china with the food, music and party ideas that are the elements of an unforgettable experience.

To help re-vitalize Guy Carpenter, the 85-year-old, trusted, “white shoe” firm, we created a stop-motion animated video that transformed a white shoe to embody the brand’s core competencies – creativity, technical savvy, transparency, strength and high performance. The video was then used internally as a rallying cry for the brand’s mission going forward.

These are just a couple of examples, but what it comes down to is that the proto-brand is a mirror reminding a brand of who they are, a visual guide into the future of a focused, healthy brand.

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