Modern Day Branding

There are often misconceptions of how important branding is to a company's success.  But every company of quality knows how well a brand can make a product or service.  Companies hire designer agencies to create the brand, but even the most important work is done before the agency gets started.  The company has to clarify its target consumer group, and figure out the message it wants to convey with its brand.

When a company brands itself, it is mostly in the form of a logo or a simple phrase.  For example, McDonald's brand is the golden arches consumers can spot from a mile a way when they are driving through a developed part of town.  Nike's brand is the swoosh, that conveys higher quality athletic equipment accompanied by prestigious gear worn by all our premier athletes.  Brands are a means for consumers to identify with a particular organization, and it is because of this that a company's brand is paramount.

One company I am most familiar with is Adidas.  This particular organization sponsored my club soccer team.  As a result, I frequently purchased their gear, and over many years of athletics, I gathered quite a vast collection of Adidas merchandise.

Adidas brands itself by its logo.  Three increasingly smaller lines, stacked one on top of the other.  That's not the only method for how it is branded.  Athletes around the world know the simple, yet powerful catch phrase, "nothing is impossible".  These three words when uttered separately mean next to nothing, one can even deter individual motivation for success, but when combined, these three words mark a phrase that carries extraordinary power in today's fitness world.  Adidas created a strong brand for itself.  It created a simple, yet effective logo that is easily identifiable and readily familiar.  It created a simple slogan, enticing hope and desire for any athlete that wished to pursue unimaginable feats.  Adidas did its research and understood its target consumers quite well.  Through such powerful branding, this company was able to construct a reputation that shall persist for generations.

The brand itself is just an identity marker.  Its the reputation that is built around it that captures consumer attention, and lets them know this product is better than the rest.  The easiest way Adidas is capable of building such a persona, similar to how many top-end organizations do, is have professional athletes model their merchandise.  It targets professional athletes for the obvious reason that its commodity's use is favorable for the active person.  It has a strong reputation in the athletic market, and if it wants to build its prestige more, then it is a great idea to associate its product with chief role models.  This leaves the impression that the product it offers is higher in quality and intended for premier performance standards  Everyday athletes look up to professionals.  Those are the people we inspire to be someday and wish for every minute that we could attain the glory that comes with walking the path they stride.  Adidas understood that.  They figured that people would attribute high quality with professionals, and thus assimilate this higher quality to the merchandise itself.  Through professional athletes, Adidas provided a solid framework for establishing its reputation.

If Adidas wished for their high-end reputation to persist, they had to continue to adapt.  They would have to constantly manufacture new merchandise befitting the latest styles and trends in the athletic world.  If they failed to re-invent themselves, without compromising their original brand of course, then their reputation might squander and the quality the brand once conveyed will increasingly suffer.

A brand acts as a footmark for an organization.  It provides an original identity of what the company's product is and who it is intended for.  Through advertisements and media outlets, a company is able to build its reputation.  It is able to further sustain it through proper marketing and creating new ideas for its products.  A brand builds a company, but a reputation sustains it.