Brand Definitions Are Ruining Your Marketing Career

I. Did Marketing Academia Fail You Too?

There are many reasons for marketing’s identity crisis. Some are mentioned in my article Boring Marketing. In that article, we were concerned with describing the different patterns that lead to reducing the marketer’s role to being dull and ultimately useless. In this introductory piece, we will direct our attention towards practicalities, specifically marketing’s most valuable asset to date: the brand.

Let’s ponder the following brand definitions…

In the 14th edition of his Marketing Management, Philip Kotler defines brand as:

A name, term, sign, symbol, or design, or a combination of them, intended to identify the goods or services of one seller or group of sellers and to differentiate them from those of competitors.

(Kotler & Keller, 2012)

In Aaker on Branding, David Aaker defines brand as:

An organization’s promise to a customer to deliver what the brand stands for, not only in terms of functional benefit, but also emotional, self-expressive, and social benefits.

(Aaker, 2014)

And finally in The Brand Gap, Marty Neumeier defines brand as:

A brand is a person’s gut feeling about a product, service, or company.

(Neumeier, 2006)

Most brand definitions involve the same wordings and address the same angles. The brand lives in the minds of consumers. It differentiates the company. It is the collective set of associations. This kind of definition has two things in common:

1. They compete in describing the ideal state of the brand.
2. They leave marketers absolutely clueless about what to do in order to reach this ideal state.

Usually, in brand management books, these definitions are followed by a geometric shape that encompasses the brand management process. Sometimes it is a loop, other times a pyramid, a ladder or even two shapes put together. I am yet to encounter a company that bases its brand operations on top of a brand management model from marketing academia. But I think it is possible that some have managed to make it work in their own case. What I am going to offer here and in the rest of the series is for those who found that marketing academia has failed them. In the following sections we will walk through the different jobs that a useful brand definition should do, then conclude with the definition itself and outline next steps.

II. Conditions for a Useful Brand Definition

It should set the universal direction of all brand work. Some professionals are lucky that the name of their discipline does the heavy lifting of not only explaining the scope of work, but signaling its value too. Marketers are not blessed with such a privilege. We have got nothing to hang onto. So if brand is one of the most valuable outputs that marketers are responsible for, its definition should help us explain our work, demonstrate how valuable it is and help others make sense of our role instead of being ridiculed as the funny and irresponsible spenders of the company. That is the straightforward part.

The other part is how brand can help us share a common direction. Because marketing is so contextual, two marketers may be doing completely different activities and still share the same title. I do believe, though, that a good definition of brand can help us share a common direction regardless of the activities we may be doing day-to-day.

It has to help us breathe. When being involved with something as complex and nuanced as brand building, it makes you feel tightness in your chest when the branding police fires its sirens. “Branding is not just a logo,” they say. But sometimes, it actually is. “Your brand should have a narrative.” Okay, why? What about the brands that clearly do not have a narrative and still swim in a big pile of incremental profit each year and call themselves a brand? Who are we to say that they are not?

Another reason for this tightness is the frequent, yet completely unfiltered advice from everyone in the company about how the brand should look, talk and act. Marketers are constantly reminded that not everyone will get the brand as well as they do. But that is actually where the problem starts, as you find yourself arguing in dismay with C-levels over what you strongly believe is downright harmful to the brand. But when all you have at your disposal is an opinion based on your gut feeling, you will be called out, and power dynamics will get in the way. And before you know it, you find yourself responsible for leading this monstrous incoherent thing that your company calls “our brand”.

A good brand definition, then, should be strong enough to ground how we think and act as brand builders. It should help us think strategically and not panic when any guru opens their mouth. Also, it should help us, not only defend, but also explain what goes into the brand and what does not. Explanations should be methodical, clear and unopinionated to prevent ungrounded opinions from messing up the brand altogether.

It should state who is involved clearly. This is usually seen as a two-way relationship between the company and its customers. Sometimes it is about shareholder value. Reflecting on reality, this is clearly limiting. If we are serious about having a practical brand definition, we need something that can accommodate the different relationships that involve the brand.

It has to account for the brand’s entire journey. Many brand definitions are concerned with an imaginary “initiation” phase in which brand identities, personalities and narratives get defined once and forever. From this perspective the job seems simple. You define a brand, which occupies like the majority of many proposed frameworks. And then you distribute it in whatever media plan you come up with. This makes brand work heavily skewed towards the beginnings, which radically belittles the value of the work that follows. A useful brand definition will not put marketers in such a position. Quite the contrary, it should include everything a marketer can do to build brand over its entire time horizon.

III. The Definition

With all of that in mind, let me propose a useful definition for brand, followed by an explanation of its differentiating characteristics.

A set of context-dependent constraints. In her book Context Changes Everything, Alicia Juarrero defines constraints as:

[…] entities, processes, events, relations, or conditions that raise or lower barriers to energy flow without directly transferring kinetic energy.

(Juarrero, 2023, p. 40)

A constraint, in this sense, is not particularly a limit. Yes, it may limit how different elements of a system interact together, but it can also allow for new forms of interactions. A brand’s visual identity is a good example of a constraint that both limits what can happen and allows for new forms of expression. On one hand, it limits how the brand is communicated visually. On the other hand, it allows for the emergence of a unique visual language that is on-brand, which provides creatives with a bounded territory to act within. Now that we know what is meant by a constraint in this context, what do I mean by context-dependent?

Alicia Juarrero defines context-dependent constraints as:

Constraints that take particles of matter and streams of energy flow away from independence from one other. They weave together streams of matter and energy into the coherent and covarying pattern of a coordination dynamic. They make distinct entities and processes interdependent without fusing them into a monolithic entity.

(Juarrero, 2023, p. 57)

Aside from the terminology that may seem difficult to grasp, the main idea, once you get it, just makes sense. Take a famous brand, Apple for example. Its visual identity, founding story and product lines all fit our description of what a constraint actually is. But they are not independent of each other. You can easily see how each of them both constrains other ones and is constrained by them at the same time. Try to find something, be it usual or unusual in the marketing community, that does not fit this description and please let me know if you do find something. Because as far as I know, thinking of brands as a set of context-dependent constraints is one of the most universal and all-encompassing descriptions that are yet tangible and actionable in the real world.

One benefit that stems from seeing brand as context-dependent is the freedom it gives us. That’s because one of the most irritating things about marketing is how people always disregard context for the sake of throwing overblown generalizations of what counts as a brand and what does not. From the perspective outlined here the answer is always it depends. The very existence of brands is contextual. Whether a logo makes a brand or not, or is important or not, is not about our opinions at all. It is something to be sensed from the particular context of a given brand.

That sustain the maximization of value exchange. Over the entire history of marketing, it is inconceivable that any kind of force has been exerted to build a brand if not for the goal of maximizing value. From making the consumer’s decision easier by trusting a brand to making shareholders loads and loads of money, it is always about value maximization. I think this is one of the reasons why many people like to fuss over marketing vs. branding. They have like this gut feeling that branding is superior. They mistake the result of the work for the work itself. By merely producing even the most incredible visual identity to exist, like ever, without the marketer properly utilizing it for the sake of maximizing value, it is utterly useless. The brand is the most important value-maximization vessel in the history of modern business. And it is the responsibility of marketers to utilize it, whether they do it or not.

If brand is the pursuit of value maximization, this gives us a platform upon which we can evaluate our decisions and actions. But also, it can help us defend the brand from the rabid opinions of the uninitiated, unaware or LinkedIn influencers. You have a methodical discussion about whether something contributes to value maximization or not. You can logically evaluate whether something harms the constant exchange of value or not. You can do all of that without it being seen as a mere personal opinion.

The idea of sustenance is paramount too. Brand work should not be skewed towards its establishment. It is continuous. Elsewhere I said that marketing work is a value continuum. And brand is everywhere in this continuum. Defining a brand personality or designing a good visual identity is not the end; it is basically a creative output that is yet to become part of the brand, on the condition that it integrates with other brand constraints, coherently. The same goes for successful campaigns and products. No matter how successful these activities came to be, the generated value has to be sustained and maximized across the lifetime of the brand.

Between an entity and its stakeholders. Brand relationships can be limited to a two-way relationship between a brand and its customers. This is as basic as it gets. But, by no means, does this limit the number of value-maximizing relationships that a brand can have. We have employees, the community, the environment and a thousand other possible relationships that can take place between a brand and its stakeholders. This widens the possibility space within which a brand can act and grow. As long as there is value to be maximized that is relevant and coherent with the brand, why not?

IV. On the Absence of Memory from the Definition

Biologically, in the mind of customers, a brand is a memory structure. That is a descriptive definition of how people perceive brands. How useful is this for marketers to act upon? How does this help us make sense of the different moving parts that constitute the brands we work on? If taking a space in the mind of customers is one output of successful brand building, then it should be a measure, not a definition. It should also govern brand operations to enable maximum levels of memorability from everything a brand does. But it is not the end-all of what a brand is. Comparing value maximization and memory as establishing points for brand definitions, it is clear how value maximization both triumphs over and encompasses memory.

To drive the point home, we can look at brand valuation. If it were enough to have a look at a brand tracking tool to make sense of the value of a brand, we would not have needed the different brand valuation techniques that are still under development to this day. They are under constant development and critique because there is a collective sentiment of dissatisfaction that these models did not yet reach a competent level of describing the real value of brands. We feel like something is left unreported. And here we are talking about both brand tracking and brand valuation. If all a brand can be is just a memory, there will not be any of that.

For the definition outlined here to be useful, it has to be accompanied with a framework, a tool that helps us act on it. In the next chapter of this inquiry, we will explore a framework I built on top of that definition that is, dare I say, truly practical?