There’s a ranchera I like. Well, I like almost every ranchera.
“All I ask. All I ask. That you make life pleasant for me. If you decide to live it with me.”
That’s why you have a Roomba. You have satnav in your car. You have a dishwasher. You have all your devices connected. You have artificial intelligence.
Things. Lots of things. To make your life pleasant. To make your life easier.
And yet…
Your brand.
Uh, what do I post?
Uh, what do I communicate?
Uh, I’m not sure this fits.
Uh, the logo. Subtle, but obvious.
Uh, is this too us?
Uh.
UH /ʌ/
noun
That tiny hesitation before a decision your brand should have made easier.
There’s something weird about all this. Really fucking weird.
We build a brand and it feels like we’ve ended up with a civil servant on their coffee break. Their third one.
You build a brand to create more value. More money. More time. Better clients. Better relationships. Better positioning. More room to choose what we do next.
And yet… yes. Your brand.
More guidelines. More protocols. More channels. More content. More assets. More approvals. More meetings. More people making sure everything is on brand. Or one single person obsessed with making sure everything is on brand.
Doesn’t matter.
In the end…
More decisions about the thing that, in theory, should help you decide.
—Riiiiing.
—Is Brand there? Put them on, we’ve got a lot to talk about.
—Chirp, chirp.
Your brand shouldn’t become a supreme being you need to ask for permission. Or a Tamagotchi you have to feed every day, just in case the poor thing passes on to a better life.
Good brands make your life easier.
Easier.
And there’s a difference between easier and easy: basically, the difference between life itself and a good dose of smoke.
Your business will still have problems. Products that don’t work. Lines that fall apart. New players. Other tools. A team that changes and throws things off.
And one Tuesday in February at 10:45 a.m., there will be a decision that nobody had the courtesy or clairvoyance to include in the brandbook. Even if it was as deep and generous with its page count as War and Peace.
—Hey. What do we do now?
—Well, let’s check the whole manual the agency gave us.
Control + F. Search.
—Nothing.
—Nothing?
—You’re welcome.
What a surprise, right?
Well, yes. Normal. Of course it isn’t there. Because a brandbook can’t contain all the answers. Mainly because it doesn’t know all the questions.
That’s why a good identity shouldn’t be built to tell you exactly what to do, but so that deciding what to do gets easier every time.
At first, you think about your brand. A lot.
Does this fit? Can we say this? Should we be here? Better here? Does this sound like us? Does it represent us? And now what?
Then, if the work has been done properly, you start thinking with it. Through it.
And some questions don’t disappear. They become easier to deal with.
Not because someone wrote the answer on page 83. Or page 41.
Because you already have a point of reference.
Because the brand starts taking up less space in your head while taking up more space in those decisions.
And yes, a brand is something that adds.
Recognition. Differentiation. Perceived value. Preference. Margin. Awareness.
But it’s also something that takes things away.
Doubt. Explanations. Work done, redone and redone again. Uncertainty.
Because a good brand helps you say yes. And it helps you say no.
And above all, it helps you say uh less often.
It gives you more criteria instead of more dependency. And it takes away some of that uncertainty. Some. Because it gives you ground and a direction. And guess what? It doesn’t collapse like your GPS the moment a path appears that hasn’t been updated on the map yet.
Recalculating route.
If, after all the work, all the strategy, the entire visual system, the entire verbal system, all the guidelines and all the meetings, you still need to ask your own brand for permission every time you move a finger, maybe you don’t have a brand.
Maybe you have a business with an impeccable outfit.
Lines Aja
Brand Strategist & Verbal Identity Consultant — Las Musas
cultooruido.com
No sé si entendí bien. Pero me puede excusar que ese mundo de las marcas es nuevo para mí y, además, me obligaron a entrar a la pista de baile; yo estaba muy tranquilo en mi mesa, hasta que a los organizadores del evento se les ocurrió que, quieran o no, todos tenían que bailar, así que las obligaciones difícilmente se disfrutan. Sin embargo, lo intenté. Empecé dando pequeños pasos y esa esperanza que no suele durar mucho de “después lo mejoro”, pero, contra todo pronóstico, sigo profundizando, probando colores, fuentes, ideas que se van alineando, van encajando como un rompecabezas. Claro, aún no tengo esas piezas que definen el límite; no tengo idea de qué tanto se extenderá. Yo prefiero pensar que la marca no es algo estático; que el mundo cambia, y es una buena excusa que las marcas vayan cambiando con él.