Brand 101: Understanding the Power in a Brand

By Clari Green

For us in MCC, one of our major challenges is getting you to understand why protecting the brand is as important to me as it should be to you.

What usually happens is that all the effort is somewhat spent on the external stakeholders and we tend to forget ourselves. I would like to change that – in an effort to bring the Heirs Holdings brand closer to home and help with understanding the role we all play in keeping our brand alive.

I am starting this new series to shed more light on how brands work. By the end of the series the aim is to understand the what, why and how of brands, beginning of course from the very beginning, which is the ‘what’, and I would love to get feedback and questions as the series goes along.

Brand 101

The first thing to know is that a brand is more than a design.

This is the biggest misconception I have come across in my line of work. Whenever you mention the word ‘brand’, people immediately default to a logo. They are not too far from the truth; however there is more to it than that.

A brand is essentially the image and personality of a product or service that a business provides. It is more or less the features that make a product unique and different. The reason the logo remains top of mind is because this is the first aspect of a brand that a consumer experiences; it is the identifier.

Branding was originally used hundreds of years ago by cattle ranchers to differentiate cattle. The ranchers used branding irons to burn symbols on their livestock so that slaughter houses could identify which ranch the cattle came from. They also branded their livestock so that they would be easier to find if they were stolen.

But brands are now more than just a means of differentiating products, they also convey a “promise” which flows from an organisation’s values – the product or service the consumer experiences should meet the standards the organization seeks to deliver.

From Positioning to Purpose

In the past I had written an article about how brands have moved away from being a mere tool of persuasion and have now reinvented themselves as an opportunity to express their purpose – why they exist. By defining the difference an organization wants to make socially and commercially, an authentic brand story begins to unfold and it is this story that helps determine the brand’s success.

At Heirs Holdings we make strategic, long-term investments that have the power to move Africa forward – we do well and we do good. This is our purpose and it’s part of the story we tell, we actually are making an impact and can talk about it.

This story helps create more relevance and makes the job easier for me and my other MCC colleagues, because having a purpose creates more empathy in the heart and minds of those we seek to influence and this is exactly what you want your brand to do.

In a nutshell, brand has a lot to do with perception, it is all the interaction/experience that people have with a product, service or organization and it is the job of the MCC and staff to improve and maintain the organization’s reputation.