Both in the broader world of commercial advertising and in the specific world of educational communications, the concept of brand is hopelessly confused. Indeed, it is so confused that no matter how diligently one tries to pull apart the threads, one fails. There are bloggers, article writers, and even established book authors who employ contradictory and inconsistent notions of brand. That’s not even to speak of the thousands of consultants, designers, and advertising firms who hold themselves out as experts on brand.

Why does it matter? It matters enormously if you are an institution looking to commission brand work. If you are not crystal clear you could easily end up talking to vendors with categorically different skill sets and ideas of what it means to do branding. Even more fundamentally, you might have constituencies within your community who are confused about what it means to “do branding.”

So let’s try to pull apart a few threads: the term “brand” can be used for two distinct and sometimes unconnected activities both of which have a legitimate place in the world of marketing. Both are important. But they are different.

Brand is used to refer to a particular approach to marketing strategy. A brand strategy is a consistently applied set of core messages and personality profile that are deployed throughout your organization to distinguish you from your competition and build mindshare with your target audience. Brand in this regard is an extremely powerful tool: it prevents consumers from reducing you to a set of indistinguishable services. It builds value, loyalty, and recognition.

A good brand strategy is a set of ideas that can be boiled down to fit on a single sheet of paper, although any serious brand strategy needs to be backed up by reams of high quality research. A brand strategy does not have a graphic dimension. It doesn’t matter how the words on the sheet of paper are typeset. A brand strategy is strictly conceptual. It drives creative execution, such as advertisements, logos, radio and TV, but it is not itself an advertisement, logo, radio or TV spot.

The second use of the term “brand” is employed when someone says, “My job is to enforce the brand on our publications.” Here, the person is talking about graphic standards. Normally, graphic standards involve a certain distinctive way of depicting the name of your organization. This is a logo or wordmark. Graphic standards generally also include rules on specific colors and typefaces to be used across all platforms. Enforcing consistent graphic standards is fundamental to effective communication. If you do not have control over your logo and your identity you are missing an opportunity to distinguish yourself in an overcrowded communications environment. However, this use of “brand,” referring to a set of graphic standards, is not the same as a “brand strategy.” In fact, in the real world, brand strategy and graphic standards may be only loosely connected.

Let’s take the issue of logos. As I mentioned, it is important to have a logo and employ it consistently. But often ridiculous and inflated claims are made for the ability of logos to advance the brand strategy. As one of the luminaries of logo design, Paul Rand, understood, great logos are largely neutral but tonally appropriate graphic images that accrue significance through repeated use. The great example of this is the IBM logo, which bears no inherent reference to the IBM product or service, but has become one of the great and enduring logos.

Brand as strategy and brand as graphic standards are both important. Neither can be reduced to the other. If you want to create a brand strategy for your institution, don’t hire a creative firm. And if you want to improve your graphic standards, don’t hire a research and strategy firm. Ideally find a vendor who knows that the former is conceptual and the latter is aesthetic. Yes, of course, the two should connect. How to connect them is a complicated topic. I’ll turn to that another day.