A guide to branding for brand sceptics - for the Guardian Social Enterprise Network
Brands are bad, right? Wrong, argues Kim Hawke. In fact, if you're more interested in making a difference than making a profit, your brand could be the greatest tool you never knew you had.
In a world where consumerism is no longer cool, brands are the bad guys. Designed to make people want more, buy more and waste more, brands and branding are not seen as natural bedfellows of those who want to create a more sustainable world.
But are brands themselves really such a malevolent force? Or can they instead be a force for good? To answer that, it's perhaps worth considering what a brand actually is.
Some people think it's a logo. Others that it's something an overpaid branding consultant comes in and creates for you. The superficial stuff, if you like. But, in truth it's none of that.
A brand is not a glossy brochure or something that's imposed upon you. It's simply who you are, sharpened and made visible and audible to the world. Or, as someone else once said, a brand is what people say about you when you're not in the room.
So, like it or not, we all have a brand. The question then becomes not whether you want to have a brand, but whether you want to have control over it. And it's control of the brand that can mean the difference between having a brand that's effective and a brand that does nothing for you.
What a brand does is help inform people's decisions and nudge them in the direction you want; towards your soap powder or towards more socially or environmentally responsible action.
But what does this mean for social enterprise?
Perhaps here more than any other sector, having a strong and consistent brand is not an option but a non-negotiable. Because as a social enterprise, you're competing directly with commercial enterprises for people's custom or attention, commercial enterprises that have often invested heavily in the development of their brands.
The challenge is to create a brand that supports both your sales and your social objectives. A good example of a brand that has managed to do just that is our client, Zaytoun, which introduced the world to fairtrade olive oil.
Zaytoun's ambition is a complex one – to help secure political, economic and social freedom for Palestine by giving Palestinian olive farmers a fair deal. However, customers don't buy problems, they buy solutions. So we worked with Zaytoun to build a brand that told their story in a way that was palatable to retailers and customers, but that in no way undersold the bigger social and political ambitions of the organisation.
We positioned Zaytoun Olive Oil as the olive oil for people who want to make a tangible difference to the lives of Palestinian farmers and their families. The key word here is tangible. Rival products such as Equal Exchange Palestinian oils and any own-brand Palestinian oils that supermarkets may bring onto the market will of course make a difference too. However, what distinguished the Zaytoun brand is that the link between customer and producer is genuinely closer than with other brands and therefore more tangible.
Developing Zaytoun's visual identity didn't just mean creating a stylish, consumer-facing image, but also communicating the very personal aspect of the brand in simple, yet effective ways. For example, on the olive oil bottle itself we added a brief message from the two founders of Zaytoun:
This warm, green, peppery oil tastes beautiful straight from the press.
We know this because every year we visit Palestine to help our farmers bring home their olive harvest.
We hope you enjoy every drop of this gorgeous oil knowing that it makes a difference to the people who have made it for you by hand in the face of conflict.
Heather and Cathi
The result was a strong, consistent and recognisable brand that put Zaytoun in the spotlight and on shop shelves. In doing so, it opened up the product and the cause to a mainstream social audience. A 30% increase in sales was just one positive outcome of this.
Of course, finding, honing and protecting your brand costs time and money. Time and money, you could argue, that would be better spent doing the good work you set out to do in the first place. But when you consider the power the best brands have to inspire action and unite people in their choice of product (or cause), even the strongest brand sceptic might agree that a brand is one investment you simply can't afford to be without.
Finding your brand – questions to ask:
What is the social or environmental need or problem (as you see it)?
How does your social enterprise solve this need/problem?
Why was this need/problem not solved before?
What makes you unique?
When you have these answers, you can begin to build the story of your brand, or what we call the brand narrative.
Some further reading:
The Brand Gap: How to Bridge the Distance Between Business Strategy and Design by Marty Neumeier
What Is Branding? by Matthew Healey
Brand Channel
Brand Karma
Logo Design Love
Seth Godin
Kim Hawke is an account director at Neo - a communications agency committed to positive change
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