Brand DNA – The Soul of Your Business

As part of the ‘Ingredients for Ecommerce Success‘ Series, we wrote a piece about how a Brand helps you to deliver your Value Proposition in a more consistent way and if done right, allow you to differentiate your offer in the blink of an eye. This article looks at your Brand DNA. It’s advanced stuff – and hard.

A Brand is More than a Logo

If ecommerce success is a matter of having the right ingredients and following the recipe, branding is more like alchemy – the distillation and purification of ideas, concepts, feelings and promises into gold!

If done right, your Brand is the personality, the soul, the DNA of your business. It’s what you use to clone new limbs and muscles. This is not the same as a logo, or a corporate identity – which in this analogy might be your face.

Focus on your Core

Brand marketing people who have worked for well established brands at companies like Unilever or Diageo have been able to distill all that a brand stands for into a phrase or a set of words that everything else builds from. This is sometimes called the brand core or essence.

This is not a strap-line or vision statement. Slogans come and go, derived from the brand-core. Sometimes, the brand core concepts are unknown to consumers and in some cases, almost unable to be guessed.

Guinness – A Case Study

Once upon a time, a marketing person who was responsible for Guinness, the dark coloured Irish stout, told me that there were three words at the core of the brand. I could give you 100 guesses and you might get 1 out of the 3. But once you know them, they make a lot of sense. They are….

Goodness ~ Power ~ Communion

The Words at the Core of Guinness

Goodness. Not a word you would typically associate with a beer. But a word that has appeared in Guinness advertisements for decades. In 1929, the brand used a campaign – ‘Guinness is Good for You‘ – and there are some arguments to justify this claim.

Power. In the 1930s, Guiness ran ads with the slogan – ‘Guiness for Strength’, which they might not get away with today, however the more modern ads still have this word at the core. Take a look at ‘The Surfer‘, a black and white TV commercial from 1998 which features horses in pounding waves. Why was the ad in black and white? Look at a glass of Guinness. The power theme also comes through in some of the sports that the brand supports – like rugby.

Communion. A secular definition of this word is ‘an act or instance of sharing.’ This in and of itself makes a lot of sense for a beer brand. Many campaigns feature friends together, sharing a drink and a moment. Once again, Rugby is a team sport with a close camaraderie . However, that is not the whole story. Guinness is an Irish brand – in fact its hard to think of an Irish brand recognised more globally. Communion has a very different definition for the predominantly Catholic Irish population. Having this word at the core of the brand gives everything that Guinness does a deeper meaning.

Refine, Distill, Concentrate…

These days, a brand is just as likely to share much of its DNA with the founder of the company. Think about Virgin or Apple or Tesla. Try to imagine those brands without thinking of Richard Branson, Steve Jobs or Elon Musk.

That’s one way to go. Take the personalities and traits of the founding team and use that as a starting point.

Or, if your brand is very different to the people who are driving it, you can use a ‘Mad Men’ style exercise to imagine your brand as a person.

It’s not easy. It takes concentration and time. But it’s worth it.