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Brand is what separates the best companies in the world from the rest. Period.
- Branders Magazine
- 10 hours ago
- 5 min read
Your brand is the entire ecosystem around your company that leads to a perception—an emotional response—in the hearts and minds of your customers.
By Bill Kenney, CEO, Co-Founder at Focus Lab
We all interact with brand touchpoints every hour of every day. Sometimes you realize it, often you don’t. That's where the power of brand lies. The world’s most influential organizations, like Apple, Nike, and Coca-Cola, have understood this for decades. Winning organizations lead with brand.
So why doesn’t everyone follow this winning formula?
Walk into any room and say the word “brand,” and you’ll hear dozens of definitions. Most will center around visuals—logos, colors, maybe a tagline if you’re lucky. A logo is the easiest part to see and remember. It’s a fixed, simplified artifact. It shows up on websites, social profiles, signage, and clothing. So, naturally, when someone says “We need a new brand,” they usually mean “We don’t like our logo.” This misconception is dangerous. It limits an organization's ability to truly leverage brand as a superpower.
LET’S DEFINE BRAND
Your brand is your company's entire ecosystem that creates perception and trust. It’s how your audience feels about you, not just how they recognize you. The real question isn’t “Do we need a new logo?” It’s “Do people get who we are, what we stand for, and why we’re different?”
To answer those questions, you need an orchestra of moving parts. The logo is the first note the audience hears. But real resonance comes from harmony—the strategy, story, visuals, voice, product, and internal culture all playing in sync. When done well, your brand becomes music your audience feels, even if they can’t name every instrument.
Brand is your product AND your company's mission. It’s your track record of customer experiences AND your packaging. It’s the way you show up in public AND the culture you have behind closed doors. It’s the sum of every decision you make, every impression you leave, and every moment you shape.
Here’s our definition at Focus Lab:
Your brand is the entire ecosystem around your company that leads to a perception—an emotional response—in the hearts and minds of your customers.
When done right, your brand aligns every part of your business around a single, cohesive identity. This alignment reduces friction. It accelerates decision-making. It improves recruitment, fundraising, customer loyalty, and internal culture. In other words, brand pays dividends across the board–if you look at it correctly. I.e., not just a logo.
In my book, Conquer Your Rebrand, I said: “Branding is a top-line business effort that has a direct and powerful impact on marketing and growth.” Said plainly, your brand is not a marketing tool. It’s not something you deploy within a department. Brand is the foundation you build on. It’s what gives shape and cohesion to every other business decision.” I’m not in the branding business, I’m in the organizational alignment business. Alignment creates momentum. Momentum creates value.
And all of that is precisely why brand is misunderstood by most. The breadth of it makes it hard for most to define. But those who do understand it and invest in it feel the full impact.
REAL LIFE IMPACTS OF BRAND CLARITY
In 2016, customer engagement platform Appboy knew they needed to level up. They had just raised Series C funding and were planning for scale. First, they partnered with our friend David Placek at Lexicon on a rename, becoming Braze. Then we stepped in to lead the brand's visual, verbal, and website transformation. Their new collective identity, paired with their market-leading product plus thriving culture, created precise alignment with their future ambitions.
What happened next? Braze raised $80 million in Series E funding. Then, went public! Brand gave Braze the clarity, confidence, and consistent identity across all touchpoints to accelerate. Brand is a propellant, not a luxury.
This is not hyperbole or a one-off event. Here’s a story to add more flavor.
Every now and then, our Focus Lab team and I travel to a client’s headquarters, spending the day completing discovery exercises. On one of these occasions in Seattle, we’d just completed our archetypes exercise and found ourselves on a break. While sitting around a giant oak table in a glass-walled conference room, a member of the client’s team casually asked me, “Bill, why does it seem that every company Focus Lab works with is wildly successful? They either secure new rounds of capital immediately or get acquired. What’s in the water?”
Everyone waited for me to reveal the magic answer. I pondered for a moment, then said, “Honestly, I can’t suggest that we’re the secret ingredient in every successful partnership. It boils down to a commonality our clients share: a clear understanding and deep appreciation for brand. Our clients recognize that if they get their brand right, they will have a big leg up in their journey.” This answer surprised everyone in the room. After all, it was almost as if the question was planned to make me look good. So I could say, “It’s us!” The truth was it’s bigger than us. It’s upstream from my company, when our partners realize that brand is going to be their best path forward in leading their market.
SO WHAT DOES THE LOGO DO?
If you’ve made it this far, you might think I’m downplaying the importance of a logo. Let me be clear: I’m not. Logos absolutely matter. Your logo is an identifier. A visual cue to help customers distinguish you from others.
At Focus Lab, we often say the logo is like a “flag”—a rallying symbol for everything your brand stands for. When done right, it becomes a visual shorthand for the trust, clarity, and emotion your brand has built over time. Consider the Nike swoosh, McDonald's golden arches, or Apple’s iconic bitten apple. Those logos didn’t build brand equity on their own via the design—they’ve become iconic because of what they’ve come to represent.
In the words of brand icon Michael Bierut, “A logo is an empty vessel awaiting the meaning that will be poured into it by history and experience.”
But what makes a logo great, technically speaking?
Simplicity: Great logos are simple in design. Enough to be recognized at a glance and remembered without effort. They avoid unnecessary complexity so they can live clearly in the minds of the customer. They’re not meant to tell rich stories. Some can, but that’s not the goal. But note, simplicity doesn’t mean removing all personality for something extremely modern and “clean.” You still need to create a logo that is an accurate reflection of your company’s attributes. The Starbucks logo is a good example of not losing the soul of the business for the sake of simplicity.
Scalability: Ensure that your logo performs consistently across all sizes—from a highway billboard to a mobile app icon to a favicon in a browser tab. No matter where it shows up, it needs to hold its integrity. For more complex logo solutions, this might mean having two versions of your logo. Consider how W.B. Mason uses a fully illustrated, heavily detailed logo on their trucks, versus what they might use on their email signatures and social media. Again, you can get creative with how you achieve scalability. This rule doesn’t mean water down your solution to the safest, scalable outcome. Boring!
Versatility: Successful logos work in full color, black and white, reversed out, stacked, or horizontal, across all mediums and use cases. If a logo only works on a homepage and fails everywhere else, you’re in for a world of pain. Both in creating new assets and cementing your logo into the minds of your customers.
When these three principles are considered, your logo becomes more than a design element—it becomes a strategic tool. A brand asset.
As this issue of Branders rightly highlights, logos are worthy of attention, care, and craft. Once paired inside a larger, clearly aligned brand system, logos become a beacon.
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