By Luke Anderson | Experience Designer

When we think about brands, we probably think of the way a company publicly expresses itself through words and pictures. Simple, right?

Not quite. When you look below the surface, you’ll find a brand is much more than that. Brands are powerful ways of creating value through human connection in two ways.

From the outside looking in, a brand has value when audiences outside the company engage with the brand’s messages and take meaning from that experience.

For example, Airbnb’s core purpose is for people to ‘belong anywhere’: a sentiment that rings true throughout the company, from business operations to the customer experience. My own personal experience with Airbnb gave me a connection with the brand not through any direct contact with Airbnb, but through the my host’s welcoming hospitality as they went above and beyond to share what the special parts of the local area. Interestingly, this all happened before Airbnb publicly shared their purpose and shows just how in-touch they are with how customers experience the brand.

From the inside looking out, brands are driven from a set of beliefs and principles in an organisation that coalesces as a sense of identity. People in the organisation uphold these as custodians of the brand.

Often, we see this second means of brand value being overlooked because branding is traditionally considered to be a marketing exercise. Looking at it that way misses half the story: employees are best placed to advocate for the brand’s cause and are ultimately the ones who bring the brand experience to life.

When it comes to branding (or any communication for that matter), we need to design for this duality if we are to strive for human connection.

In my role as an Experience Designer at STCK, I recently stewarded our team’s efforts to collectively design our brand: an activity that, in an experience design agency like ours, can be both simpler and more complicated than in other types of organisations.

The greatest value I took from this process was recognising that it takes iteration to facilitate diverse perspectives in a team.

With a range of backgrounds and experiences, we needed to come together several times to navigate the path from our unique perspectives to find common ground and alignment. We often found ourselves amongst a sea of post-it notes, locked in long discussion about the state of the world and how we fit in it…or debating about just the right word to characterise us. Around and around we went until we found the right things that aligned our perspectives.

Through all this iteration, the fact we are a team of designers worked in our favour. Each of us is accustomed to working this way, which allowed us to trust in the process as we unearthed what was important to us individually and collectively.

Making our way through the ambiguity of the creative process, I drew on a few principles to help us come together and drive alignment and advocacy for our brand.

1. Bring the team on the journey

One of our key catch-cries at STCK is ‘We do with not to.’

Involving the team early and using space to tap into group genius helps ensure participants have the time and space to explore the depth of creating a shared brand.

The creative process isn’t always straight-forward or linear. It often asks us to traverse many themes and revisit them, making connections and continuing to experiment until we reach clarity.

We want to strive for collective consciousness, allowing conversation to flow so a brand narrative begins to form. The fact each team member was present and participated as narrators of the shared story helped them feel understood and connected to the intent of the work.

2. A brand is born out of ethos

Just like a person, brands too should have their own belief systems and reasons for existing.

This is critical in setting the foundations for making decisions about how the brand expresses itself through identity and storytelling.

Consider how this all cascades: your purpose influences your beliefs, your beliefs distil your values. Combining these develops the brand’s attributes and personality and then translates to the decisions made about the brand’s identity system.

A brand is more than just words and pictures. There are deeper motivations at play that shape the tone of communication and influence how people experience the brand.

3. Meet the organisation where it is

Start with your goals. What does your organisation actually need from a brand at this point in its growth and goals? Look for the efforts that deliver the best value so you can advance those goals.

As exciting as it is to dream up big ideas about creating a splashy brand, you might find you’re biting off more than you can chew. It’s important to understand where your organisation is. Is it mature enough to pull off all-encompassing brand system and have it adopted through large-scale change, or does the team need something immediately accessible that can be built into existing processes and ways of working?

At STCK, we set ourselves an initial goal of achieving a ‘minimum loveable brand’, asking us to create something that was fit for purpose at our company’s growth stage.

Our brand journey has just begun

Creating a brand experience is an iterative process, so progress is more important than perfection as we keep growing.

From here, I’m looking forward to seeing us adopt our ‘minimum loveable brand’ in what we do every day. I can’t wait to see the team not only use our branded tools and resources, but actively express our brand ethos in the work we do and the experiences we create for our clients.