Cosmetic vs Strategic Branding

This article is drawn from our Designing Tomorrow podcast, Season 2 - Episode 08. Season 2 episodes are conversations between Jonathan Hicken, Executive Director of the Seymour Marine Discovery Center, and Cosmic’s Creative Director, Eric Ressler. The conversation has been edited for brevity and readability.
 

There's a spectrum of cosmetic to strategic branding that a really good brand should hit. Let’s walk through some of the more cosmetic elements of a brand and some of the more strategic elements of a brand.

The Logo: A Powerful Symbol, but Not a Brand

A good brand has some cosmetic elements and some strategic elements as well. Let's start with the most obvious thing that people think of as being synonymous with brand — the logo. As designers and logo geeks, we spent a lot of time in our early days painstakingly crafting logos. And we still do this for clients. Logos are absolutely important, but the longer we've been doing this work, oddly, the less we actually care about logos. They're important, but… 

At the end of the day, the logo is really a symbol that represents everything else that makes a brand. We spend time painstakingly crafting logos and perfecting little elements and getting into those little details and thinking about them from a bigger picture standpoint because we've all seen the power of what a logo can represent. But if we use the common example of the Nike Swoosh, the Nike Swoosh doesn't really mean anything. There is some meaning behind it, but intuitively it doesn't mean anything. Nike has spent a lot of time, energy, effort and money teaching people what that symbol means through their real world actions as a brand. 

The logo is the most obvious cosmetic element of a brand, but there's other cosmetic elements of branding as well. And we want to reiterate here, cosmetic might sound like a negative framing for this element of branding. This is still really important. But cosmetic branding fails if you don't also encapsulate some of the more strategic elements of branding. 

For Example:

You might see a press release from a major basketball team releasing new logos or new looks and they break down all these logos into the tiniest details. And you think, so what? That has nothing to do with basketball or this has nothing to do with the team in any way, shape, or form. We’ve seen that in the social impact space too, where sometimes an organization hides behind the work they put into the logo a little bit. They disproportionately weight the meaning behind the logo. They can spend hours and days and weeks on this, but at the end of the day, it's meaningless. It carries no weight or purpose if the symbology’s not backed up with real world action and real world responsibility.

Visual Brand Identity: The Full Package

We've been guilty of creating logos that have hidden meanings and that's fun and that's cool. And having those Easter eggs, there's not anything wrong with that, but no one is thinking about that when they're interacting with your brand. And again, the logo can be very powerful as a symbol or a fingerprint for your brand, but it is not your full brand. 

Let's talk about a couple other things that make up what we would call a visual brand identity. They’re still more on the cosmetic side of the spectrum, but still really important. These are things like your colors or your color palette. 

A lot of brands — and this is a good strategy if you can do it — really lean in on owning one single color and becoming very well-known for that color. You've maybe even seen examples online where people post just the colors of brands and people are able to associate that color palette with the brand even without seeing the logo or a name on the brand.

But for an organization that’s not looking to become a household name, is that really something they should spend a lot of time on?

After doing this work for a long time, we’ve learned that all of these elements matter, but none of them matter in a silo. It's kind of like the package is what matters. We've built a lot of brands and a lot of visual identity systems, brands and color specifically and logo and some of these other elements that we'll get to that are more on the cosmetic side of the spectrum. They do matter in a subconscious way, even in brand recognition — teaching your audience that you use certain colors. When you do that in a consistent way, you are starting to create some level of consistency that people can start to expect and associate with your brand. And that consistency starts to build credibility and a reputation for your brand. Again, that’s only when they're backed up by other real world actions that you're taking and when you’re delivering on your brand promise.

The Danger of Inconsistency

When visual brand identity elements are not consistent; when your logo is being used in all kinds of weird ways, when you don't have a consistent intentional color palette that you're using, then all of a sudden you’re purple one week and then green the next week because an intern decided that. Having it dialed in is a helpful way to continuously teach people that you have a brand and this is how your brand shows up visually.

Unify all of Your Visual Brand Elements

There’s much more to the visual expression of the brand. These are things like imagery, photography, graphics, illustrations, icons, patterns, collages — any kind of visual expression or extension of the brand. 

We spend a lot of time on this when we're working with clients because this is often what can separate and distinguish your brand. And sometimes it can be the photo style. Is it really raw and authentic or video? Some of these visual mediums can really round out and extend the brand. 

Now we're starting to really get a little bit more strategic on the spectrum. These are still arguably cosmetic elements, but if they're used strategically, they can also be very powerful for communication.

Your Brand is a System

It’s really the sum of the parts. How do you use fonts and colors and icons and illustrations together in a way that is distinct? And that is a system, a design system, a brand identity system that has a coherent point of view. That's the work in developing a visual identity system.

Tone & Voice: Your Brand’s Verbal and Written Identity

There's more to a brand than a visual identity system. The next element is tone and voice. Now we're starting to bridge the gap between visuals and written or spoken expression for a brand. Tone and voice are related to the visuals. What's the visual tone? What's the visual voice of a brand? But now we're really starting to get into messaging. And messaging is the midpoint in this spectrum between cosmetic elements of your brand and more strategic elements of your brand. 

How you tell your story — how you say what you say — is a very strategic element. We're starting to get into the story that you're telling. We'll get into more messaging elements in a while, but tone and voice is something that doesn't get nearly enough attention in rebranding efforts or in brand building in general. 

But to be clear, some audiences are paying more attention to the visual brand, some audiences are paying more attention to the tone. Are these brand elements attracting certain kinds of support?

We all learn differently and we all have different tendencies around what captures attention for us. Some people are much more visually inclined. As designers, we’re very visually inclined. So what tends to catch our attention is some distinct, interesting, unique visual hooks. But our team are also readers and spend a lot of time writing. And so a lot of times, the personality of a brand really comes through in the words, in the written word and the spoken word through video. 

But there's no one way of doing this. We've built brands that have a very bold visual aesthetic as a strategic intentional choice, and then that gets paired with really bold copy to drive that point home. And then other times you can go really bold visually, but then balance that with the counterpoint on the written side of things. So there's a way of mixing these ingredients together.

Target Audiences: Who Are You Really Talking To?

Let's get deeper into the strategic side of the spectrum of brand building, starting with target audience. 

• Who are you actually trying to reach in your branding and your marketing? 
• How are you breaking those audiences down? 

This is not cosmetic anymore, though all of these strategic elements should and can influence the cosmetic elements as well. Because if you understand who your audience is and what might resonate with them, you're going to make different choices around things like tone and voice, the colors, the fonts, the imagery you use, even the logo potentially.

Understanding your audience is one of the most difficult steps in the branding process. If you think you've gotten your audience targeted, get it one step narrower, go one step deeper. And when you think you're there, go another step deeper. Really, really getting down to that intimate level of understanding somebody's motivations, what makes them tick. You’ve got to get that nailed. 

To be clear, we're talking about branding from most cosmetic to least cosmetic. When we do branding work for clients — and especially rebrands — target audience is one of the very first things we do. It’s very preliminary in our work.

Niche: Your Position in Your Cause Ecosystem

The next one is one of our favorites — niche. We're talking about how you position your organization amongst the broader impact ecosystem and how you differentiate your organization from other similar organizations in that ecosystem. 

This is obviously very strategic. You have to get clear on your niche in order to be strategic and creative in some of the cosmetic elements of a brand. One of the very first things that we do when we're doing a branding project is a landscape review. We look at the ecosystem, the social impact ecosystem or issue area and see who is out there in this space. We study how they’re presenting themselves visually, how they present themselves from a messaging standpoint. And we audit that and look at the colors. 

And what's really interesting is — not always, but almost always — there's a color associated with every niche. So a lot of conservation brands are blues and greens. A lot of activist brands are black and white and yellow. So there's some amount of space branding when it comes to color and typography — a lot of the more cosmetic elements of branding. 

We're often making contradictory color choices, sometimes contradictory font choices or even messaging choices to help our clients really stand out. Now, of course, you don't want to stand out in a bad way or a way that feels not in alignment with the work that you're doing or the niche that you're in. So there's a balance that has to be struck there. That's just one small example of how we connect something like niche into one of the more cosmetic elements of branding.

Mission, Vision, and Values: Anchors of Meaning

The next element that's really strategic when it comes to branding is your mission, vision, and values. Oftentimes when clients come to us, they've already got a working mission statement and/or vision statement. Maybe that needs some adjustment. Maybe it doesn't. They might have some brand values they've done. These are very strategic elements that are squarely in the brand building bucket. And you can see how these elements drastically influence all of the other elements as well. 

Prioritizing the Development of Brand Elements

Let’s break down how we approach this in terms of order.

1. When we're doing branding work, the very first thing we do is landscape review, look at the space, understand the space. We do a bunch of discovery work alongside that.
    
2. Mission, vision, values, and niche we do in parallel because they're so synergistic with one another. And we look to see if there is a clearly defined niche for the organization.
   • Do they have a clear position?
   • Have they figured out how to articulate their differentiation?
   • Do they have an operating model or an approach that's distinct and unique, and does that influence the mission and the vision?
   • Does their model influence their values? 
      
3. We do all of the target audience work to figure out what the audiences are that we need to reach in order to realize their mission and vision.

From there we expand into developing some of the more creative aspects of the brand — all the way through the cosmetic work and messaging such as brand story along with tone and voice. And then we get all the way back to imagery, fonts, colors and logo. A lot of the cosmetic stuff is branching off of the deeper strategic pillars that we're establishing up front.

Navigating the Spectrum: A Flexible, Purposeful Approach

Be prepared to adjust the mission and vision and values as a part of a branding or rebranding process — understanding that the adjustments you may make are going to be great. Many social impact organizations come to us with the mindset that the mission or the vision or the values were set in stone. And they're locked into what they think are divine values. 

But the branding process is about strengthening those things and not abandoning them. This mindset can really unlock the creativity and the power of the brand building work. That's sometimes challenging for leaders who've been with organizations for a long time. They can feel a sense of loyalty — to the mission statements and vision statements and whatnot. And frankly, it's hard to let those go sometimes. 

To be honest, sometimes we will bring on a client and look at mission, vision, values or different elements of this brand spectrum and determine that some of them still work. We don't need to reinvent the wheel if it's still working. Sometimes mission, vision, and values are very closely locked in. 

Changing brand elements often requires a ton of board approval and all kinds of community stakeholder input. We look at the pros and cons of doing that and decide — given where you are as an organization — if it’s worth going through that? And sometimes the answer is absolutely yes. And sometimes the answer is that there's still a lot of really good branding work that can be done without touching mission, vision, or values. 

This happens all the time with logos. People get very attached to logos. Logos again, are symbols that represent an organization and how they've shown up in the world. We design and redesign logos all the time. But not all the time. We look at all the other elements and we can still do extremely effective strategic rebranding — even reinventing the visual identity system — but keep the logo or maybe do a very slight, very subtle refresh on that logo that doesn't rock the boat too much for the community. 

Finding the Balance: Your Place on the Spectrum

There's not any one right way to determine where you land on the spectrum of cosmetic to strategic branding. When you're thinking about doing a rebrand, do you necessarily need to hit every point on this spectrum? Not necessarily. 

Should you ever do just a cosmetic rebrand? Not so much, in our opinion. Every once in a while if everything happens to be great, except the brand's just looking kind of a little dusty and kind of out of style, maybe there's some edge cases where a slight refresh, where you don't rethink things deeply makes sense. But frankly, we don't really see that all that much. 

On the flip side though, there are times where you can rethink some of the strategic elements of branding, and that doesn't necessarily mean you have to redo some of the more cosmetic side of the rebrand. So you can do things like change your niche and your vision and your mission and redo some of your messaging, but keep your visual identity system if it still feels like it's appropriate and it still works. 

Understand that this is a set of tools in the branding tool belt. We may need to lean on one more than another depending on where your organization is, how mature it is, or how big of a pivot you might be setting yourself up for. That's really helpful. 

For example, at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History, we didn't change the logo. Instead, we helped them take the existing logo and supercharge it so that it was even more effective in all of their assets and language. But in other cases, it was almost purely cosmetic with some underlying strategic shifts for the team and how they talk about the brand story and message.

Thoughtful Branding: An Influence on Impact

Social impact leaders are used to creating strategic plans. But most don’t take into account how strategic brand building can influence their impact. Organizations with solid brands attract donors and funders. They attract supporters and give communities something to rally around. Use the spectrum of cosmetic to strategic branding as a way of thinking about what’s most important to impact when you’re including a rebrand as part of your strategic plan. When done thoughtfully, it’s one more tool you have to help grow your impact.