Cosmetic vs. Strategic Branding

Branding is about far more than just slick, eye-catching aesthetics.

What truly transforms an organization is a brand built on vision and strategy. Without a clear strategy, positioning, and messaging, the aesthetic elements like logos, fonts, and colors won’t do anything to create lasting impact.

Branding goes beyond visuals. It’s about aligning every aspect of the organization with its purpose, values, and audience.

A successful rebrand requires more than just a great logo—it demands a strategic mix of:

→ Brand Strategy

→ Positioning and differentiation

→ Messaging

→ And, of course, the aesthetic elements like fonts, colors, photography, and logos

In this episode, we break down the difference between approaching branding as a purely aesthetic exercise versus a deeply strategic process, and how a well-thought-out rebrand can help your social impact organization create meaningful change.

Episode Highlights 

• [00:00] Introduction to the Branding Spectrum 
• [01:01] Cosmetic vs. Strategic Branding
• [04:40] Color and Visual Identity 
• [09:27] Tone, Voice, and Messaging 
• [12:21] Target Audience and Niche 
• [16:11] Mission, Vision, and Values

Quotes

• “A really good brand should hit a lot of different points on the spectrum from cosmetic to strategic.” - Eric Ressler [00:30]
• “Logos are absolutely important, but all of the other things that make a brand are significantly more important than the logo.” - Eric Ressler [01:41]
• “The logo can be very powerful as a symbol or a fingerprint for your brand, but it is not your full brand.” - Eric Ressler [02:37]
• “Sometimes we can hide behind the work we put into the logo a little bit. It carries no weight or purpose if you’re not backing it up with real world action.” - Jonathan Hicken [03:48]
• “Potentially getting your audience right is one of the most difficult steps in this process.” - Jonathan Hicken [13:14]
• “Target audience is one of the very first things we do. It’s very preliminary in our work.” - Eric Ressler [13:20]
• “The number one thing I wish I would have been ready to do going into rebranding efforts was be prepared to adjust the mission and vision and values.” - Jonathan Hicken [18:23]

Resources

• Social Impact Branding
• Navigating a Rebrand: Nine Common Mistakes to Avoid
• Want to Scale Your Social Impact? Your Brand is the Fuel
• Beyond Aesthetics: The ROI of Brand Building

Transcript

Eric Ressler [00:00]:

Jonathan, when I say the word brand, what's the very first word that comes to mind for you? 

Jonathan Hicken:

Niche. 

Eric Ressler:

Oh, nice. Yeah, I like that answer. So what I wanted to do today is spend a little bit of time talking about the difference between cosmetic branding and strategic branding. And as I was preparing the outline for this episode, I actually came to a realization that there's almost a spectrum of cosmetic to strategic that a really good brand should hit a lot of different points on the spectrum. So today I want to talk through what some of the more cosmetic elements of a brand are and what some of the more strategic elements of a brand are you in? 

Jonathan Hicken:

Let's go. 

Eric Ressler [01:01]:

So as I talked about, I think that really, a good brand has some cosmetic elements, obviously, right? And some strategic elements as well. So let's start with the most obvious and the thing that I think a lot of people do really think of as being synonymous with brand, which is logo. I'm a designer. I've been a designer for a long time. I'm kind of a logo geek. I've been a logo geek for a long time as well. In my early design days, I spent so much time just painstakingly crafting logos. And we still do this for clients. Logos are absolutely important, but the longer I've been doing this work, oddly, the less I actually care about logos. Interesting. And I still think they're important, don't get me wrong, but I actually think all of the other things that make a brand are significantly more important than the logo.

[01:51]:

And the logo at the end of the day is really a symbol that represents everything else that makes a brand. And so again, logos are important. 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 I think 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. So the logo is the most obvious cosmetic element of a brand, but there's other cosmetic elements of branding as well. And I just want to reiterate here, cosmetic might sound kind of like a negative framing for this element of branding. This is still really important. I think that cosmetic branding where it fails is if you don't also encapsulate some of the more strategic elements of branding. I'm sure you've seen what I would call a cosmetic rebrand and kind of the negatives of that. Are there any examples that come to mind or have you seen that in your work?

Jonathan Hicken [03:10]:

Yeah, I mean, I'm a sports fan, so I follow basketball and you see these press releases from these teams releasing new logos or new looks or whatever, and they break down all these logos into the tiniest details. And I've gotten to the point where I see these press releases. I'm like, so what? That has nothing to do with basketball or this has nothing to do with the team in any way, shape, or form. And I've seen that in the social impact space too, where I think sometimes we can hide behind the work we put into the logo a little bit. We disproportionately weight the meaning behind the logo, and we 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 you're not backing up the symbology with real world action and real world responsibility.

Eric Ressler [03:56]:

Yeah, totally. And I think we've all been guilty of this, of creating these logos that have these hidden meanings and that's fun and that's cool. And having those Easter eggs, there's something necessarily 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. So let's talk about a couple other things that are still kind of more on the cosmetic side of the spectrum, but still really important that make up what I would call like a visual brand identity. 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. So any thoughts on just generally how color has been used for branding and if that's something you've experienced?

Jonathan Hicken [04:56]:

Look, I think for most of us listening to this, the conversation about color or owning a color is probably out of reach in terms of the size of our organization or becoming a household name. So there is a part of me as an executive director that I'm already starting to think to myself, does this really matter when it comes to even the elements of cosmetic braining that are important, which I acknowledge that they are, but in my position, in my day-to-day, I'm already thinking past the color itself. I can geek out with the best of 'em on this stuff. But I do wonder really at the scale of the organizations that we run, I imagine a lot of our listeners are running, is that really something we should spend a lot of time on? I

Eric Ressler [05:39]:

Think yes and no, right? So I think after doing this work for a long time, what I've learned is that all of these elements matter, but none of them matter in a silo, right? It's kind of like the package is what matters. So 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, starting to teach your audience, Hey, when we use this logo, when we use these colors and some of these other elements that we'll get to in a minute, 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, only when they're backed up by other real world actions that you're taking and coming through on your brand promise.

[06:39]:

But I would say maybe the more dangerous thing is when these things 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 and then all of a sudden your purple one week and then green the next week because the intern on Canva decided they were green this week or whatever it is. So it's almost like not having this dialed in is the real problem, but having it dialed in is just kind of a helpful way to continuously teach people that you have a brand and this is how your brand shows up visually.

[07:17]:

What I am going to kind of describe this next package is the visual expression of the brand. These are things like imagery, photography that you use, graphics, illustrations, icons, collages, any kind of visual expression or extension of the brand, patterns, diagrams even. How do you visually communicate as a brand? And 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 from others is how do you show up visually? And sometimes it can be the photo style, is it really raw and authentic or motion video, right? Some of these visual mediums that can really round out and extend the brand. And so I'm sure you've seen examples of this working. 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.

Jonathan Hicken [08:13]:

I'm immediately starting to think about how we would use those elements to align ourselves with a movement or a space or an industry. I'm curious, my mind's going through, I work in the science education space and I'm wondering about the use of shapes or imagery that my audience will recognize as scientific in nature or educational in nature and how we link those, the concepts that they're used to and the other brands that they see and what they might find at my organization. So clearly there's meaning here.

Eric Ressler [08:45]:

Totally. And then I think it's really, again, 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, but there's more to it than that obviously. And the next element is tone and voice, and now we're starting to bridge the gap between visuals and written or spoken expression for a brand. And I think tone and voice could describe the visuals to some degree. 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 I think is kind of the midpoint in this spectrum between cosmetic elements of your brand and more strategic elements of your brand because how you tell your story, how you say what you say is kind of a cosmetic element to some degree, but it's really also a very strategic element. We're starting to get into what is even the story that you're telling, and we'll start to get into more messaging elements in a while. But I personally feel like tone and voice is something that doesn't get nearly enough attention in rebranding efforts or in brand building in general, and in certain ways can be a real superpower when you develop a distinct point of view, a distinct voice as a brand. Yeah,

Jonathan Hicken [10:06]:

I think the use of words is the single most important thing to get right in this conversation. So far. Whenever I'm hiring people on my team, I'm looking for people who are excellent writers and communicators, whether written or verbal. So I'm right there with you. I mean, I think this is something that you got to nail this conversation, Eric is making me think about fiction authors and we think about as readers, do we read books because we care about characters or we care about plot, or we care about how the author writes these different elements that we connect to. So I wonder, does the same thing happen for audiences of social impact brands? Some audiences are paying more attention to the visual brand, some audiences are paying more attention to the tone, and maybe is that attracting certain support or not?

Eric Ressler [10:51]:

Well, I think we all learn differently and we all have different tendencies around what captures attention for us. Some people are much more visually inclined. I'm a very visually inclined person, so what tends to catch my attention is some kind of distinct, interesting, unique visual that hooks me in. But I'm also a huge reader and I spend a lot of time writing, a lot of time reading. And so a lot of times I feel like the personality of a brand really comes through in the words, in the written word and the spoken word through video. But it really just depends, right? 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 really just drive that point home. And then other times you can go really bold or in one direction visually, but then kind of balance that with the counterpoint on the written side of things. So there's a whole way of mixing these ingredients together.

[12:02]:

Let's get to a couple other elements that now we're really starting to get on the more strategic side of the spectrum of building a brand. And the next one that I have is target audience. So this starts to get into who are you actually trying to reach in your branding and your marketing? How are you breaking those audiences down? This is not a cosmetic thing anymore. Very clearly we're in the strategic side, but what I want to make a point on with all of these is 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

Jonathan Hicken [12:45]:

Getting your audience is one of the most difficult steps in this process I have seen for myself and with other colleagues who've gone through similar exercises. And my advice here is if you think you've gotten your audience targeted, get it one step narrower, go one step deeper and you think you're there, go another step deeper. I mean really, really getting down to that intimate level of understanding of somebody's motivations, what makes them tick. You got to get that nailed. And so I'm glad to hear that you're bringing this up as a key pillar of the strategic branding.

Eric Ressler [13:20]:

And I mean, just to add on to that, we're talking about this in order of most cosmetic to least cosmetic. And when we actually do branding work for clients and especially rebrands, target audience is one of the very first things we do, is very preliminary in our work because if we don't have a clear sense of the audience, how can we make strategic or creative decisions at all? Right? So that's definitely an early one.

[13:53]:

And the next one is one of our favorites, niche. So we're talking about how do you position your organization amongst the broader impact ecosystem and how do you differentiate your organization from other similar organizations in that ecosystem? This is obviously very strategic. We've argued and discussed this many times in other episodes, there was a lot of content around niche. In season one, we will continue to talk about niche probably for because it's so important, but this is again, I think related to target audience, something that is so preliminary, you have to get clear on your niche in order to be strategic and creative in some of the cosmetic elements of a brand.

Jonathan Hicken [14:30]:

Eric, can you link something that you said on the most cosmetic side of the spectrum to to the niche, which is how do you use color to help establish your niche?

Eric Ressler [14:43]:

So one of the very first things that we do when we're doing a branding project is what we call a landscape review. So we'll look at the ecosystem, the social impact ecosystem or issue area and see who is out there in this space, how are they presenting themselves visually, how are they presenting themselves from a messaging standpoint? And we'll audit that and we'll look at color. And what's really interesting is not always, but almost always, there's kind of 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, even typography, tone, like a lot of these more cosmetic elements of branding. One of the things we're doing is we're looking at, again, with regards to differentiation. How can we create a brand that is memorable and distinct within that niche? And so 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. But that's just one small example of how we connect something like niche into one of the more cosmetic elements of branding.

[16:11]:

So the next element that's really strategic when it comes to branding is your mission, your vision, and your values. So oftentimes when clients come to us, they've already got maybe a working mission statement, vision statement, maybe that needs some adjustment, maybe it doesn't. They've got some brand values they've done. Sometimes may not always. We did an episode on brand values episode six, where you gave our listeners some tips around how to actually make brand values more actionable, which I think was really great. So definitely listen to that if you haven't ERs. But these are very strategic elements and still in my opinion, squarely in the brand building bucket. And you can see how these elements drastically influence all of the other elements as well. And in terms of order, I'm just going to give a little breakdown of how we approach this in terms of order.

[17:00]:

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, but I want to keep it to these points in this episode. Then we start to look at things like mission, vision, values and niche kind of in parallel because they're so synergistic with one another. And we'll look at is there a clearly defined niche for this 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 that influence the values? So these are some of the core things that we'll do early on. Alongside that, we'll also do all of this target audience work to figure out, well, given our decisions that we've made here, here are the audiences that we know we need to reach order to realize that mission, realize that vision. And then we start to expand off of that into developing some of the more creative all the way through cosmetic work such as brand story, messaging, tone and voice. And then getting all the way back to imagery, fonts, colors and logo. A lot of the cosmetic stuff is branching off of these deeper strategic pillars that we're establishing upfront. I know we've done some branding work together, you've done some branding work outside of the work we've done together. How does this all track with your experience? I'm sure you've had a few different experiences with Rebrands.

Jonathan Hicken [18:24]:

Looking back on it, the number one thing I wish I would've been ready to do going into rebranding efforts was be prepared to adjust the mission and vision and values as a part of the process and understanding that actually the adjustments we may make are going to be great, right? I guess I've come into, historically I came into these projects with this sense that the mission or the vision or the values were set in stone, right? And these were locked in divine values. And once I started to allow myself to let you, a leader show us that there were ways of strengthening those things and not abandoning them, I think that really unlocked the creativity and the power of the work. And I think that that's something that's challenging, especially for those of us who've been with organizations for a long time. We feel a sense of loyalty, right? To these mission statements and vision statements and whatnot. And frankly, it's hard to let those go sometimes. So I do think that it's something going into a rebrand, a strategic rebrand process that if you can approach it with openness that it may need to adjust or change, the result is arguably going to be stronger.

Eric Ressler [19:36]:

Sometimes we will bring a client on and look at mission, vision and values or different elements of this spectrum of what makes a brand and say, you know what? That part still works. We don't need to reinvent the wheel if it's still working. Sometimes mission, vision and values are very closely locked in. It requires a ton of board approval and all kinds of community stakeholder input to change those things. And we say, what's the pros and cons of doing that? Is that worth it at this point given where you are as an organization going through that? And sometimes the answer is absolutely yes. And sometimes the answer is, you know what? 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.

[20:27]:

And so we will absolutely redesign logos all the time. We do that, but all the time we don't. Right? And we look at all these other elements, and we can still do extremely effective strategic rebranding, even reinventing the visual identity system, but keeping that logo or maybe doing a very slight refresh on that logo that is very subtle and doesn't really rock the boat too much for the community. So there's not any one right way to do that. A couple other things to just talk about is when you're thinking about doing a rebrand, do you necessarily need to hit every point on this spectrum? Not necessarily, right? I think the best rebrands often are hitting all points on this spectrum. Should you ever do just a cosmetic rebrand? Not so much, in my 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, but you don't really rethink things deeply makes sense.

[21:21]:

I don't really see that all that much. I think on the flip side though, there are times where you can rethink some of the strategic elements of branding that don'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. So there's not only one way to do this. Any other big takeaways for you on this one?

Jonathan Hicken [21:51]:

I love the idea of thinking about branding on a spectrum and going into a process understanding that this is a set of tools in the tool belt, and we may need to lean on one more than another depending on where your organization is or how mature it is or how far along it is, or how big of a pivot you might be setting yourself up for. That's really helpful. I know the work that we've done together, for example at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History, we didn't change the logo, if anything you and cosmic to help us take that logo and actually supercharge it so that it was even more effective in all of our assets and all of our language. So that's an example I've gone through. And in other cases, like you said, it was almost purely cosmetic with some underlying strategic shifts for the team and how we talked about the story and how we talked about the brand message. So thank you for proposing this as a spectrum. I think sometimes we put into these stark buckets and that can narrow the scope of how we think about the project.

Eric Ressler [22:48]:

Yeah, well, I think this kind of cosmetic slash strategic dichotomy was actually an idea that you brought up in one of our earlier episodes, and it got me thinking about like, Hey, there's something to this. Let's kind of unpack this in a little bit more detail. So I think we'll call today on that one.

Jonathan Hicken [23:01]:

Alright, sounds good. Thanks Eric. 

Eric Ressler [23:02]:

Thanks, Jonathan.