When I was a kid, the word brand didn’t exist.

No one talked about their organization’s brand, and certainly no one talked about their website as a reflection of their brand. Then again, no one HAD a website back then. We’re talking about the late 20^th Century, for heaven’s sake. The internet didn’t exist.

But nowadays, in the shiny new Age of Identity known as the 21^st Century, branding is everything. It’s your website, it’s your company; heck – it’s even your own “look and feel” as displayed by social media luminaries like Selena Gomez and Ariana Grande. These stars from other celebrity worlds – television and music – have masterfully co-opted their Instagram and Twitter feeds to promote and endorse products seamlessly, leading many in the marketing and advertising arena to wonder where the line should be drawn between brand and endorsement. The Federal Trade Commission also had something to say about this, recently warning some high-profile celebrities and influencers to make the payment for these product endorsements crystal clear in their feeds.

In this age of continuous promotion, the word “branding” has come to mean everything, and in so doing, has come to mean almost nothing. The short of it is that people now use the word “brand” to describe a Fortune 50 company, and they use the same word – “brand” – to describe their aesthetic and how they dress. So how’s a 21^st Century marketing professional supposed to know what the word *branding* actually means?  (See, even putting it between asterisks didn’t help.)

First of all, branding is NOT marketing.

While the word branding has come to mean everything in the world of promotion, in the marketing trade, branding doesn’t mean marketing. Marketing is the implementation of a brand, the practice of promoting a brand, the mechanism by which your brand appears and is received by the outside world. Marketing encompasses the playing pieces in the big Brand Game – it’s the website, the emails, the advertising, and the business cards – and it’s also the delivery systems by which your company’s brand is communicated to the outside world. So while it’s the reflection of your brand, it’s not THE BRAND. The brand exists at the molecular level – it’s not the website; it’s the building blocks that are used to create the website, the emails, and the business cards.

So how does one transfer all of these brand building blocks into a marketing program? The answer is a brand platform. A brand platform is the creation and organization of all the components of the brand – and it’s the essential chemistry of all the recipe ingredients. So…it’s at the molecular level, not the website level…or, to use cooking as a metaphor, it’s the salt you use in the osso bucco, not the osso bucco itself.

And the kind of salt you use can make all the difference.

Did you know there are actually shades of salt, from black to white, and everything between, including pink? Although the compound is essentially sodium chloride, or NaCl, there are many additional minerals that can change salt’s color, including volcanic clay and algae. So…salt isn’t just salt, any more than your brand’s building blocks are just  building blocks. The devil is in the details of your choices…from table salt to kosher to Himalayan Kala Namak. And the same is true of your brand’s building blocks – from a serif or san serif typeface (or both) to the primary and secondary color palettes, to the imagery you choose to reflect your brand. These are the ingredients for your brand recipe…and their quality makes a giant difference in the final look and feel of your marketing: your website, your emails, your advertising, and your business cards. The more you skimp on your ingredients, the less compelling and effective your marketing implementation will be.

A brand is exactly what you make it, right down to the chemistry you start with. And it’s both fun and immensely productive to create your brand’s platform, when you have the right partner.

To learn more about the brand platform process, contact us here. If you’re interested in how to make osso bucco, find that recipe here. And if you want to learn more about how to develop your corporate brand from a broad business point of view, learn more from the Harvard Business Review here.