At its most fundamental level, your brand is how consumers identify your product or service as distinct from similar offerings.

Branding started with the practice of cattle farmers burning their mark, or brand, onto the hide of their animals so they could be identified. The word was adopted by the early marketers when they started to use indefinable names or labels for their products and so branding was born.

Things have changed significantly from the early days of simple labelling with a whole industry built around brand creation, brand promotion and brand management.

Branding is not about taste or pretty logos, it is about following a process, the end product of which is the words and pictures that make up the brand – logo, style guide, copy platform, strap lines and so on.

The starting point of the branding process is creating your brand platform. This is the time to have your internal debate and discuss your brand and once you have reached an agreement, any outputs are checked back against the principles you have agreed to see if they support your brand.

This approach takes away matters of personal taste and opinion from content creation. The question becomes “does it support the brand” and not “do I like it”.

This is not a ‘one-and-done’, as part of your management process, you should revisit your brand at least every 12 months or at any time of major change. It’s not suggested that you change your logo every 12 months but make sure your brand is still in line with your operations or vice-versa.