We had an interesting talk on #pr20chat a couple weeks ago, when Beth Harte started with a simple question: “What is branding?”
All of the PR folks in the chat promptly painted their faces with war paint and went to battle against each other.
Okay, so it wasn’t that bad. But we were starkly divided over the core idea of who owns the brand– is it the customers or the company?
I think, in the end, despite the great observations and arguments on both sides, we were really arguing semantics. Sender, receiver, signal… we were all talking about the same process. What we really needed were some common terms to agree on (and not the terms settled upon after a war, but words).
Brand Image
On the Company owns the brand side of things, we have brand image. Brand image is how a company wants you to see them. Of course, even here we’ll see disagreement, but for the most part this is the realm of the Public Relations team of the company.
Brand Perception
In the other corner stands The customer owns the brand, which we’ll call brand perception. Brand perception is how the public (the ones you are relating to) views the product. It’s the favorite team shirt a football fan wears on Sundays. A band poster hung in a teenager’s room. An opinion voiced to a friend.
So there we have it, the two sides of the branding coin. Big thanks to Shel Holtz and the others for helping to hammer out these terms near the end of the chat. In the end, both sides were right, we were just looking at it from different perspectives.
Although, if you had to look at it from one side, obviously the company owns the brand.
