A logo is not a brand.
The industry repeats that sentence with the satisfaction of someone who has just discovered fire. It is still true.
A logo is closer to the terminal of a battery. Touch the symbol and you receive some of the charge that has accumulated behind it: products, promises, campaigns, rumours, employees, shops, disappointments, childhood memories, prices, scandals, football matches, family conversations, smells, uniforms and the salesperson who once treated your arrival as a personal attack.
All of that can end up compressed into a ridiculously small shape.
A bitten apple. Three lines. A star. A letter. An animal. A colour a company tries to claim with the composure of a colonial empire, although the lawyers have yet to register the sky.
That is what is extraordinary about a brand. It becomes a place where meaning accumulates.
Repetition helps. The same sign appears on the product, the shop, the shirt, the screen, the building, the uniform of the person serving you and, if partnerships has had an especially ambitious week, on some creature that had been living quite peacefully until then.
Each appearance leaves something. Trust, perhaps. Desire, familiarity, prestige, rejection. Often several things at once.
The brand tries to direct that charge, of course. That is what strategy, identity, advertising, brand experience and a considerable number of meetings about whether a typeface feels human enough are for.
But it cannot control everything that enters.
That matters, because people charge brands with their own lives, too.
A drink can become attached to a childhood summer. A car can bring back the silence of a father driving at night. A trainer can become associated with the first time a teenager felt they belonged somewhere.
The marketing department didn't create those moments. It was lucky enough to be there when they happened.
Over time, separating one thing from the other becomes difficult. The product was there during the experience. Years later, the symbol appears again and something of that life returns with it.
That is much more powerful than a message. Much harder to control, too.
A company can change its logo, adjust its tone, hire a new agency or make an emotional campaign in which a man walks slowly through a field while a voice talks about the future. But if the battery is charged with disappointment, changing the container doesn't automatically empty what is inside.
The reverse happens, too. Some brands survive mediocre products, mistakes and forgettable campaigns because, for years, they were present in moments people still value.
Memory doesn't organise life like a strategy presentation. Things stick to one another.
The smell of sunscreen can take you to a beach. A song to a person. A logo to a kitchen, a journey, a friendship or a time when you still didn't know what things actually cost.
A brand lives in those associations as much as in any manual.
That is why I have always found the question “How do we want this brand to look?” a little limited. Of course it matters. Worrying about it is my job. But the more interesting question is what kind of experience we are building around that form, and what charge might remain inside after we have left the room.
An identity can be beautiful and empty. It can also be fairly ordinary and carry decades of life. Form helps gather that experience, give it continuity and make it recognisable. It lets us find it again.
There is a small danger here. When a brand accompanies enough human moments, it can start behaving as though it produced them.
Summer was Coca-Cola. Victory was Nike. Rebellion was a motorcycle. Family was a table with a packet in the middle.
The brand was there. Perhaps it even helped shape the moment. But it was never the whole moment.
There is a difference between participating in an experience and claiming ownership of it. Advertising works along that border constantly. It tries to make the product feel like the reason a certain life is possible.
When that works for long enough, the promise stops feeling like communication. It starts to seem like a natural property of the object.
The car doesn't represent freedom. It is freedom. The drink doesn't accompany friendship. It is friendship.
The brand begins to claim the charge it has been collecting.
Here it helps to return to the battery. A battery can store energy and release it later. It didn't create what charged it.
A brand can store an extraordinary part of our lives: memories, aspirations, disappointments, belonging, taste, even love. That makes it powerful.
We should remember where the energy came from.
The battery holds the charge. Life produced it.