the term branding people use it interchangeably with logo design identity design or even sometimes typography and maybe we need to set the record straight I I know you're the best person that tells us what is branding Marty yeah so let's start with what branding isn't okay it's because it's not a lot of things people say it is not a logo okay a logo is a very useful tool for a business but it's not the brand it's a symbol for the brand a brand is not a product so when people talk about this brand buying this brand or that brand they're really talking about buying one product or another product the brand is not that people say the brand is a promise the company makes to customers and there's some truth in that yeah I mean it it does end up acting as a promise but that's not what it is either advertising people like to say well it's the sum of all the impressions that a company makes on an audience yeah well you know if you're trying to sell a lot of impressions I can see where that might be useful to you but from a business point of view why do they want that so and how does that help people understand what they're doing so none of those things are really what with branding is a brand is a result it's it's a customer's gut feeling about a product a service or a company it ends up in their heads in their hearts they take whatever raw materials you throw at them and they make something out of it but it's there making it they're creating it and so in a sense when you create a brand you're not creating one brand you're creating millions of brands like however many customers are people in your audience each one has a different brand of you so a brand is like a reputation right so it's your business reputation and everyone's gonna be a little bit different about what that reputation is and that's okay as long as you have a you've got it corralled mostly where you want it and that it's beneficial to the company so we tend to look at companies and designers tend to look at branding as from our point of view like we're this is something we're doing we're telling a story where we're making a claim or you know we're making a pitch and and that's what we do but that's not what a brand is a brand is the result of that and if you don't start there you don't know what you're doing you actually don't know what you do you think you know what you're doing but you don't so from a designer's point of view I mean I always tended to be this way it's like I just had a it was my gut feeling right about whether this is gonna work or not and then I would sell it as hard as I could get the client that's sign off on it from the clients point of view they're going well it's a checklist I got the you know I got the logo I got the got the tagline I got the ad campaign but check and they think they're done right none of that's right you know what's right is what happens in people's heads like what are we achieved like what's the reputation that we've created through the products were putting out and the design of the products the messaging we're putting out the look and feel of them our culture you know how does that affect people how our how our employees behave you know how is that affecting our reputation all that stuff counts so it's a big world and it actually takes in almost all of business not so much finance but finance is involved too because finance has to green-light all these things but almost everybody in a in a company is you know affecting the brand doing something with the brand doing it for the brand or hurting the brand so you you got to think of it that way oh yeah I could I didn't want to say one word because that was perfect this is unscripted Marty's just talking from decades of experience and writing and articulating this it's very clear to me