The Role of Language in Branding
Effective communication is key to influencing and achieving success—both in life and within organizations. A Brand Language clearly communicate, define, and reveal itself to your Buyers while your Brand Rhetoric persuade them about your Brand.
At the heart of this communication lies our Brand Language, not just in words but in symbols, designs, and associations that form the narratives of our brands.
The process of crafting this language is often emergent and unconscious. Designers, Marketers and Strategist project their own beliefs, experience, desires and even biases when defining Brands, which is natural and expected.
- We will first Draft the language. By Creating a Semantic Field to Qualifying our Brand.
- Reflect on our choices. By deconstructing this process, we will uncover and analyze the reason why we make those choices using metacognition (Thinking about our thoughts).
- Finalizing the Language By grouping and refine our Vocabulary into a Language
When we build a brand, we need to dive in, immerse ourselves, consider and listen to our Buyers perspective, however like Steve Jobs said, “People don’t know what they want until you show them”, so let’s put both our creatives, designers and marketers hat all at once.
Brand Identities are not static entities but a dynamic narrative that evolves through various layers of human psychology. This narrative is shaped by different aspects of brand behavior and perception, let’s craft a compelling brand rhetoric that resonates on multiple levels.
Semantic fields
Creativity and design are processes that takes thoughts into words, and words into choices, and choices into actions. We will focus on taking our thoughts into words. Words are defined by a sign and a referent:
A sign is something that represents or stands for an idea, object, or concept, conveying meaning through a symbol, word, or gesture.
The referent is the actual object, concept, or entity in the real world that a sign or symbol represents and determine the sign.
Relation of sign to referent
Iconic
similarity likeness, resemble something
Examples
- Transparent (Clear and open)
- Balanced (Stable, fair)
- Sharp (Precise, clear)
- Warm (Friendly, welcoming)
- Fluid (Flexible, adaptable)
Indexic
environmental contact, contiguity where it is
Examples
- Reliable (Dependable, consistent)
- Organic (Natural, sustainable)
- Connected (Engaged, networked)
- Accessible (Easy to reach)
- Responsive (Quick, adaptable)
Symbolic
this stand for that - code / linguistic / agreed upon relation in social reality
Examples
- Innovative (Creative, forward-thinking)
- Luxury (Exclusive, premium)
- Authentic (Genuine, trustworthy)
- Dynamic (Energetic, changing)
- Timeless (Enduring, classic)
Now we can see how each words create semantic vectors, mental directions and lead us to converge towards ideas that are understood collectively.
When we experience a Brand, we define and qualify it with words, so let’s define our Semantic Fields, a group of words that will define the brand qualities and definition.
✍️ Next steps
- Create a list defining the Brand Language, when choosing words, distinguish between iconic, indexic and symbolic as well as nouns, verbs and adjectives.
- Refine your vocabulary using Brandy.
- Highlight the most relevant words and assign a score intensity of “rightness” to each words, to sort the words in a new list.
- Constantly ask “Why?” three times in a row for each bucket.
- Seek feedback Does it all make sense? Is it clear?
Don’t overthink it and iterate the process as needed, trust your gut when making decisions.