Your brand is not your logo

It’s been said before, but it bears saying again: Your brand is not your logo. It’s not your color scheme, or your tagline, or even your principles or your market segments or your penetration. Your brand is the gut feeling regular people get when they think of your company.

This includes your customers, suppliers, partners, employees, investors, enemies, and general public. It is shaped by the way you interact with them, in every phone conversation, transaction, and problem escalation.

These are the only things that matter. The other stuff people normally call “branding” is just window dressing that clarifies and can enhance your brand value. But the real branding is done in your day-to-day operations, not in the marketing, PR or design department.

People love Amazon because you can get just about any piece of media or media equipment you want at the best price anywhere, and it’s easy and fast – despite how bad the logo and Web site look.

People love Netflix because it emancipated millions of us from video-store slavery with its free mailing system, easy online queues, and no late fees. Its “branding” people think of is nothing more than a reminder (in the form of a red envelope) of the joy of escaping from video store hell.

People love Macs because they don’t ask you to tell the computer when you connect a camera. It just knows. And they don’t make you hunt and search for drivers with every new printer or piece of software. They just install automatically. Compared with people’s traditional experiences, that’s a welcome relief. The fact that they’re prettier is just window dressing on that key benefit.

To really stand out, you need to deliver your product or service like no one has ever done before. It’s not enough to be a “leading provider of ___ solutions.” You need to change their expectations of the entire market.

Why do people love your company? Do they know? Do they have a reason? 

Highrise working beautifully as an online contact manager

We’ve been experimenting with Highrise from 37signals for a customer relationship management/address book tool online. The boys at 37signals are adept at creating simple-yet-powerful Web productivity tools.

I’ve personally been creating and sharing a few contacts in cases, adding followup tasks, and it’s remarkably easy. All of the notetaking I used to do in the “Notes” field of Outlook contacts or my Apple Address Book, I can do instead in date-stamped entries associated to that person — and I can search to find them anywhere, and tag them as well.

The “ahh” moment
Today, I entered a contact from a few years back who called me out of the blue, and when I finished the entry, I realized I wanted her on my iPhone address book too. So I click the “vCard” link, and the vCard file downloaded from Highrise to my computer, and then opened Address Book and added it! Now when I plug in my iPhone, it will automatically sync and put her in. Excellent and thoughtful step from the Highrise team to integrate so well. This makes a no-brainer deciding where to add new contacts.

Breaking through the Surface

Wow. So Microsoft are now soft-promoting the new Surface computing platform, which sort of brings the iPhone, the Minority Report grab-screen, and some oPhoto-like snapshot galleries together in a Frankenstein coffee table. Ever since the iPhone announcement, people have been talking a lot this year about the “pinch” touch-screen technology that allows manipulation with your fingers. This guy Jeff Han at NYU has developed a pretty cool interface as well.

I appreciate the future-factor, but what’s even better is this faux-commercial for Surface now appearing on Flixxy. It playfully raises all the questions I continually ask myself: is this better than interacting with humans? Is this better than handling photos myself? Isn’t a real postcard more thoughtful? Isn’t painting more fun when you can smell the oils and get messy? What would happen if I diverted all the time that I spend messing with technology instead to my kids? And finally, which has more party appeal — the FrankenSurface or a vintage 1981 table-top Ms. Pacman machine?