The three-legged race

Often a startup knocks on the door interested in one specific service we offer. Generally, their intention is to hire us to review their executive summary, their investor pitch, or yes, their logo. That's when an almost pedagogical process begins to try to make them see how difficult it is to win a chess match playing with just one piece on your side of the board.

After this process, we typically tackle a project that, properly scoped with all determining factors in place, tends to be more ambitious and deeper than originally expected, encompassing more elements beyond the one we started discussing.

I'm going to share part of that process here. On one hand, in case it helps branding take root a little more and a little sooner in the famous ecosystem. On the other, to improve the conversation and, why not, shorten that phase in new projects.

Logo, brand… but aren't they the same thing?

No. A lot has been written about the differences between a company's or institution's logo and brand. Just a quick Google search will do.

Very (but very) briefly: brand is the image people have of your company, while a logo is just a tangible element that contributes to creating that image. Along with many others.

"A brand is what people say about you when you're not in the room." —Jeff Bezos

Some of the elements of a brand, visible or not.

The problem is that it's easy to get lost in technical jargon and fancy English buzzwords, and not everyone needs to be familiar with how branding can help them reach their objectives.

For that reason, we often use the following metaphor.

The three-legged race

We all know the classic children's game (and not-so-children's, truth be told—it's got a certain charm and you get a good laugh out of it) of three-legged races in pairs or groups where the team members, lined up one next to the other, tie their respective ankles to the teammates on each side.

The objective is straightforward: reach the finish line before your rivals. And there's only one formula for doing it: coordination.

Either you coordinate with your teammates, or you're done for. The moment one—just one—goes off on their own, not only will they fall, but they'll very likely bring the whole team down. And winning the race? Forget about it.

The team that manages to establish a common strategy that's easy for all members to follow will be the one with the best shot at reaching the finish line first.

Who is who

Imagine that your brand is one of the teams competing in the race. The rest of the teams, then, are your rivals—that is, your competition: the brands running in the same race as you.

The goal is the objectives. What you set out to achieve with the initial focused work. These objectives may be well-oriented or not, which is why it's advisable to start the project by studying this point to build from a solid foundation. If the goal isn't where we think it is, we'll hardly win the race.

Each of the members of your team is an element of your brand. They have the logo tied around their ankles, the colors, the typefaces, the name and "the little tagline under the logo," the tone your brand uses when speaking, company policy, customer service, and any element of the company that has the slightest contact, direct or indirect, with anyone at all—both outside and inside the doors.

Strategy will be the guidelines based on study, analysis, and experience that are established to achieve coordination and try to reach objectives as quickly and effectively as possible.

And when we talk about coordination, we mean the coherence that must exist between the different elements and between these and the established brand strategy. This coherence will allow objectives to be reached sooner and more effectively.

• By aligning all the elements that make up a brand, both with each other and with the marked strategy, we're multiplying the chances of reaching our objectives as a company.

For example: if our brand strategy has turned out to be positioning ourselves as innovators, transparent, and sensible (again, oversimplifying greatly), we must make sure that all the elements of the brand (logo, name, product…) could be described with those same adjectives.

Coherence is something that should obsess us when we talk about brands.

Your team is unique

Following the metaphor, it's crucial to be clear that strategy must be specific to each team. Knowing their particularities and understanding how far your members can go is fundamental.

Probably not all team members will be able to align equally fast, so you'll need to decide which process to follow, looking for the option that least penalizes the team's progress toward the goal.

Our work starts there, defining that goal and sketching the strategy we'll follow, where we always keep in mind the immediate needs of the project and a parallel vision for the medium and long term.

And that's why, if you say logo to me, I say brand.