When you think of brands, you think of visibility. Brands stand out in the marketplace. They’re designed to attract your attention. They can only work if they first do this. Their visual language must have a visual impact.
21 October 2025
Of course, brands can be subtle. They’re not all bold and brash and shouty. Quiet, brands such as Aesop lean into subtlety as an inherent part of their aesthetic. But they must still be distinctive and identifiable.
However, the pursuit of visual distinctiveness can lead to fundamental errors in brand development. These occur when businesses confuse brand design with brand identity.
Brand design vs brand identity
Brand design is a process leading to an outcome. The outcome of a brand’s design is its identity.
BUT…
Design isn’t the only thing that goes into creating a brand’s identity. This doesn’t detract from the importance of brand design, but on its own, it doesn’t form the entirety of a brand.
This might come as something of a surprise. I’m sure there are plenty of people who see brands largely in terms of their logos, typefaces and choice of colours. This is perfectly understandable.
When you think of Coca Cola, say, you immediately picture its red backdrop and white logo. The same goes for the Nike swoosh.
However, a brand is much more than its visual language. Brand designs decisions should be based on a diverse set of inputs that go far beyond aesthetics. If you lift the bonnet of a brand, what will you find underneath?
You should find the components that give a brand its depth.
The depth of field of a photographic image determines how much of it appears in sharper focus.
When a business puts too much emphasis on its brand design and not enough on the whole picture, it develops too shallow a depth of field — beyond the visual identity, the other components are blurred and indistinct.
This shallowness allows for inconsistencies to creep into the brand messaging and how the customer experiences the brand — a brand may seem to say one thing but fail to do another. The worst thing it can do is break its promise, because then it loses the customer’s trust.
Broken brand promises
Once a brand damages its reputation, it’s hard to rebuild it. Often, the bigger the brand, the harder it falls.
In 1981, the UK high street jeweller Ratners was a well-known and widespread household brand. Then, in a speech at a business dinner, the chairman, Gerald Ratner, referred to one of his products as “total crap”. It was meant to be a light-hearted remark, but it swiftly turned into a public relations catastrophe.
Ultimately, the company’s share value divebombed by some £500 million. Gerald Ratner had to leave his own business, and it was eventually rebranded. The brand vanished from the high street but “doing a Ratner” became shorthand for any disastrous public relations exercise.
The point is that you need to be on-brand always, even when you’re the company chairman enjoying a few drinks and a nice dinner in public.
A lack of congruence is likely to end up breaking a brand’s promise to its customers.
What is brand congruence?
For the customer, the brand must be the right fit. This occurs when the brand’s identity and values align with the customer’s values and sense of who they are.
You can see this in action in the competitive world of supermarket retail. At one end of the market, Waitrose knows who its customers are and ensures all aspects of its brand matches these customers’ expectations and tastes.
At the other end, Aldi also knows who its customers are and what it needs to do to attract and retain them.
To achieve brand congruence, all aspects of the brand itself must fit together seamlessly — from its appearance to how the customer experiences it across all possible touchpoints.
A brand doesn’t just look a certain way, it feels specific too. It has an aura. To create and maintain this aura, a brand must have depth.
How do you know if your brand lacks depth?
Look at your brand’s depth of field. Is everything in focus, not just your brand’s visual identity, but how it appears in all its aspects, inwardly and outwardly?
Your brand lacks depth, if:
You’re at all unclear about why your brand exists in the market, who it’s appealing to and what it wants to achieve
You haven’t a clear, succinct set of brand values to show what you stand for
Your brand doesn’t have a specific personality and character
Your brand doesn’t use a distinct and consistent tone of voice to communicate to its prospects and customers
How others experience your brand is inconsistent, including marketing, PR and the end-to-end customer journey.