Logo Vs Branding: What’s the Difference?

…and more importantly: which one do YOU really need?

Firstly, congratulations! You’re ready to follow your dream of starting a business: a journey that, as we all know, takes an incredible amount of time, dedication, and hard work.

The road ahead is paved with a lot of difficult questions, and pesky problems that will rear their heads at every turn.

Here’s the good news: getting your branding right is a solution to many of them - and we’re here to help.

Let’s put it this way.

In any branding campaign, the logos are the tip of the iceberg. Your branding is the rest of the iceberg.

Many new business owners accidentally conflate logos and branding, and it’s an honest mistake. Logos and branding are intrinsically entangled, and you can’t have one without the other.

However, logos are a part of your branding - not the other way around. Before you even think of conceptualizing your logo, it’s important to answer the big branding questions first, starting with:

Who do you want to be as a brand?

What is your brand values, and how do you want to be perceived?

What does your brand stand for?

The answers to these questions determine your logo. If your logo accurately represents your brand identity, it has the power to speak directly to your customers and communicate precisely who you are, and what you’re offering.

What is a logo?

Every successful business needs a professional logo. It’s the iconic image that companies use to represent themselves: such as the red-and-white Coca Cola logo, Gucci’s double Gs, the yellow rectangle of National Geographic, and the Apple with a “byte”.

The logo becomes the most important visual element of the company, helping customers recognize and remember the business, and distinguish it from competitors.

What is branding?

More holistically, branding defines how your customers experience your business. While a logo is only a singular mark, a “brand” includes every single touch-point your customers have with your company.

There are two main areas of branding, each equally important:

1. Brand Strategy

Your brand strategy is “behind the scenes” - the part customers don’t see, but can intangibly experience. It is the foundation upon which your business stands and grows. The process of establishing your brand strategy ensures that your visual branding aligns with your brand goals and philosophies, and attracts the right people.

While every designer works uniquely, some common aspects of brand strategy are:

- Positioning your brand within the market (messaging and values)

- Target audience and their values (establishing the general audience and the ideal client avatar)

- Finding the sweet spot for making a profit

- Mission statement

- Brand interaction path

- Differentiation from the competition

- Brand vision

2. Visual Identity

This includes all the visual elements of your brand. Every good designer bases the brand’s visual identity closely around the brand strategy, which is created first.

The brand strategy then determines the basic tools of visual identity: the choice of style, fonts, colour, and graphics, each chosen carefully to represent what your brand stands for, while also carving out an identity that is distinctive from the competition.

This visual identity is then consistently used across all of your brand's touchpoints (including all the ways customers interact with your business—website, social media, marketing material, packaging, shop decor, etc.).

There are a few fundamental visual elements:

- Logos & marks

- Typography

- Colour

And also some additional ones:

- Photography

- Graphics (icons, backgrounds, patterns, textures, etc.)

The Difference

For example, consider the difference between Nike’s logo, and their overall branding.

Nike’s logo is the swoosh. It’s a clean shape that represents motion and speed. The name Nike is derived from the Greek Winged Goddess of Victory. It’s nice to look at, and easy to recognize - but taken in isolation, it’s just a simple shape.

Nike’s branding includes its commercials, celebrity endorsements, product packaging, store design, product placement in media, sponsorships, in-store graphics, hang-tags, the music in its videos, the design of its website, print ads, product photography, technology, and so much more: the Nike universe. It encompasses every interaction you’ve ever had with Nike.

As you can see, there is a big difference between the process of logo design and that of branding.In short, a customer may experience a brand’s logo before they even encounter the product or service you offer. However, the logo is only a small part of the brand identity. The logo is determined, chosen, and shaped based on the brand identity. In the question of “what comes first, the chicken or the egg?”, the brand identity is the chicken that hatches the egg (the logo).

This explains why the creation of a brand is so much more expensive than designing a logo - as it is an expansive, time-consuming effort that lays the foundation for your brand. The whole brand identity (including Brand Strategy + Visual Identity) works together to create a presence that is far more potent than a logo working alone.

At SAAAR, we believe that branding is a holistic exercise that empowers every business; giving every unique business the right tools to be heard in an increasingly noisy market, and grow to its fullest potential. And as we said earlier: the logo is just the tip of the iceberg.

Let’s navigate the rest of the iceberg, together!