And therein lies the mystery of a brand experience. There's something created from essence that when we experience them, these events become impressionable as fundamentally life-giving to us in some way. They become the experiences we carry long after the actual moment of first encountering them.

To many people, including shockingly also many marketing professionals out there, branding is more of a dissociative process often relegated to the level of condiments you sprinkle on later. It's the wrapping not the present. Many think of brand as a quick logo design and frequently these days in our digital world, you'll hear people automatically adding in "oh yeah, can we have a website done too".

This is understandable as brand by simple dictionary and historical definition has origins that literally come from the farm and the agricultural livestock practice where branding animals with red hot branding iron used to mark an animal's hide for identification. Businesses still hold onto that idea when they think of “branding themselves”. Indeed there is a whole branch of marketing called "merchandizing the brand" where you stick your logo on pretty much everything from tote bags to coffee mugs and pens. These have their place but they're ancillary at best to the more core essentials of a branding strategy.

Branding has evolved from simply putting your logo on everything to being recognized as something much more integrated with every aspect of a business. In its simplest evolution, your brand is your promise to your customer. In reality, it is the experience of your brand that either fulfills that promise for people or not.

Do I inevitably compare every Irish apple tart I've had since to my aunt's?

Yes, I do, even in the reality that she probably had good baking days and not so great baking days. The point is her "brand" of apple tart for me had equity - an equity all other bakers of the Irish apple tart now compete against. Moreover they are trying to compete not even really conscious what it was beyond the raw ingredients and the basic recipe that she had that they don't.

The French coined this: the "je ne sais quoi" of something...; literally translated means "The-I-don't-know-of-something". Here at Ravennabridge, we see this as the "quality" of the brand experience. We are fascinated by and devoted at the same time to the "je ne sais quoi" of a brand precisely because we believe it is this that lies at the heart of building whole body branding intelligence.

Humans are incredibly complex precisely because we define our realities from our intricate internal contexts of experience far more than what conventional data-crunch-laden marketing or even AI bots want you to believe they have the power to infiltrate and control. There's something much more beyond these capabilities as impressive of course as they are.

Here's the thing - if you want to brand as a business or even create your own personal brand, competing only relying on the conventional approaches is largely a waste of time, energy and money. It's what we're increasingly calling "noise".

We would even, albeit at cutting into our own business, make the declaration that competing in the noise is the wrong structure entirely especially these days.

A brand, to build equity, MUST differentiate and it can only do this successfully over the long term and in a sustainable way when it brands from its own essence. While everyone is looking at the dawning of a singularity arriving with artificial intelligence, this is the other kind of "singularity" we're most interested in bringing to the table for our clients!

This pivot in mindset from conventional branding to whole body intelligent branding is significant in that it offers a unique strategic advantage that comes not simply from a head-centric data-set of decision making (or from an AI algorithm-based machine-learned "thinking" for that matter though this capability cannot be ignored and certainly a topic worthy of a blog article for another time). Rather we approach branding as a strategy far more in the context of a whole body intelligence that is at its essence designing a more fully embodied experience. By fully, we mean the more authentic the brand is in terms of experience the more imprinted your brand becomes.

Whole body intelligent branding is at the forefront of next generation branding precisely because it operates integrating a whole body intelligent architecture that offers far more than the graphics and slogan-based generation exercise people relegate branding to be and especially so in an age when everything can be ordered up at the press of a button or a series of AI prompts. The deeper potential of branding happens when you adopt branding as deeply integrating with business strategy built out of the experiential whole of you not seen as a separate marketing component you add on. Yet this marketing practice is the typical approach we see and exactly why what it takes to make a "generic" Irish apple tart", as good as the product might be, ends up somehow missing that "Je ne sais quoi" that makes all the "difference" which was, from a marketing objective, the whole point in the first place.

Key to tying the brand promise with the brand experience is the designing and building of, as we said earlier, what we call here at Ravennabridge a “whole body intelligent brand architecture”. How well you build that brand architecture determines your long-term integrity with your clients and therein your brand equity.

While marketing experts will chase the mechanics of their channels be they the number of thumbs up "likes" on Facebook, the counting of hearts on Instagram posts or the click through rates on email campaigns all tracking for the data on what their customers are doing, the whole body intelligent branding strategist is on the other hand observing a more close to home data set of experiences and asking what is the experience I want my clients to have of me.

My aunt understood that immediately. In addition to being my aunt, she was also a brilliant hostess, chef, and serial entrepreneur even opening up a high end restaurant in her own home - a pretty radical forward looking enterprise in the days when literally being at home with authenticity wasn't even a concept. Yet it was for authenticity why people would travel 50 miles round trip out of Dublin to have dinner there.

When we are craving more authenticity than ever whole body intelligent branding is a road map businesses are willing to travel to reach their own innate potential and sustainability.

If you have a project you'd like to discuss with us, drop us a line. We'd be delighted to chat with you!

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