Branding with Public Relations

Public relations is much more than media releases, and special events. Public relations is about maintaining a brand.  Professional communicators are ultimately trying to build brands, and maintain a visual identity and promote the values in the company's mission statement. Here in our program, we spent a week discussing branding, and everything that goes along with it!


Branding is ultimately everything behind the logo. We learned that branding includes:

• Marketing
• Advertising
• Logos
• Emotions
• Quality delivery
• Slogans

Many brands have recognizable symbols. I mean, who doesn't know the Nike Swoosh? InterBrand, a company who analyzes brands internationally and ranks them, declared their list of The World's Top 100 Brands this year. They are all very familiar names. The top 5 were:

Recognize them?

Tim taught us that Logo's are a crucial part of a company's brand, and that we as practitioners may take part in the development of a company logo. A lot more goes into a logo than I ever would have considered! Logo's need to be memorable, unique, appropriate for the company. They need to be adaptable in small sizes, larger sizes, and to fit on everything we as a company deliver. Talk about important!

We spent a week discussing brands, before breaking off into our groups to make up our own product and naming it. Let the Brandstorming Commence! 

Tim brought in lots of candy and munchies for us to chow down on as we developed our plans.

We had to ask ourselves important questions like:

• What IS your brand?
• Who's your competition?
• What are the key benefits to your product?
• What do you deliver to the consumer?
• Who's your Target Market?
• Should your brand sound wealthy? trendy? fun?

My group decided to invent an all natural, Canadian, energy drink! This would be possible by including herbs, ginseng, and other natural boosters, and a hint of maple syrup for that sugary Canadian Touch!  We realized our competition lies within natural juices, and energy drink markets. Our benefits included healthy living, and a feeling of national pride. Our target was a younger Canadian audience and therefore our name needed to fun and trendy (To sum it up briefly)! We presented our ideas to another group in the class, and ultimately went with the name Oh!Ganic Juice. This name encompasses the Canadian touch, making a play on words of "Oh! Canada", and still being fun for the younger crowd. A pretty fun assignment if you ask me!