A brand craft doctrine for Vietnamese businesses

Explanation

A business controls only what it puts out: its name, its marks, its words, its products, its service. The brand is what stays in other people's memory after those encounters. Every piece of design work is therefore judged at the receiving end, not at the making end. The second half is Marty Neumeier's line: a brand is not what a company says it is, it is what other people say it is. Keller supports the memory half: brand knowledge lives in the customer's head.

Sources

• Marty Neumeier, The Brand Gap, New Riders, 2003
• Kevin Lane Keller, Conceptualizing, Measuring, and Managing Customer-Based Brand Equity, Journal of Marketing, 57(1), 1993

Explanation

Nobody studies a brand as closely as the people who make it. Customers meet it in passing: on a shelf, on a phone screen, on a sign by the road. What cannot be recognised in that moment may as well not be there. The rule applies to identity assets (the core colour, the mark, the typeface, the character, the form of address), not to every piece of content: a capability profile, a quotation or a contract is read carefully while the buyer weighs a decision, but the identity assets on them must still be recognised at once.

Sources

• Byron Sharp, How Brands Grow, Oxford University Press, 2010
• Jenni Romaniuk, Building Distinctive Brand Assets, Oxford University Press, 2018

Explanation

Every design choice is a business decision: choosing a colour is choosing whom you stand next to on the shelf; choosing a typeface is choosing a licence cost and the place where print will fail. So it needs someone accountable, like any other business decision. A decision without an owner can be reopened by anyone who sees it differently, and something decided again and again never stays still long enough to become an asset.

Explanation

Memory of a brand is built from the number of times people meet the same identity asset again. Each time that asset is made different, by its users, by the printer, by a campaign that wants to look new, the recognition already built is split. Close enough does not mean identical to the pixel: an identity asset refreshed step by step under written rules (12.02, 12.04) still adds to what has been built, as long as customers still recognise it.

Sources

• Byron Sharp, How Brands Grow, Oxford University Press, 2010

Explanation

Budgets have a ceiling, staff wear several hats, print shops and sign makers have their own machines, materials and skills, and a hot, humid climate fades colour fast. Standards learned from foreign books have to pass through those conditions before they become a solution. The boundary between this doctrine and its foreign sources: foreign sources are kept for the mechanism, while the tests are adjusted to local production conditions, budgets and channels.

Explanation

The approval meeting is the day a design looks its best and has been tested least. The drawing must still pass that meeting, and its makers remain responsible for it; the meeting simply cannot tell whether the work has value. Brand effects accumulate slowly and only become clear in later years, after the identity has passed through many hands and met new products, new channels and new staff. Binet and Field show that long-term effects build more slowly than short-term ones; that source gives no specific number of years, and neither does this doctrine.

Sources

• Les Binet and Peter Field, The Long and the Short of It, IPA, 2013

Explanation

A promise that exceeds the evidence borrows credibility from the future, and the client pays back that loan when the promise fails. The root idea is David Hume's: a wise person proportions belief to the evidence. The doctrine carries that idea into how the craft speaks, and applies it to itself: any principle that has reasoning but no checkable evidence yet is marked as still being tested.

Sources

• David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, 1748, section X