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Language in professional life
Language in professional life

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1 Brands and branding

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This is a wordle comprising the following words – predominantly in various shades of green and brown – written in lower case: voice, identity, advertising, branding, speak, business, tone, marketing, verbal, quality, images, brand, communication, product and customers.

When people hear ‘branding’, they don’t normally associate it with language. The more obvious aspects of branding are probably the visual ones, such as logos, colour palettes, tag lines, images and TV adverts (see Murcia Bielsa, 2012). However, language is increasingly being seen in business contexts as the key to successful branding (e.g. Barattin and Latusi, 2025; Simmons, 2006).

Activity 1 What is a brand?

Timing: Allow about 10 minutes

At this point, it’s useful to reflect on what a brand actually is. Without looking back at the figure in the previous section, think of six or seven brands that you’ve encountered in the last 24 hours and write down the names in the box below and what your interaction with them was. Do they have anything in common?

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Discussion

Here is an example list:

My list includes Google (general internet searches), Chat GPT (while talking to a student whose research draws on Gen AI), Hewlett Packard (my work laptop), The Open University (my employer), Aldi (they made the soup I had for lunch), Oxford City Council (I emailed about a tree growing out of the pavement in front of my house), and BBC iPlayer (for the series I’m currently watching on TV). I could go on...

The interesting thing is that, on the face of it, these have relatively little in common with each other. Some of them are to do with technology (Google, ChatGPT), some provide services (Google, Oxford City Council, BBC iPlayer, The Open University), some provide physical items or products (Hewlett Packard, Aldi), but others may encompass many products, physical or otherwise (Google). Some of these are also names of companies (Google, Hewlett Packard) or charities (BBC, The Open University), but others are part of much larger companies (ChatGPT is owned by Open AI). This means that a brand is not quite synonymous with a given product or service and it is also not necessarily the same as a company.

In fact, ‘brand’ is notoriously difficult to define. It is an intangible asset (something of value that is not a physical thing), designed to attract consumer attention, and to encapsulate as well as shape expectations, emotions and attitudes associated with a particular company, product or service (de Chernatony, 2009). It’s also inextricably linked with an identity or personality that is created by and for the brand (Murcia Bielsa, 2012) which helps to differentiate the product from others of the same type (Larsen, 2023).

But how is this done? Specifically:

  • How do you attract consumer attention and capture as well as shape the associations with a company, product or service?
  • How can you create a personality for something that is not human?

Answering these questions is the domain of branding, which in addition to visual elements such as design scheme, colour palettes and fonts also, crucially, includes words. In this week, the focus is of course on these words: the role of language in branding, or verbal identity.