Stop Saying Branding!

There’s a word designers and clients throw around constantly, in briefs, in pitches, in strategy documents that nobody reads past page three.

Branding.

Andrea Trabucco-Campos, a partner at Pentagram — arguably the most respected design firm on the planet — says he doesn’t love it. In a recent interview, he put it plainly: he doesn’t love “the idea that it’s something that’s superimposed onto something else.”

He prefers identity.

And honestly? Same.

This isn’t just semantics. The word you choose shapes how you think about the work. And how you think about the work shapes what you actually do.

Branding implies a cattle iron. You take something — a company, a product, a service — and you stamp it with something. You impose. You apply. You slap a logo on it and call it a day.

Identity, on the other hand, implies something that already exists. Something to be understood, drawn out, amplified. As Trabucco-Campos puts it: “You’re trying to engage with it so you truly understand its essence and amplify it. Amplify things as they exist, not as I want them to exist.”

Two different words. Two completely different relationships with a client.

This distinction isn’t new. It’s just been forgotten.

Back in the 1940s, a German-born designer named Walter Landor set up his studio on a retired ferryboat in San Francisco harbour — because of course he did — and spent the next five decades quietly building the foundations of what we now call brand identity. Coca-Cola. Levi’s. FedEx. British Airways. The man left fingerprints on half the visual culture of the twentieth century.

His famous line: “Products are made in the factory, but brands are created in the mind.”

Not in the studio. Not in the brief. In the mind — of the person experiencing it.

Marty Neumeier built on that foundation decades later. In his conversations with Chris Do on The Futur, Neumeier defines a brand as a customer’s “gut feeling” about a product, service, or company. Not a logo. Not a promise. Not a product. A gut feeling — visceral, emotional, and entirely out of your control.

You can’t design a gut feeling. You can only create the conditions for one.

So here’s the question worth sitting with: if the brand ultimately lives in someone else’s mind, what exactly is our job?

Trabucco-Campos’s answer is the most useful one I’ve heard: your job is to engage deeply enough to understand the real essence of what you’re working with, then amplify it honestly. Not invent it. Not impose it. Amplify it.

That’s a fundamentally different brief.

It means the most important thing you can do at the start of a project isn’t open Figma. It’s ask questions and actually listen to the answers. It means the research isn’t a formality you get through before the fun part. It is the fun part.

Of course, there are a few things making this harder than it needs to be right now.

The first is the format.

Social media has compressed everything into one consumable image. Half a second of attention, then it’s gone. Trabucco-Campos is right that an identity is a large system — and in that largeness there’s complexity, richness, things that cannot be communicated in a single image. But try telling that to an algorithm. Try explaining to a client that their identity needs room to breathe when their CMO is measuring everything in impressions and engagement rates.

The constraint of the format and the speed of consumption are actively working against what identity design can actually do.

The second problem is mimicry.

Ask any brand who they admire and they’ll say Apple. Nike. Maybe Oatly if they’re feeling adventurous. So designers are briefed to make something “like Apple” — clean, minimal, confident. Which produces work that looks like every other brand that was briefed to look like Apple.

There’s even a name for this now: blanding. The creeping homogenisation of visual identity into a sea of geometric sans-serifs, muted palettes, and logos that could belong to anyone. A SaaS company, a wellness brand, a law firm — same font, slightly different shade of dusty blue, done.

What makes this particularly ironic is that Apple and Nike are not made up of one thing. They’re the accumulated result of years of many different campaigns, many different objects, many different decisions — most of which involved taking a risk. Copying the aesthetic without the underlying conviction is like buying someone else’s confidence. It doesn’t fit. And everybody can tell.

Trabucco-Campos calls this a “flattening.” Things replicating other things that are successful. Risk aversion dressed up as strategy.

He thinks it’s a bad state of things.

He’s right.

But here’s the part that doesn’t get said enough: the flattening is also an opportunity. When everything looks the same, looking different doesn’t just get you noticed — it gets you remembered. The bar for genuine distinctiveness has never been lower, precisely because everyone is racing to clear a different, much safer bar.

The brands and the designers willing to take a chance right now have a lot of room to run.

So what does this mean in practice?

It means the next time a client hands you a brief that starts with “we want something clean and modern,” you push back — gently, constructively, but clearly. Clean and modern is a description of half the internet. What do they actually stand for? What is genuinely true about them that nobody else could claim?

It means treating research as an act of listening, not as a box to tick.

It means building systems, not just logos. Identity that works across complexity, not just on a business card.

And it means using the right word. Not branding — with its implication of something imposed — but identity. Something discovered. Something real. Something that was already there, waiting for a good designer to come along and help it be seen.

Walter Landor figured this out on a ferryboat in 1941.

We could probably remember it now.

The interview with Pentagram partner Andrea Trabucco-Campos: