I am a reluctant brander. Like most User Experience designers, I like to think of myself as a high-minded design thinker – not a marketer.  You know the arguments.  Designers  think about solving real human problems and obsess on the essence of something’s purpose.  Marketers define essence as that which gets noticed and remembered. Designers are empathically creative. Marketers are exploitatively creative.  Designers seek timeless truths.  Marketers are trend-chasers.  Designers live in Brooklyn and sell artisanal pickles between freelance gigs.  Marketers live in Manhattan and coin phrases like FroYo.   Yet it didn’t take me long working in this field to realize that making such distinctions is wrong-headed.  If anything, I relate more to the marketer these days.  Marketers trend towards the pragmatic.  Designers? At their worst: ideologues, aesthetes,  navel-gazers.  Design and marketing ultimately chase the same goal, “marketplace magic,” so why not think like a good branding brain in order to name and position your digital business?  At a minimum you should know a little about the work of Lynn Altman before you set about trying to name your site and write a tagline for it.  Her firm, BrandNow, and her book, Brand it Yourself, are excellent starting points for demystifying the creative process behind successful product branding.

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