The Meaning of Branding

Branding in dialogue with nature

Every big brand has a style guide, sort of a Ten Commandments. One commandment is the brand colors, and from it thou shall not deviate. They include at least one primary color and a set of secondary colors with corresponding HEX, RGB, CBYK codes.

Take a look at the Parliament box—the two blues are the brand’s primary colors, the silver a primary secondary, and the red dot of the P a distant secondary. They evolved from the gold and single dark blue of the original brand. Creatives assigned to refresh Parliament products can play around with them—for example, reversing the primary blues for the secondary silver or bringing back the original gold—but they shouldn’t rely on colors outside of these specific blues, this specific red, unless they want to break the commandments. 

Humans didn’t make up branding, we stole it from nature. Animals/plants, secondary/tertiary colors. The secondary mustard of the iris flower. The spikey curves of the Joshua tree versus the right angles of the saguar…