Today, a recognizable
brand is required to guarantee company’s successful being and operation. In this context, a brand is not just an equivalent of a label or a trademark, yet a combination of identity details, like corporate colors, tunes, design of the uniform for employees and so on. The top three of such trademarks are Coca-Cola, Google and Microsoft.
The word
brand itself derives from an Old Norse "brandr," which could be translated as "fire" or "to burn": this was a name for a burn mark, used by the ranchers for their cattle. Today this word has a positive connotation, as it associates with a
public image and reputation of companies.
The articles that we translated from English contain multiple examples of right and wrong
branding as well as
brand management hints. In theory, a brand should describe a product so that the audience could immediately identify what is in front of it — laundry detergent or corn flakes. Also, a visual image is significant, like the Playboy bunny, Nikes swoosh, Apples apple or the Starbucks mermaid. Yet even the best brands eventually need rebranding.
The
article also refers to the smart creativity of one agency in Kazakhstan: it faced a challenging task of branding fisherman’s gumboots, which associate with hygiene and safety rather than with attractive look. They were translated to English as Wellington boots, which referred to high, covering the knees boots, used for horse riding and named after the Duke of Wellington. The promo visual showed underwater predators (piranhas, electric eels, crabs) getting their claws into the boots, meanwhile the upper part of the
boots was sticking out of a shoebox. It was a simple and a clear way to explain the customers that those boots could protect them not only from water but also from any danger underwater. The text on the package was originally in Russian, as it all happened in Kazakhstan. Later it was translated to English, and that’s how the American author discovered the case and mentioned it in his article, which we translated to Russian again in our agency as a part of a bigger symposium. And now you have just witnessed a rare occurrence of a reverse translation.
Our
marketing experts translate to Russian various articles about brands, brand management and branding. This type of translations requires very accurate work with marketing phraseology, copywriting and
advertising language. We have a whole group of professional translators focused on the marketing subject.
Click
here to read it in Russian.
A brand is a marketing term meaning a new product or a service with a popular and recognizable brand marks, while branding and brand management are focused on consumer psychology in order to make the brand rememberable and recognizable. A famous American marketing expert, whose work we have translated recently, describes the main principles of branding in fascinating short articles.
