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Brand, Karen’s Marketing Tips

The difference between a logo, a brand and branding

Posted on February 24, 2017February 21, 2022 by Karen Reyburn

New brand

The concept of “brand” is tied directly into the principles of content marketing.

When your goal is to establish authority by sharing helpful, relevant information to your target audience, their reception of the content that you share is a reflection of your brand, whatever it may be.

So it’s critical for you as an accountancy firm to give more thought (and time, and effort, and money) into your brand.

As you know, the Profitable Firm is in the midst of a rebrand (read all about it here). This process has been an educational one, and we’re keen to get better at understanding brand so we can help you with yours. So we asked Col Gray from Pixels Ink to run an online training for the whole Profitable Firm team on branding – specifically, the difference between a logo, a brand, and branding.

Your brand is made up of the intangibles, the emotions, how people feel about you

The brand is the sum of everything you are, what you stand for, how you work. How you speak to clients. How you answer the phone. How people feel when they go to your website. The emotions they are experiencing in relation to your firm.

“Branding is what people say about you when you’re not in the room.” – Jeff Bezos, Amazon

Brand

A great example is Apple. As Col put it in our training, “Apple could put out a real stinker of a product and you’ll still get people queuing up to buy it. That’s because it’s not about the product anymore; it’s about Apple, and people still love Apple.”

Whether you’re one of those people or not, it is undeniable that Apple have built a true brand. So have Xero. So has Coca-Cola. (Remember the incredible furore stirred up when Coke tried to change its recipe with “New Coke” in the 80’s? Disaster. They didn’t change a recipe, they messed with a brand, and the people weren’t having it.)

What you’re doing with a brand is building a loyal following. People who will stay with you as you grow, change, adapt, and respond to their ever-changing needs.

The logo is the visual element of your branding that connects your audience to what you do

First, and most importantly, says Col, “The logo is not for you. It’s for your clients.”

The biggest mistake you can make when reviewing, refreshing, or re-creating your logo is that of only considering what it is that you like.

Of course, you have to like your logo. The last thing you want is a logo that you are not proud to share, even if your designer thinks it’s amazing.

But you may be surprised what you come to love. When we started the brand process with our clients at Maverick Accountants, one of the first things they mentioned was that they didn’t like the colour red. (You may be interested to see their resulting logo here.) Similarly, Col shared with us the story of a client who started out by saying she didn’t like purple, and didn’t like triangles. (Her logo is here). And at The Profitable Firm, the very first logo Col showed me was the one we ultimately chose…but it took me several months to come round to it.

The reason your preconceived thoughts may change is often because you realise, going through the process, what it all means. How the colours say and reflect a certain concept. What the shapes say about your business. The feelings it can stir within the heart of your dream client.

logo

Your clients – the best ones, the type of businesses or people you want to work with – absolutely must love your logo. But (and this is especially true in a rebrand) it will take time for this to happen. Part of your role in marketing is to help them understand what the logo is trying to do. It’s also to use your logo as merely the starting point for everything in marketing.

Many accountants have a misunderstanding of what a logo truly is because you’ve had a bad experience with a graphic designer. You’ve been ripped off. They took no time over it. They created a logo they liked, but neither you nor your clients did. They listened to what you wanted, but didn’t give you the benefit of expert advice that would challenge you on what that is. You got a ‘nice design’ but it doesn’t do anything, make them feel something.

If you’re looking for a logo to get you more business – or if it comes to that, for anything to “get you more business” (social media, email marketing, a new CRM system), your focus is in the wrong place.

We could design the most amazing logo that truly reflects your firm, and your clients could love it. But there’s a lot of work required – by you, your team, and the firm – to promote the brand itself. The logo on its own is not going to make you money – it’s going to be the foundation of how you promote and share your business.

The logo is not the magic bullet. You are the magic bullet.

And when you have the right logo, your confidence will rise in who you are as a firm. You’ll feel more brave about doing marketing that you wouldn’t have considered before – things you wouldn’t have had the strength to do because your platform was a bit weak.

You’ll use that logo to help you build a solid brand identity, one that is strong enough to hold a serious level of marketing.

Branding is the tangible things: the stuff you use to build emotions about your brand

If the brand is the invisible, and the logo is the visual, then branding is what brings all of this together into something people can feel, touch, see, interact with.

Your branding includes:

  • Website
  • Leaflets
  • Business cards
  • Signage
  • Products (keychains, mugs)
  • Social media accounts
  • ..you get the idea.

This is where everything pulls together. The feelings people have about your brand are integrated into these branding items, and it begins to make decisions about these things so much easier.

Here are some examples of design and branding that reflect a feeling, an approach:

Maverick: Accounting for the bold

Choosing imagery for their website was a matter of reflecting the qualities of the new brand – bold, adventurous, a little wild. This is why most of the images here are outside the office. “We wanted people to come to our website and wonder for a moment if it was an accountancy firm or not,” the directors said.

Maverick

Maverick

Maverick

Spark: Bright colours and geometric lines

When Spark came to us, they already had a new brand and logo (although we got to give a vote on the final logo, which we enjoyed doing!). Their bright colours and geometric lines needed to be reflected everywhere – on the sections of the website, in the icons, on social media.

The question for accountants now is: what do people feel when they interact with your brand? How do you want them to feel? Most importantly, does what your prospects see – your website, signage, technology, language – match what you know your existing clients feel about you?

If not, it may be time to make a change.

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“We onboarded over 70 new clients in tax season - all premium, no cheap. And that compares to I think 50 last year. I got no junk this year - like none. Having the prices on the website was really good. If they balk at the price than we're done - it's right there. Even existing clients that have said something about the price - I've said - this is the price if you're new - you ARE getting a legacy pricing. So they're like “okay, let's move on from that conversation”. Love this win for @titaniumhq.ca 🔥 Jamie partly attributes this win to including pricing information on this website! This helped: 1. Qualifies out people who can't afford his services 2. Helped current/legacy clients understand pricing Keep up the great work 👏🎉 #client #win #victory #pricing #value #clientwins #website #onboarding #marketing #success

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Whether it’s their mum, their uncle or their neighbour… how often do you end up redoing the work and not charging for it? 🫣 Use marketing to SHOW your clients the value in their #accountant being responsible for all the numbers 🙌 and the consequences when they get someone inexperienced to do it 🤪 And charge what you’re WORTH for the work 🌟 If you need help using marketing to show your value, fill out our discovery form on our website and book a chat with one of the team! 💪 #bookkeeping #clients #accountants #value #worth #accuracy #marketing

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Your #brand is the identity
🔥 Brand books 🔥 Your #brand is the identity of your accounting firm 💪 It's how you communicate who you are, how you speak, who you serve and how you do your best work 💛 Your brand makes a promise to your clients and shows them the experience they'll have working with you. Because brand is SO fundamental to your firm, you need to have a place where you gather together all your brand guidelines and details so you can share them easily with your team, designers, content writers, marketing partners... This will help you to have consistency across all of your marketing and be certain everyone is working from the same brand 🙌 You can check out some of the brand books we've created for #accounting firms via the link in our bio, and if you'd like to have a chat with us about creating a brand book for your firm, hit 'Start today' on the our website! ✅ #brand #books #consistency #experience #promises #delivery


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📢HIRING for Marketing Assistant 📢 Applications are still open for our next superstar to join the #marketing team! 🔥 This role has responsibility for supporting in the creation of #marketing deliverables and tailoring all our marketing activity to help more accountants and bookkeepers find PF and get the marketing support they need and want 🙌 You'll be great for this role if you: ✔ Have minimum 2 years experience of working in a marketing role ✔ Enjoy building relationships with people ✔ Are excited to join a collaborative team ✔ Like working remotely ✔ Would love to have a varied role which uses a variety of skills across a range of projects You'll also be: 🔥 Passionate 🤝 Collaborative 🗣 A great communicator 😍 Creative The first stage is submitting a 3 MINUTE VIDEO sharing a little about yourself and why you'd be great for this role. You'll find more details via the link in stories & our bio! No marketing people were harmed in the making of this post 😆 Please share this with anyone who you think would be a great fit for our team and for this role! 🌟 #hiring #marketing #assistant #role #career #creative #agency #team #accountants #bookkeepers


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