What is a brand?
Anglo-Saxons call it “brand”, “branding” being the activity of designing “brands”.
This term has become so widely used in professional jargon that I have never questioned its profound meaning. Why is the translation of the French word “marque” not “mark” in English?
If the translation of “graphic” by “graphique” never asked me an existential question, the translation of “brand” by “marque” is more surprising. Must we necessarily perceive an identical meaning for these two words? You have to plunge into the etymology of the words to find the beginning of an explanation.
A bit of etymology
The words keep traces of their history, of their journey through the centuries. Thus the word “work” does not profoundly resonate with the word “work”. The French word comes from the Latin “tripalium”, an instrument of immobilization (and torture!) whose three points have nothing to envy the fact of pointing at the factory. Later, the name of this Roman instrument was used to designate the state of a person who is suffering, and this is the meaning that is still used in obstetrics. When a mother-to-be goes into labor, it means that she is beginning to suffer! By extension, the word has been used to designate painful occupations, then production activities… in short, a nice story, far from that of the English word “work” inherited from the old German, which had borrowed it from the Greek “érgon” meaning “an activity / an action”.
Etymology, the unconscious of language, teaches us a lot about the meaning of words. So why is “Brand” used in the United States and “mark” in Gallic countries?
In English there are two words “brand” and “mark”, the first is used in technical language, the second in everyday language. The same word is used in everyday language to designate “a trace, an imprint left by something or someone” and in professional language “a sign or a name used to identify a product or service”.
The word “mark” originates from the Proto-Germanic word “marka” meaning “border / border / border demarcation sign”. The origin of the word crosses that of “walking” which itself comes from the Frankish “markon” “to print the mark of the foot”. It is this meaning that it has retained in French.
To communicate is to dialogue, to exchange, to share. As Marie-Claude Sicard says, in her book “Identity of brand”, to communicate is to begin by making the hypothesis of the freedom of the other, and not that of his weakness or of his re-publishing. Communicating is anything but trying to brand people like cattle!
Consumer: there is no such thing as a consumer. There are only individuals, people. At most, the “consumer” is a character trait present in each of us, which is expressed for a few minutes a day, often without our knowledge. To address a consumer is to deny that 99% of the rest of the time it is a man, a woman, a nurse, a father, a graphic designer… a multiple, complex and above all unique person! There is no way to separate the consumer from the human being as a whole. Therefore, it is above all the rules of “human” communication that must apply and not the dictates of relationship marketing.
