The Job Description for a Stronger Brand Identity
If a brand is a vibe, then visual (how it looks) and verbal (how it talks) identity are two of the main ways that vibe gets expressed, and ultimately interpreted, by the outside world.
Yes, there are other major levers that shape brand perception: how the company behaves, the sales and service experience, the way employees show up (or don’t) in real life. But in terms of what marketers can directly control, it's pretty much limited to how the brand looks and sounds.
Smart marketers understand that those expressions don’t exist in a vacuum. There are countless external forces: cultural context, existing biases, historical baggage, the chaos of the internet—that can bend, reshape, or totally distort what a brand is trying to say. Smart brands don’t just fight against that. They deeply understand those forces and leverage them like judo. FOX News, for example, has built an empire by understanding its audience’s worldview and reinforcing it with surgical precision. You don’t have to like it to learn from it.
I also want to acknowledge sonic identity while we’re here. Most brands treat it like a sign-off or logo sting at the end of an ad, but depending on your category, it could mean your on-hold music, the crunch of your chips, the way your car door thunks (or doesn’t). Not all of that is in a marketer’s domain, however, but the more teams align around the same brand fundamentals, the more cohesion you get. And cohesion is what drives strong brand identities and strong brand identities have more impact which can be measured in things like awareness, attribution, engagement, and ultimately, sales.
If visual and verbal identity are the two most controllable assets in a brand’s arsenal, what are they actually supposed to do?
To answer this question, you need to understand how and why customers shop for you—whether that’s your product, service, category or brand. While many have (prematurely) proclaimed the death of the classic sales-funnel, it still serves as a relevant mental model for this exercise. Map your brand’s touchpoints all the way down the funnel to get a clear picture of where your brand identity matters most (and where it doesn’t). Paired with a thorough grasp of your Category Entry Points (CEPs; or triggers as to why a customer begins their shopping activity), you can write a strong job description for your brand’s visual and verbal identity.
The Three Jobs of Brand Identity
Borrowing from the classic Jobs to be Done model, I like to think of brand identity elements as working to fulfill three overlapping jobs: Identification, Differentiation, and Expression.
Imagine them as rings in a Venn diagram. The goal is to define the correct amount of tension in this triad that imprints a succinct impression in the mind of buyers yet also allows for possible future growth and scale as warranted. Full overlap, where all three jobs align with precision, is rare. It requires a level of organizational clarity, brand novelty, and discipline that doesn’t seem to exist in late-stage capitalism. On the other hand, complete separation of the rings signals gaps that serve to confuse the customer (picture a logo whose look and feel is at odds with the brand voice and feels completely out of place in a given category).
The Three “Jobs to be Done” of Brand Identity
1. Identification
A successful identity does two things, and ideally quickly: First, it helps people recognize your brand and connect it back to you. Call it attribution, call it “name to a face.” The point is, they know it's you when they see it. Second, it uses the right cues to place you in a relevant category or mental file. Not just who you are, but what kind of thing you are.
This isn’t about spelling everything out. It’s about leveraging cultural and category codes in a way that feels familiar enough to be legible, and specific enough to be remembered. You’re not designing in a vacuum; you’re designing for context.
If you're selling healthy snacks with a brand identity that arbitrarily feels like B2B cybersecurity, you haven’t made a bold creative choice—you've likely taken yourself out of the consideration set. You want your brand to be distinctive, but that has to be based on a relevant insight about your customer or category.
Identification isn’t just about standing out. It’s about showing up where your audience expects to find you, looking like you belong, and making sure they remember your name when they do.
2. Differentiation
Differentiation isn’t a strategy. Like distinction, it’s the byproduct of a brand that knows what it stands for and expresses that with conviction.
And no, it doesn’t have to come from a differentiated product, service or attribute. One of my favorite examples is Coors Light. What makes Coors Light different in an increasingly crowded field of light beer? The marketing team has decided, simply, that it’s “cold.” Not award winning, not heritage, not handcrafted. Cold. They’ve turned cold into a religion, from blue and silver hued Rocky Mountain visuals to TV spots with ice climbers, snow covered beaches, the coolest rappers/actors (figuratively and literally: Ice Cube and LL Cool J) and even Patrick Mahomes breaking the 4th wall as he scales the Chill Train, Mission Impossible-style.
Ironically, plenty of people buy Coors Light warm off the shelf. But that’s not the point; Coors Light has claimed a contextual whitespace in a crowded category and locked it down. The product isn’t colder than any other beer, but the brand is.
3. Expression
If Identification is the what, Expression is the how. This is the job where tone, personality, and point of view come into play. It’s not just about being seen; it’s about being felt.
Expression gives your brand emotional texture. It’s how you come across in conversation, how you carry yourself in a room, how you land in someone’s memory. And it only works if it matches your audience’s expectations just enough to be accepted, and just different enough to be interesting. For a brand like Liquid Death, an offbeat POV and tone in a completely saturated and blank-space category such as water works. For a category like health insurance? Not so much.
Expression is the easiest part of identity to break because it lives everywhere: website, packaging, social captions, product labels. It’s also where brands get seduced by “voice” without enough thought to voice control. Cleverness without consistency (and alignment to the underlying brand personality) is just noise.
The Alignment Test
Thinking in terms of “jobs to be done” is helpful because it creates a simple test: are your brand’s identity elements doing these jobs in a coordinated way?
Apple, in its heyday, is the go-to example. Its design was instantly identifiable. Its differentiation was clean, intuitive, and human in an uninteresting category full of beige boxes. And its minimalist, confident, slightly smug expression was unmistakable. Everything from its packaging to its keynote events worked in sync.
That kind of alignment isn’t accidental. It’s the result of organizational discipline, creative clarity, and the belief that your brand’s point of view is worth repeating until people get it—or get out of the way.
