Brand reputation remains a hugely important factor in scholarly publishing. Even if one ignores metrics like the Impact Factor, what the reader or author thinks about your journal, or the types of books your company produces, is a major influencer in their decision to buy, read, or submit a manuscript. But what do we mean by “brand”?

Oxford University Press (full disclosure: my employer) put together the video below from an author of a new book on branding to offer a quick explanation. Brand is not the same thing as your logo, nor is branding the same thing as marketing. Branding is all about design (and no, that does not mean how things look).

David Crotty

David Crotty

David Crotty is a Senior Consultant at Clarke & Esposito, a boutique management consulting firm focused on strategic issues related to professional and academic publishing and information services. Previously, David was the Editorial Director, Journals Policy for Oxford University Press. He oversaw journal policy across OUP’s journals program, drove technological innovation, and served as an information officer. David acquired and managed a suite of research society-owned journals with OUP, and before that was the Executive Editor for Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, where he created and edited new science books and journals, along with serving as a journal Editor-in-Chief. He has served on the Board of Directors for the STM Association, the Society for Scholarly Publishing and CHOR, Inc., as well as The AAP-PSP Executive Council. David received his PhD in Genetics from Columbia University and did developmental neuroscience research at Caltech before moving from the bench to publishing.

Discussion

1 Thought on "An Introduction to Branding"

Always helpful to hear different takes on branding definitions. Fun visuals added with the notecards. I’m glad the video did not harp on branding being just design because I think people who are not in the business do confuse branding with marketing and with design. They’re all related but not one in the same.

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