Heraldry - Let Your Flag Fly

Heraldry was a way to let the world know who you were. A medieval knight could let his flag fly.

By the middle of the 1100s, knights were getting pretty armored up, wearing full metal plate armor. The helmet grew from the skull cap with a nose guard, a design that had been popular for centuries, into a fully enclosed head covering with a visor and/or narrow eye slits.

While this was great for protection, they made one knight virtually unrecognizable from another. The image you have in your head of a freestanding suit of knights’ armor right now? Yeah, they’re starting to look just like that.

So, if you’re a pedigreed and trained knight, you have a couple of problems. One, you are the son of a knight, who was also the son of a knight, but nobody knows it. Two, nobody knows it’s you in that armor, and thus cannot be impressed with your handsome mustache.

This is important both during real battles and during tournaments. Take off your armor, and both problems are solved. But then you’ll almost certainly die by lance stab / sword slash / mace smash in combat, which is also bad. It’s a pickle.

Enter heraldry. You could just write on a piece of parchment that you were Sir So-and-So of Somewhere, but nobody could read, so that didn’t help much. You needed an emblem that made you immediately recognizable and advertised your rank as a noble and status as a stud. And it would differentiate you from lowly, dirty, grubby common soldiers and maybe worse, rapidly rising, uppity bourgeois merchants.

“Heraldry deals with the use, display, and regulation of hereditary symbols employed to distinguish individuals, armies, and institutions.”

The name “coat of arms” comes from the tunic that nights would wear over their armor to identify themselves. They started off simple with colored stripes and crosses, but then developed into an ornate symbolic language with sophisticated rules.

Coats of arms started as personal symbols, but then came to be focused more on family lineage and pedigrees. This developed slowly over many decades and mirrors the evolution of the knight from mounted warrior who earns his place with his sword in battle to knight as noble rank earned by being born into the right family.

When you see them now in the shape of the shield, that’s because they would be painted on the shield in addition to the surcoat the knight wore over his armor. This is something that movies actually tend to get right.

The escutcheon is the shield, the field is the background color, and it might have one big design or be divided into two or three or four parts. Charges are the designs on the shield. Growing ever more elaborate, the coat of arms might have two animal “supporters” on either side of the shield, a motto below the escutcheon in Latin to be extra fancy, and topped off with a helmet, or a crown for the king.

By the end of the Middle Ages, the business of heraldry was rigorously defined, with only specific colors and patterns allowed. The eldest male of the household bore the family’s coat of arms in its original form, and all the younger brothers and cousins would make small variations in the design called marks of cadency.

A specific language developed to describe the coats of arms, with its own vocabulary like, “an azure lion rampant on a field of argent” meaning “a blue lion standing on its hind legs with a white background.”

If two knights were using the same heraldry, they would go to court to decide who got to keep it and who had to change. Yes, there was IP / copyright protection in the medieval world. Who knew?

The brand of a company or product is so important to the success of its business. A strong brand can sell more units at a higher price than weak brands or unbranded alternatives.

Even marketing experts disagree on how exactly to define what “brand” means, but they’re unanimous on what it ain’t. It’s not the logo. Brand is more than the name, the logo, and the look and feel taken together.

Yes, all of those elements are important, but a brand is the story that someone tells themselves when they think about a specific company or product or service or place or person.

Think of your favorite brand. There’s a story in your head about why you like it. You choose it, pay more for it, advocate for it, are loyal to it. This is because you remember how great it was in the past and expect it to be superior to its alternatives in the future, by whatever metrics are most important to you.

Companies will shell out millions to “rebrand,” changing the name and/or their visuals, but if their communication is confusing or their customer service is terrible, the experience the customer takes away is the brand, not the logo.