Creating a Long Lasting Brand and Corporate Identity

Before you invest all your time and resources in your advertising or marketing, make sure you have defined your brand identity and your product “personality”. You probably have talked to someone about their marketing efforts and they often think of branding, marketing and advertising as one of the same and that could cause a confusion. Companies that market their products or services without properly investing their time upfront establishing their brand and corporate identity may not be as successful and end up wasting a lot time and expenses in marketing with little or no return on investment.

What is Your Brand Personality?

Your logo itself is not your brand nor your identity. However, the logo, identity (visual aspects of your overall brand) and corporate image and public perception of your company, products and services are all made up of your brand.

Strategy: To create a brand, the first step is to come up with a strategy. You’ll need to refine the company’s propositions, its mission statement and how best to bring your vision to life.

Creative Direction and Execution: The ultimate goal is to create a strong brand with uniformed and consistent concept and visual or look/feel. All elements within your brand should carry the same voice from the logo (symbols/icons), typography/typeface/fonts, color scheme, tone, choice of photography, visual styles & treatment, and design layout. Colors affect people’s emotion so you have to know who target audience (demographic and psychographic for example their interests and opinions) is and how the choice of color will create an impact to them. The brand could affect your audiences in more than visually and through several other senses (think of the jingle music used in your radio commercial), the taste of food at your restaurant or the scent of your product…so we have to come up with a multi-sensory way to bring them all together to best capture the essence of your brand.

Your brand should be unique and memorable. Try to find what is unique about your company and your product, brainstorm on a white board and write down the name/tagline or sketch as many ideas of what your logo should look like and then narrow down the choice to 3-4 choices and continue to refine you concepts until you’ve collectively arrived at one strongest concept that will truly reflect your company and represent your brand. Then refine your concept further by continue to simplify process and make sure the logo that you come up can stand the 1 inch test or basically it can still hold up when you scale it down to that size.

Implementation & Consistency: Ensure that your brand is properly adopted in all your adverting and marketing channels. Make sure that every designers or art directors involved in your creative efforts strictly follow the brand guidelines that you’ve established and that every marketing material or advertising campaign truly reflects the brand personality and image.

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