Truly Deeply/Madly

The Power of brand Image
Whilst brands do not live or die by the suc­cess of their brand iden­tity, a well designed image is a valu­able asset for every busi­ness. An effec­tive brand iden­tity will pro­vide cues to your mar­ket about your busi­ness, what it does, what it stands for and it’s com­pet­i­tive posi­tion in the mar­ket. Many organ­i­sa­tions under­es­ti­mate the impor­tance of brand iden­tity, choos­ing to invest their time and money in other aspects of their busi­ness. By fail­ing to make informed and con­scious deci­sions about the brand image they present to their mar­ket, these busi­nesses inad­ver­tently send mixed and gen­er­ally neg­a­tive messages.

01. Putting the Horse Before the Cart
Few organ­i­sa­tions invest the time in devel­op­ing their brand def­i­n­i­tion before embark­ing on the design of their brand iden­tity. The first step of any brand iden­tity project must be to gain clar­ity around your brand’s per­son­al­ity and its go-to-market proposition.

02. Pay­ing Peanuts and Won­der­ing why you’re Get­ting Mon­keys
Not all busi­nesses can afford the cost of a top shelf brand con­sul­tant to design their iden­tity. But not all good con­sul­tants are expen­sive, and not all expen­sive con­sul­tants are good. Use your busi­ness net­work to gain rec­om­men­da­tions and use the inter­net to research brand agen­cies whose work is both smart and aes­thetic. Brand iden­tity projects that start with “I know a guy who owes me a favour…” always end in disaster.

03. Fail­ing to Invest in your Brand’s Iden­tity
The cost of imple­ment­ing your brand iden­tity in sig­nage, on your web site, uni­forms, brochures, retail fit-out, adver­tis­ing, and all the rest typ­i­cally over­shad­ows the cost of get­ting your brand iden­tity design right in the first place. The oppor­tu­nity cost to your busi­ness of going to mar­ket with a brand iden­tity that is com­mu­ni­cat­ing the wrong mes­sages to your mar­ket is even greater. Get­ting your brand propo­si­tion and iden­tity right from the begin­ning is the great­est invest­ment you can make in the mar­ket­ing of your business.

04. Navel Gaz­ing
With an inter­nal focus, most busi­nesses assume that their cus­tomers know far more about their prod­ucts and ser­vices than they actu­ally do. Your brand iden­tity should pro­vide a customer-based per­spec­tive on how you com­mu­ni­cate what you do to market.

05. “I Know what I Like“
When it comes to brand iden­tity — every­one has an opin­ion. The real­ity is though, that all opin­ions are not born equal. It is impor­tant to remem­ber that the only goal of a brand iden­tity is to com­mu­ni­cate the right mes­sages to the right peo­ple. For­tu­nately if you’ve cho­sen a skilled and expe­ri­enced brand designer they will under­stand the visual cues required to achieve this goal. Unfor­tu­nately, your per­sonal opin­ions are of lit­tle value.

06. Imi­ta­tion is the Most Sin­cere form of Flat­tery
With all aspects of brand­ing, dif­fer­en­ti­a­tion is vital. Every busi­ness needs to pro­vide its cus­tomers with a com­pelling rea­son to choose its prod­ucts or ser­vices over those of the com­pe­ti­tion. Embark­ing on a brand iden­tity project with the desire to look like the mar­ket leader is a strat­egy that needs to be very care­fully considered.

07. “We Can’t Change the Logo“
There are thou­sands of rea­sons why a busi­ness can’t change its brand iden­tity — a few of them are even valid. How­ever, for most busi­nesses this response is reflex­ive, emo­tional and rarely based on strate­gic thought. It is impos­si­ble to repo­si­tion a busi­ness in the mar­ket­place with­out chang­ing it’s brand iden­tity. Some­times you just need to break some eggs to bake a bet­ter cake.

08. It has to be Blue
Colour is a pow­er­ful cul­tural com­mu­ni­ca­tor. The colours you choose to rep­re­sent you busi­ness brand, it’s prod­ucts and ser­vices evoke an emo­tional response, posi­tion your brand rel­a­tive to the mar­ket lead­ers you com­pete with and com­mu­ni­cate a myr­iad of cues to your cus­tomers from qual­ity to price, from pro­fes­sion­al­ism to envi­ron­men­tal cre­den­tials. You must ensure your brand identity’s colours are well con­sid­ered and care­fully selected.

09. Not just a Pretty Logo
Your brand iden­tity con­sists of many lay­ers well beyond the brand mark itself. Every visual expres­sion of your brand through it’s pack­ag­ing, brochures, web site, staff uni­forms, even your Twit­ter page make up your brand iden­tity and they all need to look the same. Your brand iden­tity will con­sist of a com­bi­na­tion of ele­ments includ­ing type­faces, colours, pat­terns, tex­tures, pho­tos, illus­tra­tions, all selected to say the right things about your brand to your market.

10. My Work here is Done
Once you have devel­oped a well designed visual iden­tity for your brand, give your­self a clap on the back… and then get down to the real work. Your brand is the sum of a mil­lion ges­tures — large and small — car­ried out every day by you and your organ­i­sa­tion. Look­ing the part is a crit­i­cal starting-point, but bring­ing your brand propo­si­tion to life in every­thing you do and say will play a pow­er­ful role in achiev­ing the goals you have for your business.

Here’s an exam­ple of a brand iden­tity project we did for Gelati Sky.
From strate­gic brand def­i­n­i­tion and brand per­son­al­ity to the design of dif­fer­en­ti­ated visual lan­guage that looks as deli­cious as the gelato tastes, the Gelati Sky brand iden­tity is a great exam­ple of a client and project that ticks all the boxes. As Paul Scal­isi (owner and Gelato Chef) relayed to us: “When­ever we meet with a new stock­ist, we open the box, they see the prod­uct and say ‘Wow!’”. Like it says on the pack: ‘Gelati Sky, it’s what dreams taste like’.

If you’d like to ensure your new brand iden­tity has the nec­es­sary con­sid­er­a­tion to avoid these pit­falls, give us a buzz — we’ll be only too happy to share our expe­ri­ence and exper­tise with you.

David Ansett

Tags: Brand Agency, Brand Design, Brand Identity, Brand Strategy, code of visual langauge, Corporate Image, Graphic Design Melbourne, Visual Language

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 27th, 2009 at 12:18 pm and is filed under Small Brands Big Personalities, Thinking, Visual Language. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.