A brand identity is essential to just about any business or organisation, no matter what industry they’re in. This identity will define who you are and what you do to customers, partners, and the public – it also helps to set you apart from your competition! An effective corporate identity will make you easily recognisable through the way you brand, act, and communicate. Here’s how to do it the easy way:
Know Who You Are
To establish your brand identity, you need to have an internal consensus of who you are. Review your history, mission, and methods to help you to do this. Define why you exist and how you’re different from the rest.
What Do Others Think of You?
It’s important to get an idea of how others see you, so conduct surveys, ask questions, set up interviews, and hold simple discussions to get an understanding of this. Once you have a good idea, decide whether you’d like to change that perception or not. Try to send out the right kind of message.
Research Similar Businesses
Look at competitor’s websites, read testimonials, and visit their social networking pages. Decide what you like and what you don’t like, and then work out how easy it is for you to grasp their corporate identity.
Look to the Future
Your corporate identity should embrace your goals for the next 5-10 years so that it’s pretty much future proof, as well as your present. Try to include all employees and partners in this by asking them what they see for the future of the company. Make sure you take the opinion of people who have been with you the longest into consideration, especially.
Start the Creative Process
Brainstorm your ideas on logos, tag lines, colours, and objects that you think would work well in materials to represent your corporate identity. Put together a team of designers and writers, or hire a consultant if you don’t have that kind of creative talent.
Depending on your business, you’ll need to create identity materials with the help of a company like Encore Image; like a logo, business cards, websites, flyers, and packaging. Make sure everything is consistent.
Make Your Identity Customer Orientated
What I mean by this, is if you work with children, for example, you can use primary colours and fun layouts/images to give an idea of who you are. If you’re a corporate business, you should reflect that in your design.
However, you want to be taken seriously, so always remain professional and make sure you’re easy to understand, interesting, clean, and engaging. Anything that could be misinterpreted as offensive should be scrapped, and you need to double check for errors.
Writing a Strategy
Write a strategy to ensure that you’re consistent with your materials and efforts. You can then look back on your strategy and make sure that it’s still working and relevant.
Have you used this post to establish a brand identity? Let us know how straight forward you found it in the comments. Thanks for reading!
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