Corporate branding: who do you think you are?

There is a commonly held misconception in business that the product will always find its market. This is patently untrue – as anyone who’s come up with the million dollar idea but failed to find a backer will testify. The right product or service is, of course, vital - but the success of your business depends on far more than just having something good to sell.

Whether you like it or not, the success of your business is subject to the following principles:

• The customer experience of your product or service isn’t formed purely by using it.
• The impression your business makes on the world doesn’t start with the product you offer.
• How the world sees you is determined by the sum total of what it knows about you.

Your customers need to know you, build a relationship with you. They need to like you. That journey of understanding begins with discovering who you are.

Brand designs

You don’t have to be holding a steaming mug of cappuccino from an international coffee house or sitting in business class of a transatlantic 747 to know what your coffee company or your air carrier of choice is all about. This can only happen because our experience of a product or service begins not with the thing itself, but with the branding of it.

Corporate branding is the very essence of your business boiled down to a simple, striking, unforgettable corporate design, brand and logo. It reflects who you are, where you are and what you do. Choose a corporate design or brand that fits your business and your customers will understand you before you ever realise they’re looking. Choose an exceptional corporate designer and your customers will understand you before they realise they’re looking.

Think of a design classic cola bottle, a red and white label and a curling, looping logo. You know the product, know the company’s values, know what makes that business tick before you ever take the bottle off the shelf.

Think of 4 interconnected rings and the phrase ‘vorsprung durch technik’. One design and three words that are the very embodiment of Germanic reliability, precision engineering and technological capability without ever having so much as opened the door of the car in question.

More rings. Five of them, interconnected. Each one a different colour. Three above, two below. One image to symbolise the human spirit. Citius, altius, fortius. Faster, higher, stronger. Is any design as evocative or ubiquitous as the Olympic flag?

A picture doesn’t paint a thousand words. It replaces them. It bypasses the head and goes right for the heart – precisely the place where your business needs to reside to succeed.

Talking loud and clear

Your corporate brand, your design, your logo, is what speaks to your customers when you can’t. Your brand can have a global reach. Your brand never sleeps. Your brand never has an off day or says the wrong thing at the wrong time. Your brand can convey more about your business than a full page of text, and can do so in a fraction of the time. Effective corporate design and branding speaks to the heart, not just the head – and it can be a huge difference between your company and its competitors at a time when the slightest competitive advantage is at a premium.

Corporate design isn’t window dressing. It isn’t an add-on, an extra, a nice-to-have. It isn’t the business equivalent of an extra cup holder on your dashboard.

Corporate design is fundamental to your business. Get it even just a little wrong and your potential customers will get the feeling that something just isn’t right. They’ll detect the incongruity between what they hear and what they see and feel. The head may not notice the difference, but the heart certainly will. And your potential customers will forever remain just that: potential.

A strong, unifying corporate design can give your business a unique identity, a visual representation of itself that you can reproduce on everything from web pages to global marketing campaigns; business cards to mouse mats.

So if your customers’ attachment is not to what you offer but to you, and if their experience of you starts being formed the second they see the merest glimpse of your logo, then doesn’t that make corporate design the next essential step for your business?

Corporate design will give you the voice, attract the attention and say loud and clear what your business is about. It will capture your customers’ hearts. And then you can capture their business.

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