Brand or Cor­po­rate Iden­ti­ty is the way your com­pa­ny appears to the out­side world. The sym­bol­ism that allows your audi­ence to visu­al­ly recog­nise you in the mar­ket place.

Your brand iden­ti­ty needs to be con­sis­tent across the board, wher­ev­er it appears. In all visu­al com­mu­ni­ca­tion; busi­ness cards, let­ter head, com­pa­ny cloth­ing, web­site etc. It is quite pos­si­ble that a brand review high­lights the need for a new logo, in order to align with your chang­ing brand val­ues. You may also find that your exist­ing com­mu­ni­ca­tion meth­ods are out­dat­ed or not specif­i­cal­ly focused on your cho­sen tar­get mar­ket. Brochures, data sheets and leaflets are now sec­ondary to reg­u­lar news and updates via your website.

Branding 101, Part IV: The Brand Jigsaw

Many of the world’s largest cor­po­ra­tions con­stant­ly evolve their brand iden­ti­ty, based on chang­ing mar­kets, chang­ing cus­tomer needs and the revis­it­ing of brand val­ues. British Tele­com (BT) is a good exam­ple of this. They have evolved from a nation­al tele­phone oper­a­tor to a glob­al com­peti­tor in the ever-chang­ing world of telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions. Their cor­po­rate iden­ti­ty has sub­se­quent­ly been devel­oped to focus on these changes.

If your cho­sen mar­ket is sub­ject to change, it may be worth build­ing flex­i­bil­i­ty into what­ev­er cor­po­rate iden­ti­ty you have designed for your business.

Your com­pa­ny now has a visu­al iden­ti­ty, but how do you per­son­al­ly com­mu­ni­cate with your audi­ence? This com­mu­ni­ca­tion can be spo­ken or written.

The words you choose to use, as well as the style and per­son­al­i­ty of the lan­guage, all add up to a part of your brand.

Your brand val­ues will help you decide the right tone of voice for your com­pa­ny. Some exam­ples of how the big brands do it:

• Fun, car­toon style of Red Bull
• Pro­fes­sion­al, reas­sur­ing, con­fi­dent like British Airways
• Wacky, off the wall like IKEA

Does your com­pa­ny speak in the third or first per­son? How clear­ly will the per­son receiv­ing your com­mu­ni­ca­tion under­stand it?

Your ‘tone of voice’ must be con­sis­tent at every pos­si­ble point of client com­mu­ni­ca­tion. In oth­er words, when your com­pa­ny engages with its audi­ence, by what­ev­er means, it always sounds or reads the same.

In the final part – Brand­ing 101: Man­ag­ing your brand of this series, we’ll look at ongo­ing man­age­ment of your exist­ing brand.