Brand Identity and Corporate Identity

Identity comes in many forms in the business world, though, not all are positive. Building an identity for your brand or company face is essential to achieve a visible presence in the market place. Your identity tells potential customers or clients who you are, what kind of reputation you have, quality of service, geography covered by you, name or logo recognition and much more.

When people look at an ad in any form of media, do they recognized you? What kind of thoughts go through the minds of people that see your name or a logo that identifies you? Is your logo or name even definable at all? All these questions are imperative to ask when considering how you will begin building your brand identity.

I believe that you should start with what your greatest strength is (i.e. what is your company best known for) and build a stronger awareness with your current client base and have them become evangelists for you company. Your clients are already happy and positive about this strength so it becomes a fairly simple transition to do.
Capitalizing on what you currently have that is doing well requires little to no change at all. If you are a new business then you need to analyze what you think you greatest strengths will be and build on that.

Your second aspect of your identity is to identify your greatest weakness (i.e. the source of your clients biggest frustration) and begin correcting it. This is the time for you to completely revamp your current standards and use the opportunity to relaunch your marketing campaigns. I have known many companies that have had clients that really want to be loyal but because of a certain aspect, the client begins using the services of a different company. You would be surprised at how many clients you could regain if you corrected this major weakness. New businesses should always do a self analysis of their weaknesses after a year or two of being in business. If you identify a weakness early on then you can easily get it corrected before it becomes habit in the company.

Once these internal aspects are out of the way you need to begin helping people to easily identify your brand over all others out in the market. This is done by creating a unique logo, catchy slogan, innovative name that gets people asking what it is (i.e. VUDU) or maybe a jingle that gets stuck in your head. All of these things are great ways to get people to identify you but you also need to make sure that there is a relation between your identity within the market and what you are known for. An example is "Just do it"®. Everyone recognizes this as the Nike® slogan but people also then associate Nike® with quality and comfort. This identifies them in the market and provides a positive outlook for their products.

It is clear that many companies often forget to establish a positive view of themselves to clients and only become recognizable as a name or face. The reputation of a company is of far greater importance than a catchy slogan or a fancy logo. Amazon.com for instance has been able to market itself well with no slogan, a boring (mostly text) logo and really nothing that would grab your attention, however, their consistency of having their name everywhere and having a reputation of great deals on books and other merchandise on an easy to use website was a powerful enough identity for them to be successful.

When looking for a company to align with for building your identity make sure that it understands both the internal and external aspects of a healthy brand identity. Look for a company that is not just web oriented but print based as well.

Here are the 7 keys to successful brand or corporate identity:

1. Internal Health - how do your employees view your company
2. Client Perception - how do your current clients see you
3. Findability - are you easily found by those that have heard of you
4. Visibly Identifiable - when you are found, do people instantly know who you are or what you provide
5. Industry Reputation - how do industry professionals view your company
6. Company Reputation - how do potential clients view your company
7. Competition Reputation - how does your competition see you (are you just hated, ignored or a role model to follow)

Finally in order for all these things to work you must have a great marketing plan to implement. Web based aspects like search engine optimization, e-newsletters, affiliate programs, etc are a great way to start because of the lower cost but make sure you cover all your print media as well. Everything from business cards to magazine ads and even television must be thought of as tools to get your identity out there. Branding never has an end; it is always ongoing and should be re-analyzed every so often to improve effectiveness.