Your Brand Identity

What is a Brand Identity?

The emotional impact that you make on your customers – strategically directed by brand assets. Brand assets are anything from your logo to the bathroom flooring in your office building.

The Key To A Successful Brand Identity

Unified branding. With unified branding, you build immediate trust with your customers. They know they can expect the same positive experience no matter who they are working with within your company. In their minds, the brand itself becomes a personality.

The larger your business grows the more chances you run of brand mutation. Brand mutation is when an asset begins to stray from the prescribed brand guidelines. This can damage your customer relationship by eroding the trust you’ve worked hard to establish. Your client expects the same level of interaction and messaging through their entire sales process. When they come into contact with an asset or employee that gives them a different experience than what they expect, they may leave.

Here’s an example, Siobhan is dating a handsome and kind Australian fellow, they go to dinner a couple times and enjoy each other’s company. One particular evening he speaks with an American accent instead of his Australian one, with no explanation. Siobhan, understandably, dumps him and looks for someone who isn’t a weirdo.

This may seem like a bland Tinder catfishing story, but it illustrates the betrayal of trust customers feel when confronted by behavior that doesn’t meet their expectations.

Avoid Branding Mistakes

Out of Date

Regularly check your marketing materials for accuracy, especially if you have a sales team that relies on brochures or handouts to give clients. It never looks good to make a claim in your brochure from data that was collected over two years ago. A good practice would be to date each marketing asset with the last time it was updated, then get your marketing department into the habit of creating new assets or updating old ones.

Inconsistent

The larger your company becomes the harder it is to keep everyone on the same track when it comes to branding. The best way to combat your growing size is a branding guideline. Brand guidelines can be as simple as a web page with your approved logos and fonts or it can be a complex novelette. But having a Brand Guideline isn’t enough. You have to make it part of your on-boarding process for new employees, and occasionally have refreshers for current employees. You can also make sure your lines of communication are open enough so that when an employee sees a misuse or needs a new asset designed, your design and marketing team can handle it.

Of course, we can help you with any of these brand identity problems! If you are looking for a refresh, want supplemental assets, or maybe your graphic designer has taken off and you need a new brochure stat! We can take care of it.

We’ve written another article about how important strong branding is, you can check it out.