Brand Identity - Lessons for Small Businesses

During the recession we witnessed a boom in many kind of small businesses all across the United States. Many of these small businesses are making smart decisions to build their brand identities. However, some of them fail hopelessly, not due to lack of passion but due to lack of knowledge.

To understand brand identity you need to understand what brand identity means. Corporate Brand Identity, is the persona or characteristics of an organization as it intentionally adapts and tries to promote using their marketing campaigns. It is implied by using coporate logo designs, web design, and other marketing created in synchronization with other design elements of the brand or the product.

A company, business or organization's brand identity promotes the business, describes its objectives, displays the values and culture behind the organization. With effective marketing it becomes symbolic to how your brand is generally perceived. From the visual appearance of your products, to the corporate logo, and from letter heads to all communications every things help businesses establish a brand identity.

Since most small businesses cannot afford a elaborate marketing campaign, still they can strengthen their brand identity by following some basic practices. First of all, hire a professional logo designer to create your business logo design. Getting a professional custom made logo design is not that expensive. Also if you need (well every one needs) a website you better give it to the same designer. That way your logo and your website will compliment each other better.

Once you got your logo design, use it well to promote your business's brand identity. You can use your logo on business cards, office stationary, banners, brochures, and every thing else you can think of.

Popular Ways to Promote Brand Identity With Logo

They say a diamond is forever, I would tell you that a good logo is also going to stick with you and your next generations for decades if not centuries. There are so many businesses out there with such beautiful logos, I mean even your competitors might get a logo much better than yours. So how do you beat them all? By using your logo for promotion of your brand identity and doing it more effectively than any of your competitors.

Get your logo printed on these China mugs and sell them to your clients. Or simply give them away for free. People love free stuff and each time they are drinking coffee in this mug they are thinking about good things in their lives coffee, comfort, and your business logo.

Print your logo on T-Shirts and distribute them on some special occasion or simply give them away for free.

Get your logo printed on Paper Bags. If you already use paper bag at your workplace thats good if you don't then you should start using them now as these bags are more environment friendly than plastic bags. Also make sure that the paper used in your bags is the recycled one and no trees get hurt when you promote your brand identity.

Print out I heart Stickers and distribute them to your Customers. I love such stickers and I love many things for example I love the book shop around the corner of my street if they distributed such stickers I would gladly display them on my car's bumper.

Logo Design - Creativity vs. Customer Satisfaction

As a design artist, more specifically as a design artist who designs other people’s brand identities, you might often face this dilemma when you kill your creativity for customer satisfaction. The symptoms of this dilemma might range from mild unhappiness to extreme frustration.

You will be asked to redo an extremely good and absolutely unique logo design idea just because your customer thinks it is girly, or masculine, too heavy on eyes or so easy to ignore. You would feel angry and you should. But, anger does not bring you any jobs. So you hide your anger and you redo the design keeping in mind your clients feedback and changing it to meet their needs. It kills your heart the way you are destroying an astonishing piece of work to satisfy some non-design person who does not even know what “tint” means. 

This half heartedness takes the focus away from you and the end product is something neither you nor your client can look at. 

They key is to take client input seriously and consider it as a creative challenge. For example you have done a logo with bright sun drowning in the horizon and your client asks you to decrease the orange and add more blue to the horizon. You can get frustrated and create a purple horizon, or you can take this as a challenge. Don’t get upset over how silly this sounds; instead think of ways to add more blue. If you put your creative mind to it you will definitely find out ways to use blue.  

To some very successful design artists customer input has helped them create some of the most memorable logos of all time. Raymond Lowey was considered father of the Industrial Design. Below is an example of sketches he did for the Exxon Logo. Most of his ideas were rejected and the one that was selected was not Lowey’s first choice. Below is a photograph of his suggested ideas and then the picture of the final logo. 

National Brand Identity - UK a case study

In the late 90s and early 2000, Britain became the first nation to aggressively attempt a re-branding campaign. The campaign never actually took flight but the nation was set in mood for a rebranding which later affected government’s image and eventually Britain’s image in the world.
The rebranding campaign was handled by the tourism ministry. It was called “UK’s Ok”. The purpose of this new slogan was to present Britain as a cool modern Western nation. The globalization was causing the traditional government-run departments to get privatized and there was an immense sense of change that needed to be addressed. The new tourism campaigns started projecting Britain as a modern vibrant economy with cutting edge, hi-tech industries and a diverse society of people from many ethnic backgrounds.

Even though the British government gave up the idea of persuading a national brand identity, but they still worked on it in the tourism ministry. The tourism ministry’s marketing campaign then started focusing on creating new image of the nation. A logo competition was announced and many graphic artists submitted their ideas. The purpose was to come up with something like a slogan, something that becomes as iconic as I heart NYC sign.

The tourism ministry's efforts sparked a controversial debate. Many conservatives and even some moderate liberals were furious over the idea of hiding the traditional image of the country and emphasizing more on modernism. Many of them claimed that the ministry’s efforts look like they are ashamed of Great Britain’s historical and cultural heritage.

This campaign was so inspiring that after this tourism ministries of many countries adapted  similar approach of national branding. Today we see iconic logos of Qatar Airways, Malaysia Truly Asia, Thailand and many more countries using national branding to bring more tourists.