corporate and marketing communications

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


brand and identity

  > what is branding?
  > brand identity
   

Marketing has more than its fair share of acronyms and buzz words which, in many cases, have taken on a life of their own. Branding is one of these: much talked about but little understood.

what is branding?
There are many valid definitions of branding, but for the purposes of this site let’s go with: a brand is the result of the expectations created in audiences’ minds through experience.

The key points in this definition are that:

for audiences, read customers, potential customers, investors, press, employees - in other words everyone who comes into contact with your company.
 
brands exist only in the minds of the audience.
brands are created by an individual’s experiences of a company – through its products, services and communications.
 
There are hundreds of ‘moments of truth’ everyday, when people come into contact with your company either directly or indirectly: each one is an opportunity to delight or disappoint. Brands are
therefore proved and deduced through a company’s actions, not just declared in an advertising campaign.
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brands exist by default
Brands exist by default, but strong brands are built. A company can’t choose not to have a brand; you can’t stop people forming an opinion of your company based on their experiences. So the challenge is to set & control the brand in such a way that the perceptions formed as a result of a company’s actions differentiate it from its competitors.

There are many benefits of having a strong brand: a strong brand provides a valuable differentiator over competitors, it can enable premium pricing and the visual/verbal symbols act as fast, efficient communicators. In our increasingly competitive world, people buy brands, not products.

Whether you are looking to establish a new company (and therefore brand) or are looking to change your brand to support changing business needs, n-plus can help you with the process from initial planning to full scale implementation.

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brand identity
Corporate identity is an essential element of effective branding. A strong company, product, or service identity acts as a useful point of recognition for customers and becomes shorthand for a company's brand values. There is, therefore, a great deal more to corporate identity than a well designed logo.

An effective corporate identity system defines and pulls together all of the constituent parts (e.g. logo, typeface, colours, tone of voice, etc.) into a cohesive set of deliverables from letterheads and business cards to product design and website.

n-plus has experience of creating new company and product identities as well as evolving and improving existing identity systems. We will devise the processes to ensure consistent implementation across your whole organisation and can produce useful support tools, such as easy to use guidelines and templates for Microsoft Word and PowerPoint applications.

 

 

 
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