subject: Brand Identity [print this page] Brand Identity Brand Identity
There's a lot of talkand, unsurprisingly, a lot of confusionabout the idea of brand identity. Different experts have different ideas about what the phrase encompasses, and what you should strive to achieve in establishing yours. The only thing everyone seems to agree on is that you should have one, and it should make people have strong positive feelings about you.
The phrase brand identity is used in two different senses. In the narrower sense, it refers to the name of your offering (company, institution, consulting practice, whatever), your website, the visual treatment of the name, and other visual elements that identify and distinguish you from everyone else out there. To some, that's all that's meant by the phrase. To others, it means all that as well as the ideas and feelings you want people to associate with your brand. So, when you start having a conversation with your marketing department or consultants or whomever, decide which you mean and find out whether they mean the same thing you do.
Nearly everyone seems to agree that whenever possible your name has to be given a distinctive graphical treatment: a particular typeface in a particular color in a particular arrangement, sometimes with some games played with the letters (see, for example, the way ExxonMobilcombines the two Xs into one character). After that, the world seems to be evenly divided into two approaches: about half the world uses a logo (by which I mean an arbitrary and hopefully unique graphical element) in addition to the name; and the other half doesn't. Usually, the logo sits next to the name; in a smaller number of cases, the company name sits inside the distinct graphical elementwhich may be as simple as AIG's box or Hewlett-Packard's circle or as elaborate as the figure that GE uses.
The point of all this, other than to keep marketing departments busy and graphic designers happily occupied? Name recognition and brand recognition. Name recognition means that if somebody sees only the words "Shmurgle Corporation" (even in plain type) they'll say, "Oh, yeah, I know Shmurgle Corporation. They make shmurgles." And brand recognition means that if somebody sees the words "Shmurgle Corporation" in the distinctive typeface and type treatmentor even just the logo without the namewithout even reading or even seeing the name itself they'll say, "Oh, that's Shmurgle Corporation. They make shmurgles."
But brand identity in that sense is just the beginning. After you establish name recognition and brand recognition, you want to establish the part of brand identity that sells your products, services, or achieves your institutional goals (donations, volunteers, applications, or whatever): the ideas and feelings you want people to associate with your brand. And feelings are more important than ideas. This is the whole point of the advertising war between "I'm an Apple" and "I'm a PC." You want people to love your brand so much that, in addition to buying your products, they'll wear your baseball hats and tee shirts and even tattoo your logo on your bodyas if your company or organization were a sports team and they're not just consumers, they're fans.
