A brand is a promise. When there is competition in the marketplace then it’s your brand that sets you apart from the rest. Your brand creates and maintains your reputation and reflects your customers’ experience of your organisation. A strong brand makes you stand out from the crowds.

Brands provoke an emotion. Take Boots for instance: when we think about Boots we think of trust; Virgin conjures up a personality – fun/innovative. Cadbury’s makes us of think of quality, the rich purple of the logo symbolises royalty (French Royalty used to use this exact shade of purple) Cadbury’s decided to trademark the colour and make it their own. Harley Davidson trademarked the sound of the deep-throated roar of the motorbike and soaking up endless miles of US blue-skied highway – companies become possessive about their brands.

Our loyalty beyond reason to brands has been neatly explained by Kevin Roberts from Saatchi and Saatchi in his book Lovemarks: “If a brand delivers the promise it earns a special place in the consumers’ hearts and minds. So whenever the market gets difficult listen to the customer and go back to the basics of branding”.

• define your brand values e.g. design excellence, trust, innovation, value for money, quality customer service.  Are you offering what your customers want? Are you matched? Once established, convey this message throughout the organisation, from your business card and website through to employee attitudes. Your employees are your brand ambassadors; do they reflect what you stand for?

• manage your brand – keep employees involved - give someone the responsibility for your brand strategy. Continually reinforce the message that what they do is important and explain why. Make sure they know that breaking the promises to customers that your brand makes - just once - can damage the brand and your business.

• review your brand – get regular feedback. Keep checking that what you promise will be delivered is. Stay relevant to your customers. Bear in mind people stay loyal to a brand, emotions are involved so any changes need to be made sensitively – think carefully about a rebrand.

• budget for your brand – a budget focuses the mind and forces you to prioritise. Budget for: design: logo, signage, business stationery or product packaging, your premises, advertising, time you’ll need to spend with employees to make sure they understand your brand, resources you’ll have to provide for employees to enable them to carry out what the brand promises, eg customer service costs, keeping your company website updated.

It’s evident then, that brand is more than the just the logo, it’s the core value of your business and what it means to your customers and suppliers and the attachment they have to it. So if anyone sees Shaun, the missing ORS sheep – please let us know.

This blog was written by Jackie Poate, Business Development, Cradduck Design Co.

Tags: Brand, core values, corporate, graphic design, image, logo, packaging, promise, signage, stationery, website

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 3rd, 2009 at 11:01 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.