Corporate identities are strategy
Each day, over 130.000 new companies are founded. That means that over 130.000 new brands are created every day either by default or by purpose. Normally, getting a corporate identity is one of the first things a new company gets done. It‘s one of the first times a new company executes on their strategy—at least it should be.
Get identified
Either if you like it or not, your corporate identity is part of your communication and marketing. Normally, your identity is one of the first things new people notice about you. It’s the face of your company, and just like with real faces, it will revoke some sort of feelings for those who see it. You want those feelings to be right. Unfortunately you can’t please everyone, because different people find different things appealing. The reason branding should is (or should be) part of your initial business strategy is because your corporate identity should be made up to create the right feelings for the right people, and choosing the right people is strategy.
Corporate identities with goals
Strategy is the plan of how you’re going to reach your goal. Since corporate identities are strategy, it should also have goals. Measuring impact of something visual might be hard, but setting goals will be effective none the less. What are you trying to achieve with the identity of your company? What is the best or worst outcome of an identity? Even if we’re not aware of it, all visual identities create some sort of emotional reaction for us. Our brain automatically put labels on everything our eyes see, and a brand designers’ speciality is to make a target audience put the right labels on the brand when they see the identity. When we kicked of Brandpad (we’re not yet launched) we gave one of our favourite brand designers, Nicklas Haslestad, the great challenge of creating a corporate identity targeting designers. Our brief was almost non-existing, but at least it had clear goals: make us get attention from brand designers and make our brand reflect what we focus on as a company in this market. Those are both criteria that has to do with our business strategy, they’re just channeled into visual design.
When starting up a new business, be sure to communicate your strategy and go-to-market plan to your designer so he can make sure you align your visual identity with your strategy. If they pull in different directions, it will have a negative impact on your marketing metrics.
