Does your brand have style?

Brand – The values associated with a company such as quality, reliability, creativity and innovativeness.

Brand identity – The tangible elements of how a company is represented such as logos, shapes, sounds and smells.

Why owning an iPod feels good, before you touch the product

Anyone who’s bought an iPod in the past few years will probably remember the day they first got it, and in particular the experience of opening up the box for the first time. This relatively inexpensive part of the product (the packaging) brings an enormous amount of good feeling toward the Apple brand before the consumer even touches the actual item they’ve paid for.

With the iPod Touch for example the box is a heavier than usual card, it’s finished in a slightly satin dark grey gradient with minimal design and is tastefully adorned with metallic spot colour and embossing. The top of the box slides off in the same style as a jewellery box and has a soft foam lining to the inside which protects the iPod Touch that’s presented boldly underneath. Even the stick on manufacturing label on the reverse of the box is printed white on black to match everything else. Considering the demand for the iPod Touch and iPhone Apple could be handing them out in food bags and saving themselves money, but Apple uses the opportunity to bring quality and style to their brand.

When you buy a Harley Davidson from a dealer, rather than sticking a sign on your bike that reads “Sold” they hang a sign from it that reads “Another dream has just come true, please respect the owner by not sitting on the bike.” For the price of a printed A4 sheet of paper something that could have ended a potential sale becomes something that could trigger one.

Your brand identity is out there representing your business like a sales person shouting from the roof top 24hrs a day. It says a tremendous amount about your real brand values and cannot be ever brushed under the carpet. When a customer receives your email, picks up your brochure or views your Web site they see your brand identity as an example of your eye for detail, quality and style.

The worrying thing is its unlikely customers or even staff will ever tell you they think you’re brand looks bad, telling a business owner their brand looks bad is like telling them their children are ugly, nobody wants to be the one who says it.

If the market place was a party and your competitors were in attendance, would you feel a little underdressed?

Why brand identity is one of the first things you should gain control of and not the last

A company going to market without a clear and controlled brand identity is like a salesperson going to a meeting in just their underwear; it’s unlikely your customers would see it as professional.

Sadly the situation is many companies view brand styling as extortionately expensive and only available to the huge corporations that can afford it. The reality is brand styling is affordable to any size company and certainly should generate a return in brand value at least.

The real challenge is managing implementation and retaining control.

Introducing the Brand Style Guide

A brand style guide is a document available to all members of staff which empowers them with a set of guidelines and templates they can use to make sure all their material maintains the professional feel you want your customers to experience.

This guide can be anything from a few pages outlining logo use and type faces to a huge resource with associated template files and printed media such as letterheads and branded envelopes.

Brand style evolves over time, or the brand dies out

Sometimes being consistently average looking is at least better than being inconsistently good looking (or so my mum tells me). Sadly, like anything style related, being exposed to your own brand day in and day out can take the magic out of it an the shade of the brand grass on the other side of the fence can often seem a better pantone green. However this is not cause to wipe the slate clean and start again, overly keen changes to a brand identity can be like replacing a key character in a soap with a new actor, it can alienate and confuse people.

However some very well established and well recognised brands have drastically changed their style by allowing it to take an evolutionary process over many years. Rather than changing the style for the sake of it, they have been updated to stay looking modern but while still retaining familiarity with customer. Quite often those ‘old’ logos we recognise have changed a lot more than we think.

Brand styling, the possibilities are endless!

Brand identity is something that you can keep adding more and more detail too, I know a Managing Director who painted all the skirting boards and door frames in his factory to match the pantone shade used in his company logo. I know a Creative Director who sent back his new Mercedes because the letter spacing of the company initials were wrong on his private number plate.

The fact is brand styling is something all organisations should regularly revisit, develop and implement to stay competitive. It's also something that can apply nearly everywhere such as:

Letterhead design
Brochure design
Web site design
Building signage
Exhibition stands
Business stationary
PowerPoint presentation design
Product branding
Packaging design
Email signatures
Business card design
Vehicle graphics

Five things you can do right now

Choose one font and make sure you use it for everything your company sends out. This can go for emails, sales letters, company documents, PowerPoint presentations etc
Proofread your sales material and check you consistently use the same terminology. If you type Web site as ‘Web site’ and not ‘website’,’ web site’ or’ Web Site’ then make sure it’s always typed like that.
Make sure every member of staff knows what to say when answering the phone, be it “Hello Joe Bloggs Limited how may I help you?” or “Good morning, J.Bloggs”
Pick the single Logo file everyone is to use on documents. Make sure everyone has a copy.
Gather up all your sales material, brochures, leaflets, catalogues and letters, put them on your desk and walk outside facing away from the building. Put yourself in the shoes of the client, turn around and walk back in, look at the material and ask yourself “Is this good enough?”