Branding and Identity

An Overview Lecture

By David Franek

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“Clarity in expressing the brand— whether it be for a product, a corporation, or an institution—may be the final [business] frontier.”

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What is Branding

Branding is the strategic staking out of an appropriate, credible market space for a company and/or its products and services. Branding provides a vision upon which the company can

build —- an identity that it can maintain and add value, even while the company and its offerings grow.

Branding is a promise a company makes to the marketplace — a promise that it’s going to fulfill certain expectations. It’s permission to believe.

Branding is awareness building of a company and/or its products and services within the marketplace. A brand, if carefully crafted and maintained, never expires —

it’s the one thing that really lasts.

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What Branding Can Do

Branding is a crowbar for breaking through the clutter of competitive messages, making a company better known, and making it more memorable.

Branding steers how the marketplace thinks about the company.

Branding, by increasing awareness and by providing a context for sales and marketing messages, paves the way for sales efforts; it eases the sales process and increases the likelihood that it will be successful.

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Branding Process

• Channel BrandBuilderTM is our approach for working on larger branding projects or campaigns. It’s a flexible, seven-step process.

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Discovery Process: Brand Audit

This is when we look at an organization’s existing image and brand and evaluate its strengths and weaknesses (like getting a checkup at the doctors). Once we know where you are, we can figure out how to get you where you need to be.

Brand Equity Corporate Logo Product Names and Identities Marketing Materials Benchmarking

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Brand Equity

Brand equity is a set of brand assets and liabilities linked to its brand, its name and symbol, that add or subtract from the value provided by a product or service to an organization and/or that organization’s customers.

It has also been defined as the effect of brand knowledge on customer response to the brand. As such, brand equity is the value of the brand name in the marketplace.

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Brand Equity

What is the value of a brand equity?

Building strong brand equity is essential to secure competitive advantage. Increasingly, it is the brand, which provides the sole means of differentiation, as Fortune magazine famously said:

- “In the 21st century, branding ultimately will be the only differentiator between companies. Brand equity is now a key asset.”

- What Fortune is asserting is that sooner or later most companies will be competing on a level playing field. In these circumstances the reputation encapsulated in their brands will become the chief determinant of customer choice.

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The Art of Positioning

Positioning is the first creative step in the branding process.

It’s the most basic of all strategy statements and the foundation upon which the branding is built.

The positioning statement must define three things: Target audience Competitive category The most meaningful point of difference for your brand

Positioning is about creating a simple strategy that meaningfully differentiates your brand

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The Art of Positioning

Positioning is about turning things inside out …

Positioning is not so much created by looking for the solution inside the company, or inside your own mind but inside the prospect’s mind.

Positioning is not what you do to a product or company. Positioning is what you do to the mind of the prospect or the marketplace.

Positioning is about creating an impression in the mind of the prospect

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The Art of Positioning

Positioning comes to grips with the difficult problem of getting heard in our over-communicated marketplace.

Everyday thousands of messages compete for a share of the prospect’s mind. The mind is a battleground.

In communication, as in architecture, less is more. You have to sharpen your message to cut into the mind. You have to jettison the ambiguities, simplify the message and then simplify it some more if you want to make a long-lasting impression.

The best approach in creating a positioning statementis with an oversimplified message

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The Art of Positioning

Summary – 3 key premises: Positioning must set a company or product apart from its

competitors. You must position the company or product in the mind of the

prospect. Positioning must be singular: one simple message.

The moral of the story is: You must sacrifice. You cannot be all things to all people, you

must focus on one thing.

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Brand identity

The brand identity is a company’s signature and should represent its core attributes. It is intended to enhance perception by creating a visual contact between the brand owner and the public or marketplace.

Brand identity is all about the visual and verbal attributes of a

company presented in their marketing materials; how the logo, positioning, messaging, and look and feel are illustrated and integrated across the various components. Building blocks that fall into this category include tag line, marketplace messages, color, photography or illustration use, graphic elements, and more.

When multiple product lines are involved, a strong brand architecture can clearly organize the offerings as well as support one another through consistency and shared equity.

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Types of Brand Identity Architecture

1. Monolithic Brand Identity

A monolithic type brand identity isbased on having one organization and one branded identity. If there are acquisitions of other companies or products that become a part of the overall organization—they adopt the monolithic identity and drop their former identity.

Example: Citi Bank

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Types of Brand Identity Architecture

2. Holding Company Brand Identity

This type of identity is used for companies with strong multiple brands in the marketplace. The parent company is more of a holding company with little or no brand identity itself. If there are new acquisitions—the acquired entity continues to use theirbrand identity with little or noreference to the parent company.

Example: Proctor & Gamble

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Types of Brand Identity Architecture

3. Endorsed Brand Identity

Endorsed brand identities are hybrids Of the ideal types of monolithic andholding company identities. They offer the best of both worlds. Under and endorsed identity system,the parent company benefits fromThe branded entity and vice versa.

Example: Apple

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The Design ChannelBranding and Integrated Marketing Communications

www.thedesignchannel.com

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