Branding, Identity & Packaging
What is branding?
Branding is how you express yourself as a company to potential customers. Using design guidelines each element of your product has a similar look and tone. Branding provides several key elements to ensure the success of a product or service. These include:
• Re-enforce a good reputation
• Encourage loyalty
• Assure quality
• Convey a perception of greater worth allowing a product to be priced higher (or a product of equal price to sell more)
• Grant the buyer a sense of affirmation and entry into an imaginary community of shared values.
"Branding gives you an exceptionally effective way to broadcast who you are to your target market quickly and efficiently."
MultiChannel News
Case studies: click on a thumbnail to view a case study
Corporate identity
Corporate identity and branding is essentially design guidelines that are designed solely to fit around a company or product to identify it. These guidelines portray an image of professionalism and are used on everything from company stationery, packaging guidelines, packaging, website, brochure, vans etc right through to the advertising. This helps build your company’s reputation and increases its brand value.
Why should I brand my product/company?
A logo designed without guidelines is a bit like a car without a steering wheel. If you don't apply a consistent "look" to your stationery, website, signage, unifoms, advertiing, packaging and promotional products your products will not stand out amongst competitiors. Everyone has become very responsive to logos, their meanings, and their implementations. Because of the diversity of products, packaging and services available, the need for innovative and well thought-out logo and corporate identity design is central to a company’s success.
Effective Branding is memorable and easy to understand.
It is communicating these 4 points to the customer in the easiest possible way.
1. Who we are?
2. What do we stand for?
3. What makes us different from our competitors?
4. Who are our target audience?
“A great brand taps into emotions. Emotions drive most, if not all, of our decisions. A brand reaches out with a powerful connecting experience. It’s an emotional connecting point that transcends the product.”
Scott Bedbury/Nike, Starbucks
With these answers we can then figure out "How do we communicate with our target audience?"
"Your personal brand is a promise to your clients... a promise of quality, consistency, competency, and reliability."
Jason Hartman
Expressing yourself and standing out from your competitors.
It's not only the product itself, it's how you sell it.
Introducing yourself and helping your customers remember you.
Logo: Carefully selected text and graphics that give the "tone" of your company.
Business cards: A reminder for Customers/ Clients to contact you
Making your presence known to the area around you:
Using Signage, Posters and Leaflets is a way of making yourself familiar to potential customers in your area.
Press Ads and Radio Ads make your presence known to a wider audience.
A Slogan is a short and easy to remember phrase that expresses who you are as a company. For example: "Just Do It!" Nike
Give honest reasons why customers should your product and prove those reasons through advertising. Keep it simple and easy to understand.
“A great trademark is appropriate, dynamic, distinctive, memorable and unique.”
Primo Angeli
What does the product look/ feel like?
Packaging uses the same look and tone of the brand to make it easier for the customer to find your product on a shelf, in a catalogue or online.
Value is in Repetition.
Reminding your customers who you are through advertising increases your chances of being remembered when shopping. Seeing a creative or inspiring advertisement can encourage the customer to buy your product or visit your website. Encouraging customers to revisit your website builds client loyalty and reputation, loyal customers buy your products time and time again.
Being widely known also increases the value of your product and your reputation.
Employing Graphic Designers
“The talent for discovering the unique and marketable characteristics of a product and service is a designer’s most valuable asset.”
–Primo Angeli
Employing the skills and experience of Graphic Designers can greatly improve your products branding. Developing design guidelines and creating a consistent look and tone unites each element of the product into one easily understandable unit. It is essential for the customer to be able to link different elements of the company visually.
"Your Brand is What People Say About You When You're Not in the Room"Jeff Bezos, Founder of Amazon