Creating A Recognizable Brand For Your Organization

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A brand is the representation of a business or organization in a variety of formats. An organization with a solid brand and understanding of how their identity is supposed to be used in various mediums can improve the appearance of that organization. In turn this improves the chances that other businesses will take a serious interest in their cause and possibly be of assistance to them. Your brand can include, but is not limited to, some or all of the items below:

• Logo
• Tagline (i.e. Nike’s Just do it!)
• Specified font face, sizes, colours (i.e. Headings will always be in Arial, Bolded and in Dark Blue)
• “Official” organization colours, usually taken from the logo
• Standard look and feel for email signature (i.e. logo and name at the bottom of an email)

Large corporations and organizations will have binders of documentation dedicated to how their brand is supposed to be applied in a variety of media, such as print materials, web sites and even on the radio. But it isn’t just large companies that can benefit from the power of having a consistent brand. Every company can help take steps to bolster their brand and in turn portray an image of confidence, expertise, trustworthiness and more.

Not every organization has the funding to hire a graphic designer or marketing company to develop their brand. I would suggest that most smaller companies and organizations can actually develop their own branding rules and regulations internally.

So how do you go about creating your own brand? It starts with having a logo. A logo is a text, image or combination of texts and images that represent your organization visually. It sets the tone of your organization and will usually dictate your corporate colours. You will use your logo on letterhead, brochures, business cards, your email signature, and any other advertising and communication materials.

A logo is worth investing in, however if your organization has little funding you can always hold a contest for graphic designers to submit their entries. For the graphic designer that wins, their reward will be having another portfolio piece and perhaps you can submit a press release to the media for an added bonus.

Building on the notion of having a logo created, you can increase the power of your logo by having your organization’s tagline or motto designed into it. The tagline or motto is a short catchy phrase that encapsulates what you do. This kind of logo will speak for you when it is seen in the public eye because it visually and literally says exactly what you do.

With your logo and tagline design created you will now have a set of colours and font styles that your organization has chosen to represent you. Whatever you choose for your logo, you will have a set of colours that you can work with when creating all of your marketing materials.

At this point you will review your logo, font styles and colours and decide how you want to use them in the various media available. For instance you will want to think about logo placement on your organization’s business cards, newsletter or on the web site. Does the logo always go on the top left corner? Are our headings going to have a coloured background and lighter text in an Arial font? What size font is going to be used on our newsletter?

The best way to come up with answers for these questions is to mock up the kinds of media that your organization requires and see what people in your company like best. When a final mock up has been approved, these become the rules and regulations for those media pieces.

While these questions and their answers may seem quite inconsequential, this is what makes a brand strong. Consistency across all mediums is the foundation for a brand that will earn you a great deal of recognition and respect.

Experts say that it takes 5 to 7 exposures to an advertisement to illicit any action from the individual looking at the marketing piece. It is the continuous repetition and recognition of the brand that makes the individual act. If your organization does not apply branding rules when creating marketing pieces, your advertisements may not appear consistent and may not be seen as coming from the same organization week after week. This could increase the number of exposures required to gain the effect you desire from your marketing materials.

How do you implement a brand in an office with many people? The first item on the agenda is to communicate effectively with everyone in the organization that branding is very important to the success of the business and that your organization has taken on the task of creating standards for the look and feel of a variety of communication media. If you are passionate about this task your fellow organization members will take on the same passion.

Next you will want to provide as much support on this as possible so that the transition to the new brand is not a difficult task for people in the organization. The easiest way to do this is to create templates for Newsletters, Memos, Fax sheets, etc. You can do this quite easily through Microsoft Word. When you have created the templates, you can make them available by sharing them on your Intranet or by emailing them to your colleagues and request that they use these documents for future communication inside and outside the company.

You will find that over time your organization’s identity and the power behind the brand will become very evident. Your potential clients will start to recognize your presence and gain a feeling of confidence that you take pride in what your organization does, because you have spent the time building an identity that is consistent through the media that you use.