Brand Identity: What It Is and Who It Concerns, Explained For Everyone

Brand Identity. Technical terms in English, often related to marketing, can confuse or give the idea of ??something that cannot be “within everyone’s reach”. It happens to me that they give this impression, despite the fact that, in everyday life, you are increasingly in contact with the English language.

Today we have the internet and search engines (or rather Google – the search engine) give us the opportunity to find thousands of results on the net, if we are looking for “brand identity?. Anyone of us can deepen how he wants and for the time he has available.

The definition I wanted to give here is more discursive, certainly more elementary and many will find it questionable and imperfect, but the concept, as I see it, remains that.

Brand Identity is literally the brand identity, or to get to the heart of the matter: corporate identity. We talk about all the elements that allow the recognition of a brand or a company by people who see its name, symbol, product or advertisement. Going further, it can be said that a well-made Brand Identity also allows us to understand the objectives, soul and values ??of the company that adopts it as its own.

Defining a Brand Identity on the whole is never a simple thing if you really want to embrace everything the company needs to be recognized. The work of a professional, who must provide the company with the tools to stand out in a market full of competitors, requires an in-depth analysis to be able to give the customer truly effective tools.

However, this does not mean that Brand Identity is an objective reserved only for large companies and cannot be adopted even by medium-small, or even very small, companies that work in a small area. Sometimes you can start from simple concepts and actions to try to give order to your image, to how it is seen by people who then we would like to become our customers.

As I see it, Brand Identity for a small company can also start from this simplicity, from putting order in what you do every day, from how you present yourself outside even in small things. To try to explain it, paradoxically, I would like to use an example that concerns a large, very large company.

Ten years ago I relaunched a post from Brand New of Under consideration that talked about IKEA’s choice to abandon – after 50 years – the “Future” character (or rather a slightly customized version, called “IKEA Sans”) , used until then for the whole brand identity of the group: from catalogs to signs, to the website, etc.

In the summer of 2009 this caused a sensation and the debate among the professionals was very heated. The choice, however, was reasoned and in the end probably paid heavily in favoring the Brand Identity of the Swedish giant. A few weeks after the decision, IKEA itself marveled at the heated debate and ruled that “it was limited only to professionals in the sector and that the general public was not so interested?.

It was said that the choice was based on the greater simplicity in the use of Verdana compared to the previous character. Verdana was present on practically all computers, it could be used by employees in a simple and immediate way, and it could concern online use on the website and in letterpress, in small and large format. In short, despite the choice being criticized, IKEA had made the management of its Brand Identity more immediate.

This example to say that even a small company, with an apparently trivial choice and at no cost, can improve its recognition by the public. One thing that seems obvious, but that is often disregarded: if in your communications, on your website, perhaps even in your promotional flyers, you decide to use a free, simple, but always that type, you will promote your own recognition .

Very often, however, even in companies of two or three people you see communications or emails “personalized” by individuals, with company symbols that are used “freely” or “crippled”, with different colors used in different emails, text files or flyers, a few days apart. Here: organization and greater order, as in any daily work, improves things. Make simple choices maybe, but choose, persevere and evaluate.

This course is obviously favored if you turn to a professional, who will certainly recommend simplicity first of all. Then there will be time to go into detail and add elements that distinguish your business: In my opinion, a good start is to start with a simple, reproducible on all the channels you use like create an app like uber, with a clear and well indexed website and a series of well customized tools. There are free online resources which, if entrusted to the work of a professional, with an expense appropriate to your needs, can be very effective.

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