By Duane Harris

Your corporate identity is the key to your company branding success. A corporate identify involves the corporate logo and design strategy to launch your company’s services/products and thus is consider to be the key collateral of your company’s brand.

Nike, Team Jordan and Air Jordan are three separate brands even though Nike is the parent company.  Team Jordan is Michael Jordan’s personal company that is a brand itself and Air Jordan does belong to Nike but they are Michael Jordan’s official sneakers. Nike is the corporate brand. Team Jordan and Air Jordan are brands that are manage/overseen/produced/marketed by Nike.

Corporate identity need to evolve with the times. Failure to do so can negatively affect a corporate identity. There is confusion to this concept – i.e. Coca-Cola will always be Coca-Cola but tempering with the formula is a big risk because then you are messing with the brand!  However changing the corporate identity is necessary to keep things from going stagnant and boring.

Therefore brand identity is separate from the corporate identity.

Corporate identity is the result of a well run organizational people culture, excellent product quality, service reputation, great features, over the top benefits for the team, top tier performance and reasonable value “you get what you paid for”, are some of the key factors of brand identity.

Brand Identity – It’s the driving force of your company.

Brand identity is in a nutshell the complete holy grail of a business’ offering to its customers.

It includes the company’s service reputation, product/service qualities, key features, how it benefits your clients, the long and short term performance investment of the product/service and most important the value. It is the abridgement of all these things, which create brand identity.

Brand Image is the consumer and business’s perception of your brand identity, which may or may not coincide with your intended brand identity.  All corporations must work hard at the daunting task of getting their brand identity and brand image to align with its target market or resort to a branding company.

A branding company can show you how success starts with the brand identity.

Here some key questions to ask yourself as a decision maker for your company’s brand:

• Do you have a well sound realistic executable branding strategy?
• Is your teams aware of it your brand strategy and are they willing to be spokespersons for your company’s brand during interactions with the outside world on a daily basis?
• Is your firm making the most strategically sound decisions for your brand?
• Do you know your competition’s perception of your brand?
• Do you know your customers’ perceptions of your brand?
• Is your message via media totally accessible to your customer ~ in other words is the message you are trying to tell about your brand clear and ACCESSIBLE to your customer. They won’t buy if they don’t understand it!

If your answer is “no” to any of those questions, take the first step in being able to answer yes to all of them and success by reaching out to Pah 3 Worldwide and we can get you on track.

Email: duane@pah3.com