Your corporate identity is the visual image that your company creates. It’s likely that your corporate identity will be based around your logo, but a strong corporate identity is about more than just your logo. It’s about communicating a well planned, cohesive impression that sends out the right signals about your business.
Having a strong corporate identity means that your customers and prospective customers should be able to tell that this piece of marketing has come from your business.
A strong corporate identity will usually include a brand manual or brand guidelines and will give guidelines on:
- A palette of colours
- Corporate fonts
- Technical information like the layout of pages, spaces between letters (kerning) and lines (leading)
- How and where to use the logo
- Sometimes the design of marketing literature – how to deal with headings, quotes and body text
How to create a strong corporate identity
Many small business owners recognise the importance of investing in a professionally designed logo. Often this is where it stops, you’ll see poorly, self designed leaflets or websites with the token logo in a corner somewhere.
How you use your logo, how you follow your corporate identity through across all your marketing literature is key. So here’s how to make sure your corporate identity creates a positive rather than shambolic impression.
- Ask your designer to create you a set of brand guidelines (they’re worth investing in)
- Give that set of brand guidelines to anyone who works on your brand
- Take control of your business brand – if you have something new designed and it doesn’t fit with your corporate identity then revise it
- Don’t feel that brand guidelines means making everything look the same – that would be boring! So I don’t mean sticking slavishly to a template, I just mean using the same types of colours from a cohesive colour palette, using the same fonts for the body copy and the same types of layout. You can still create flair and interest – think of Boden. All of his stuff looks very distinctive but never the same.
