Building Winning Brands – 2 Of 16

Brad VanAuken The Blake ProjectFebruary 15, 20072 min

The second most important thing to know about building winning brands is that your brand’s identity must be frequently and consistently presented.

The same Conference Board study that I referenced to earlier found that a well designed and consistently applied brand identity system also contributes significantly to a brand’s success.

Specifically, the following were deemed to be critical to brand strategy success:

•Consistent communication of brand identity and message
•Effective use of visuals/imagery in support of brand
•Ability to capture the brand in a slogan

A brand’s identity is a combination of visual, auditory, and other sensory components that create recognition, aid in memory encoding and decoding, represent the brand promise, provide differentiation, create communications synergy, and are proprietary.

The most powerful memory evoking sense is scent (ever followed a cinnamon scent through a mall to Cinnabon?).  The next most powerful memory evoking sense is sound (Harley-Davidson sought to trademark the sound of its engines, also think about AOL’s “You’ve got mail”).  The visual identity system consists of names, tag lines, other nomenclature, logotypes, symbols, other graphic devices, distinctive shapes and colors, typography, characters, spokespeople and brand ‘voice’ (personality and attitude) and visual style.

A tagline is one of the most important brand identity elements.  It should simply and powerfully reinforce the brand’s promise and always accompany the brand’s name and logo for maximum effect.

These factors have the most significant affect on identity recognition and recall:

•Frequency of use
•Consistency of use
•Distinctive symbols, shapes and colors
•Use of mnemonic devices (memory encoders)
•Size
•Background clutter (less is better)

You should make your brand’s identity system and standards available to all employees and business partners who might use it. Ideally, someone in your organization is responsible for maintaining the consistency of and otherwise managing your brand’s identity.

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Brad VanAuken The Blake Project

One comment

  • David Temple

    February 15, 2007 at 4:29 am

    It’s amazing that scent is the most powerful memory evoking sense. There’s a lot of studies done on that. Now how to start branding with scent. Perhaps a scented mailing, I hear strawberry works well.

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