The Vital Difference Between Brand And Identity
Are there such things as brands in much of the Government sector? I don’t think there are. That’s a good thing. And here’s why.
NEW THINKING
Are there such things as brands in much of the Government sector? I don’t think there are. That’s a good thing. And here’s why.
Somewhere along the line, the word “branding” got mixed up with “logo”. While it’s an established fact that brands are far more than logos, it seems that creating visual identities with rich emotional character and authentic connection still eludes many marketers. For many marketers, the discipline of creating visual identity has been reduced to mere decoration.
In The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald writes, “Personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures.” Similarly, a brand is the result of an unbroken series of consistent gestures, encompassing both what it does and how it does it.
Developing a new or refreshed corporate or brand identity is often a response to change. Many factors will drive that change – new management, mergers, acquisitions, product development, or a competitor’s threat to a core business.
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 logo is one key component. Here is what The Blake Project looks for when we evaluate logo design: