Creating Your Corporate Identity

The market place has become incredibly competitive, across all industries and sectors and at all levels. In order to get ahead in the rat race you have to make your company stand out from the rest and give people something solid and professional to remember you by. While great customer service is the cornerstone of marketing, a corporate identity is just as valuable in terms of summing your company up.

A corporate identity must be able to communicate the essence of your business in a glance. In other words, it must be able to say the unspeakable, clearly and professionally. Your logo and corporate stationery must be able to evolve and adapt across all applications to make this possible.

The single most important factor of creating the corporate identity is consistency. This is consistency in terms of application, in terms of location and in terms of summing up everything about your company.

Opinions on what works will differ, and will also have to meet your needs and expectation for your company at some level. There should be no compromise however when it comes to clarity and visibility. Those should be your foundations, how you choose to interpret them is your prerogative. The best CIs over time have been simple. They should be clean and minimal and draw attention to themselves.

Primary colours are used often to achieve this, as are colours with a contrast. Graphics should be symbolic rather than illustrative and slogans are snappy and short. Once you have established these basic parameters, working with them becomes easy. It gives you many creative channels to take the elements through and leaves you with more options to work with without compromising your CI or messaging.

Never skimp on design. While you may be left reeling after a cost overview and not be able to justify the amount of money being quoted, you have to remember that this is an investment. Your corporate identity is an asset, not an expense. You should consider yourself as putting money into the corporate identity as investing in your own company.
If you go in with an idea of what you are looking for and document your expectations, you are less likely to be disappointed. Anyone can improve on something existing and anyone can be dissatisfied with something if they do not know what they wanted.

If you approach a designer with a concrete understanding of what you are looking for, and give them a decent infrastructure in which to work (and invoice), you can also save a bit. Designers charge per hour so any guidance you can give in terms of what you want and stand for will be less work on their part and less on your bank balance.

The Four Ps of Marketing

So you have the contacts, networking and financing for a great business and want to get going on your new venture but how are you going to come up with a marketing plan? So many business owners and entrepreneurs make the mistake of believing that because their business ideas are great, they won’t have any problems selling their product or service.
How does your business plan square up against the four p’s of marketing?

1. Product
The most important aspect of whether your marketing plan is going to succeed or not lies in your product and its saleability. If it is something that everyone wants or, even better, something that everyone needs, marketing it is going to be easy. Are you selling a tangible product or providing a service?
You have to be satisfying a niche requirement and fulfilling a consumer need to give a product the wings to take off in the marketplace.

2. Price
Where does your product feature in the market place’s price range? Who can afford to buy it? Is this viable? How many do you need to sell at this price? Is this viable? Your pricing is going to dictate, to a large degree, the target audience that can afford your product, so make sure that you get it right. Too cheap can be as damaging as too expensive so don’t forget your market research.

3. Place
What physical infrastructure do you need to run your business or offer your service? Do you need retail space to sell a product or an office from which to offer your service?

4. Promotion
The medium is the message- what form of promotion is going to best suit your target market and the product you have so accurately priced in the market place?

And here’s one more…
Your business is your best marketing tool, and it doesn’t come at any extra cost. Make sure that keep the people who keep the till rolling happy. Invest in some client relations work and make sure you are offering the best value-added service possible. This is going to help you a great deal with successfully achieving point 4 so invest wisely.