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.