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.

Why PR is Underrated

Lapses in communication

PR requires a bit of tenacity to get right. I am still trying to come to terms with it. The key is understanding public relations is actually communication and not hoping for anything more. The goal of the PR is actually to create another level of communication between him / herself and the client and him / herself and the designer so that they can understand each other because they do not speak the same language.

Which sounds pretty simple. But it isn’t. Because the nature of the business person who values PR, marketing and advertising means that they are generally incredibly busy. They are also generally not the best communicators. They are, after all, business people, and not PRs.

The nature of the designer or creative is generally an acquired taste. I mean that with respect- it is a statement of fact, not a judgement. Designers usually cannot follow more than one train of thought or instruction, and they usually get all caught up in whatever they are working with at the time. They read but generally do not respond to requests, and may very well be actioning them, they just don’t communicate that to anyone until they have finished. While most professionals use their professional know-how to educate and inform clients when their expectations are unreasonable, designers will refrain from communicating this and scoff at the ignorance of the client.

Here are my tips at surviving a career in public relations:

1. Use a numbered list when communicating more than idea at a time
PRs, it appears, have a bit more of a capacity to work through an email which contains more than one instruction / piece of information. Clients and designers do not. While the art of crafting a paragraph is a skill appreciated by PRs, journalists and media professionals, it throws an invisibility cloak over itself when seen by the eyes of a designer or small business owner. Use short sentences. Do not use bullet points. Use a numbered list. Where possible make the list a different colour. Despite these tips you will find it only on very rare occasions that anyone ever makes it to the end of the list. When that happens, record date and time. For the rest of the time, refer to point three. The logic? While neither may be able to work from top to bottom, they generally both understand numbers.

2. Chasing the deadline is your problem
Regardless of whether the designer misses the deadline or the client never supplies the vital parts of the project. Don’t just tell them both when the deadline, lay out your expectations and hope for the best. On some very important occasions it may serve you to go to the place of work of the designer. And remain there until the project is finished. Really.

3. Follow up on number one because of number two
Yes, there are only three things. Three nearly-impossible things to achieve and survive times x clients times x designers times x projects. Ha ha.

Note- I use the words generally and usually a lot in this blog post. The use of these words is intended diplomatically, not to demonstrate generalisation, because they generally apply to all designers and business owners I have worked with to date, and because I would like to continue to work with them going forward.

Low Cost Marketing Ideas

There’s free and there’s low cost. When you spend a bit of money your capacity to make an impact goes up; it’s something of an investment in your target audience. Here are some easy and cost-effective ways to get your brand out there.

Corporate gifts- unique and free Branding promotional goods that are unique and eye-catching is a great way to ensure you stay front of mind. The trick is to make them unique and useful.

Steal ideas from competition products and services Within reason, of course. What you are looking for is how much they appear to be investing, and where they are investing so you can compete. When it comes to marketing and creativity though, uniqueness is key.

Seek out new and different advertising platforms Look for innovative ways to get your brand out there, and look to put your business in a space that no one else or no one in your industry has ventured into.

Offer something for free- incentivise Give customers a reason to shop with you- what’s in it for them? A discount, something for free, a value-add- these are all ways your business can distinguish itself from competition products when a customer is weighing you up.

Use email to its greatest potential Use your company database actively- to communicate your specials and promotions. People you have an existing relationship with are much easier to convert into customers than people with whom you have no history. This is information you have on record, and it is free. Exercise it.

Don’t underestimate the power of client relationships Great customer service goes a very long way. Never underestimate the power of a solid relationship and exceptional communication skills.

Creating a Successful Marketing Strategy

“Satisfying needs and wants through an exchange process”- Philip Kotler on the phenomenon of marketing.

Here are some essential pointers to keep in mind when creating a successful marketing strategy for any business, regardless of its size, shape or composition.

Define the product / service Make explicitly clear what it is that you are offering, and on what terms that product or service is offered.

Know your target market Learn as much as you can about who you are targeting with your product or service and what their likes and dislikes are.

Know your competition Learn from your competition. Have a look at what they are doing and where they are most active and get some pointers. Most importantly, work out what they are doing and do it better!

Identify a niche The most successful products fulfil a need that nothing else does. Find your niche group and target it effectively.

Generate product awareness Just because your product or service has been born into the marketplace doesn’t give it a right to be known about. Find as many avenues as you can to market your business and do it with aplomb.

Engender credibility Never underestimate the power of word of mouth and make sure that your customers have nothing but the best to say about you, starting from day one. Reputations stick- make sure yours is pretty.

Keep consistent Ensure that everything about your business is consistent, from the messaging to the product you are offering, through to the service you are offering people.

Know when to step back Especially if the business is yours and let marketing professionals do what they do best! You may have conceived, carried and born this business all on your own but there comes a time when you have to let go and listen to good professional advice!

Creating Corporate Newsletters

Every company wants to send formal communication to its clients- to profile new services on offer, and to maintain some level of relationship going forward. While one of the objectives of the newsletter is to promote sales, its ability to direct users to your website, where other services and products are on offer, should not be underestimated.

Here are some key considerations when creating a newsletter:

Do your homework and preparationYour corporate database is one of your most valuable assets, and is only as valuable as your products and services are relevant to its contacts. Your database has got to be fine-tuned according to the contacts’ relationships with your company and has got to be updated regularly in order to be of the greatest use.

Learn to Speak the LingoFind out what your target audience is, what they like, and how and when they like it.

Size Does CountKeep the newsletter file size small. Large files take time to download and are unnecessary.

Choose A Format; Select A Back-UpHow are you going to send your newsletter out? Before you decide this, you should know:
Jpegs: may look better to the eye, but do not necessarily download, depending on the spam settings of the recipient. If they don’t, the recipient will just see a blank space.
PDFs: can only be sent out as attachments, giving your recipient an extra step to view the content. How sure are you of your relationship with your client- would they take the time?
Html: distributes a small file size but can be erratic in display, depending on the browser and settings of the recipient.
What you should be looking to do is cover as many bases as possible, and offer the option of something displaying in the body of the email, and either an attached file or a link to a web-page, should something go wrong with the emailed version.


Love at First SightDon’t send out ugly-looking stuff, simple. People are attracted to what looks good to the eye. If you aren’t completely sure about your own discretion, go for clean, simple and minimal, and ask yourself what you’d think of it in five years’ time- will it have dated?

Strike A BalanceBetween images and content. While much of your appeal lies in the manipulative qualities of good online copywriting, pictures truly do say a thousand words. Invest in decent, quality images that really do represent your business and who it appeals to, and use them to create visual associations with your company image.

All Roads Lead To…While your newsletter may be an important communication tool and branding device, it should be considered a channel to get web traffic to your site, so remember to link to your website as accurately as possible.