Our director is just coming to the end of a contract with a design company, and once that’s completed tmd will be wound up.

The recession hit us at exactly the wrong time and it’s time to call it a day and move on to something with more security.

Thanks to all our clients, suppliers and partners for an interesting time.

Joe Saward: Today’s team in trouble is…

I think its odd that a sport/business so reliant on sponsorship money should have trouble communicating with interested parties. In the F1 microcosm image is everything – look at Renault F1 Team and how the press has vilified them following the “crashgate” scandal (with good reason I hasten to add). Did the protagonists take into account the damage that the whole plot could do to their parent company and by association all the other sponsors that they rely on for their funding? As it turned out the very same parent company pulled it out of the bag. I believe that Renault’s integrity has largely remained intact due to their swift action to distance themselves and the rest of the team from the people involved.

The multinational corporation was publicly seen to prune away the bad stuff, and thus turn what could have been a huge PR disaster into much less of one. The team will now rise from the ashes of crashgate as an entity much more under French control, rather than the autonomous entity that went before.

In the post linked above, Joe Saward discusses the lack of effective communication from the new teams struggling to make it to the grid for 2010. I wonder whether the engineers at the various companies are reticent to tell the world about their developments for fear of letting their rivals in on their secrets. But that is obviously short-sighted. For a business dominated by external and sponsorship funding, giving the right impression is everything. A communication black-hole makes people nervous. Being able to communicate honestly and positively with the people that can influence whether your business or venture will succeed or fail seems like a non-brainer to me.

Whether it be through traditional media, PR or social networking, and whatever the situation businesses find themselves in, ceasing communication with the outside world can only make that situation worse. Whatever the challenges of the present or the future, businesses that succeed are those that are able to convey a positive message to the right people, because it will always be far easier to destroy a reputation than create one in the first place.

http://www.fuelyourbranding.com/brand-identity-start-an-evolution/

So whenever you feel bored with your logo, feel your website needs redeveloping or your company name could do with shortening, just keep in front of mind that you see those things every day. The most important people – your customers – don’t see your brand anywhere near as much as you do. To make sure your brand is recognised by people that are exposed to it only a few times a year, it’s got to stay the same or very similar over a period of time.

One approach to keeping a brand fresh whilst maintaining consistency is to tweak it every year. BP work on their brand identity almost constantly, yet the changes are so incremental that recognition never suffers.

So next time you feel the need to start fiddling with your brand because you feel it has become tired, its probably because you are tired of it, and you should try to approach the problem from the point of view of the most important people for your business – your customers.

Just remember that leveraging the equity of an established brand is far easier than establishing one in the first place. Invest in your brand for the long term and after a few years you’ll find that because your brand is one of your most valuable assets, you won’t get bored of it so easily.

Lets take a look at the websites for some of the most powerful brands in the world. Virgin, Coca-Cola, BBC, Ferarri. All of these sites have been created based on a brand framework that has been established for years. The solid foundation for their brands has been developed and tweaked, redeveloped and re-tweaked over many years. The website – the most important public facing element of that brand has been built on that long standing foundation.

Virgin have huge brand equity to protect

But do smaller businesses really need to take any notice of this big-corporate approach? Surely all this “brand strategy” stuff is really only important to global giants that have so much to lose if their brand equity drops in value?

Well, in our opinion yes and no. Companies with huge brand equity to protect absolutely have to continuously develop their strategy and communicate with their stakeholders to stay ahead of their global competitors. It’s a game that has become so huge that the law of diminishing return begins to apply. Take the petrochemical companies for example. BP has spent millions upon millions of dollars on its new brand and communicating it to the world over the past decade, and for what? We maybe now perceive them differently, but not dramatically. The level of brand differentiation they’ve created seems small compared to the gigantic expenditure it took to achieve.

Small companies have less or nothing to lose, but a great deal more to gain, from investing in some kind of integrated approach to communicating their brands. In a marketplace full of SMEs and start-ups, one-man-bands and family enterprises, a company that can be seen to have a differentiated brand, a distinctive visual style and clear messages communicated effectively is already ahead of the curve. Innocent is a great example of this. They started small, but had a clear strategy for differentiating their brand from the multitude of other competing fruit drink companies that were springing up during the early part of this decade. What is more, the way that they made themselves stand apart from that horde had as much to do with brand communication as it did with their products. They and their creative services team created a way of speaking to their customers and stakeholders that was, and still is, unique. Many others have tried to copy them (Pret a Manger, Green and Blacks to name just two), but Innocent are still there with their friendly irreverence, their trusted and trusting tone of voice that makes them different.

Innocent started small but had a clear vision for their brand

A small company that can effectively define what makes them different to their main competitors and put that at the heart of their brand communications is one that has a better chance of carving out that niche recognition. The way that your brand is communicated should be at the centre of your strategy, and your website should form just one arm of that strategy. Stationery, catalogues, advertising, packaging, signage, uniforms – they all need to take their lead from the central brand and communication strategy.

Then when your customers, peers, competitors, neighbours, suppliers and partners see your company they see a complete, cohesive brand working to support and reinforce the activities of your business; a business that cares about and has invested in the way it appears to public eyes. And yes, a template-driven website may still be the most cost-effective way to communicate that brand on the world wide web, but at least that will be part of a larger plan to improve your business, and can be made to integrate with the other parts of the strategy, rather than being just a knee jerk reaction.

Many people would have just created a pie chart, but don’t you think this is more effective and appropriate?

The reasons for this are many-fold, and can include:

• Designers often come to a project with a pre-conceived solution in mind, before they have really begun to understand the needs of the client.
• Clients often come to a project with a pre-conceived idea of what the creative should look like, before they’ve had the opportunity to discuss the possibilities with the designer.
• In larger creative agencies, smaller clients can get overlooked in preference to larger ones, and projects can be given far too little development time in the studio schedule.
• The person responsible can get caught up in trying to visually direct their designer, rather than letting them come up with the best solution possible.

Preventing the potential for this kind of disconnect starts with the process of choosing your supplier in the first place. As the procurer of design services, there are a few things you need to find out before choosing a supplier and do once the project has started, that will help you make the right decision.

Overall experience
The best way to avoid ending up with a designer that can only offer you one solution for your project is to go for a company that can demonstrate past experience of a broad range of different projects for clients in different industries. Don’t just try to find a designer that has worked in your particular industry before, as they will already have ideas based based on what they produced on the last project that was similar to yours. Different approaches and solutions come from designers that have a broad understanding of different businesses and industries, and the ability to apply that knowledge to new situations.

Choose the solution, not the personality
If you have asked to see previous examples of work, also ask to see initial ideas based on a small amount of information. While designers hate having to sketch things out before being given the full brief, their response will give you information about their approach to the project. The designers that have done the best research into your products, services and competitors will come to the fore, even if all you have to work on is a few sketches, a few notes or just a conversation. Don’t just choose the supplier that has told you what you want to hear, because although you may end up with exactly what you had envisaged, it might not be the solution that best uses the designer’s experience and knowledge.

Choose the best match for your company in a commercial sense
From my experience in the corporate design world, some of the most interesting projects were often pushed to the back of the queue for design studio resources because they were for companies whose budgets could not match those of the telecoms giant or the mining conglomerate that were my other clients. By choosing a design agency where you can be sure that you won’t be back of the queue, you’ll get the service and resources your project deserves. If possible choose a design agency that is smaller than your company (assuming they have met all your other criteria). That will ensure you remain front of the queue, or near it.

Don’t become a Creative Director
Once the project is underway, give the designer all the information you can. Give them as clear an idea as you can of what you want to achieve, how much you can spend and the kind of thoughts you have been having about it. Then leave them to it. I can’t stress this enough. Keep in front of mind that there is a very good reason that you’re not a designer. There’s a very good reason why you have approached a third party to undertake this specialist work for you. There’s a very good reason why designers spend years, not only at art college but also in commercial employment to gain the experience needed to undertake your project. If they are wide of the mark (and despite everyone’s best efforts to avoid it, sometimes it happens), don’t start designing it yourself, because if your core skills were in Graphic Design, you wouldn’t be doing the job you do now – you’d be a designer yourself. Whilst you may have good ideas, you will be better off explaining them to your creative team and letting them run with the concept. You never know, it might spur them to even greater heights.

Of course there is another reason why you should never try to become Creative Director to your designer. Undertaking that role will take your time away from doing what you are best at – your job.

A good designer can create communications that are engaging, beautiful, intricate or workmanlike, but an exceptional designer will do these things whilst keeping one eye on the commercial aspect of the project, making sure that in every way possible the end result meets the business-driven goals of their client. In order for them to do that, there is inevitably an amount of effort required by the client to make sure that the project fulfills its potential. If everyone does their part properly, everyone wins in a commercial sense, and that, after all, is what we’re all trying to achieve.

As more and more of your customers turn to Google (or other search engines, although they hardly make a dent in the big G’s domination), more and more companies are beginning to realize that getting on the first few pages of the search results is critical to generating new sales leads.

This is borne out by statistics:

• There are over 16,000 UK searches on Google every minute
• Google powers 9 searches in every 10
• Around 80% of people will turn to Google as their first port of call when trying to find out about a product or service
• Over 60% of search engine users only view the first page of the results before further refining their search

The last two of those bullet points should sound familiar to most of us. If we examine our own online behaviour, we will realize that when we have been looking for information on a particular topic, we rarely dig deeper than 2 or 3 pages before thinking of a different way to approach our search.

Obviously this is because there are so many sites competing with each other in the same marketplace, that a simple search of one or two keywords more than likely gets the user no further forward, as the results can be quite vague.

For example: Search for “Trainers” and what do you get?

On the first 3 pages we get:

• Shops selling training shoes
• A vouchers website
• A portal for racehorse trainers
• A portal for personal trainers
• A business language training company
• News stories about the shoe industry
• An NHS public health initiative
• A portal for dog trainers
• Business education sites
• A fitness equipment supplier

…I could go on, but you get the idea. What if I actually wanted a trainer for my new dog? In the first 3 pages, there is only one relevant link. Would I click on that or refine my search to “dog trainers” ? I might actually want to refine it to “dog trainers in north London” .

Only then do I begin to get results that are actually beneficial to me – the one that lives in North London, has a new puppy and needs some help with training him.

So does this (quite obvious when you think about it) behaviour affect the small business?

Well, we have always believed that businesses are as big as they wish to appear. And especially in the world of Google and internet dominated information exchange, that is true more than it ever has been in history.

Companies must understand how Google works and use that to market their website, to maximise their website’s exposure in internet-land, thus increasing the number of incoming links they have from other sites. Google thinks of incoming links as referrals, recommendations. It’s the only way it can realistically judge content quality, since it is still a robot. The more incoming links, it reasons, the more likely the site in question is to be a leader in that particular field. So that site is rated higher in the search listing than a site with few incoming links.

For the small business the behaviour of refining keywords described above can become crucial. Companies like ours can’t compete with the corporate giants when it comes to creating content and generating web exposure – more often than not we don’t have the time or resources. But what we can do is carve ourselves a niche. A small part of the search listing where, because of the specialist knowledge we have, we are considered the top dogs. Using specialist content, blogs and social media we can let the world know what we’re best at. And that’s where we get the most crucial element to letting Google know what we’re best at – those all important referrals – incoming links.

The existing site is build using the Joomla! content management system, and our challenge was to create a design that they could implement without changing the existing structure.

Working with the site’s original creator, Toolbox Creations, and Simon & Simon’s SEO specialist, 1st Page Prophets, we created a new template to be applied to the existing site with minimal modifications. We also advised S&S on ways that they could improve communication of their core messages and the benefits their services bring to their customers.

We’re delighted with the results and delighted to have S&S on board as our newest client. The new site isn’t live yet – Toolbox are still processing the changes, but we’ll let you know when it is.

We developed a visual language, a photography style and the website inside of 7 weeks, which we’re pretty proud of if we’re honest.

The site was designed by us, and coded by our partner company Old Tin Roof – oldtinroof.com

Needless to say we’re very happy with the end result and we look forward to more opportunities to work with Clarity in the future.

But this process is to branding as a go-cart is to a Ferrari Enzo.

Four wheels – yes. A seat and a steering wheel – yes. A mode of transport – just. The world’s best supercar – no.

Just as the go-cart has things in common with the Ferrari, the $50 logo has some things in common with the fully defined and developed brand. But the fully defined and developed brand is bigger, slicker, more polished, more capable and more valuable.

The reasons for this are many-fold, and to understand them we need to have a look at the branding process and the way a skilled designer develops a brand… and the starting point is most definitely not the logo.

Creating the logo is just one part of the development of a truly unique and recognizable brand across all communications and media; an overall design language that communicates what the company is about, how it does business and how it behaves toward its customers, employees and other stakeholders.

We can all define the identities of the world’s largest organisations clearly in our heads not just because of what the logo and the website look like but because know what to expect from them – we understand their respective identities.

Examples that come to mind include:

Apple – Cool and desirable. Creating products that consumers are prepared to pay more for because they want to be cool and desirable too. Aspirational and creative rather than functional and corporate.

Mercedes – High quality brand with an exciting product range that continues to build upon its racing and luxury heritage. Luxury and performance that is within the grasp of ordinary consumers. Premium but popular.

Be There – Passionate people that have used their knowledge of the internet to create something that they are personally proud of. Young, adventurous and personable.

Microsoft – A brand that connects with both enterprise and home users. A far reaching can-do attitude to both business productivity and consumer technology. The provider of solutions for all.

Google – Enriching lives and enabling businesses by providing and sorting information. A progressive employer of progressive thinkers. The centre of the information economy.

Take Be There as an example from that list and compare it with BT. They are two very different companies, but why do we know that? Their logos are different, yes, but its more than that. Both companies provide domestic broadband internet in the UK, but that same service is delivered with such different personalities that we as consumers expect different things from each company. We therefore know that the companies are different on a fundamental level. It is their respective brands that have informed us of that and reinforce it at every opportunity.

The way a company behaves, the approach it takes to doing business, what it aspires to be, the way it communicates and the way it treats others are the fundamentals of its brand. The way it appears and the way it communicates is an outward expression of the brand known as a brand identity, of which the logo is a part, along with colours, typefaces, writing style, photography and/or illustration. Even music and audio elements can be important to a brand (Nokia or Intel spring to mind).

Virgin is a perfect example of a brand that embodies everything the company stands for. A company moulded in the image of its founder; the Virgin brand has been carefully created and developed to reflect that and embody it, so that as consumers we effortlessly associate the Virgin brand with ideas of lifestyle, freedom, adventure and imagination. The brand and its identity are completely aligned and have become more powerful for it.

So why is a $50 logo absolutely not a brand? Because in essence the designer of the brand needs to understand what makes their client unique, in order that the resulting brand identity embodies it. And no designer in their right mind would carry out peer group research, trends orientation, brainstorming, visual language development, artwork and templates preparation – all the stages you need to go through to properly understand your client and build their brand around them, fully aligned to them and unique to them – for such a small fee.

As I’m sure you can tell, we’re not a $50 logo design company. But we’re not a huge branding leviathon either. We can develop a real brand for your business, including all the steps outlined above if required. And we will charge you a lot less than those big agencies. You’ll get value for money and an engaging brand that your company will benefit from for years; something that is valuable and unique; something aligned to your company’s ethos. Something worth many, many times more than $50.