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Brand

By Simon, Managing Director on 26 May 2010  |  Category: Design Industry 0 comments

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An article published in the Lincolnshire Echo's Ask the Expert column about brand.

When Mel West at the Lincolnshire Echo asked Optima to write something for this article, she immediately suggested that we spoke about ‘Brand’. After all we work with a number of big brands so we should know our stuff? I think Mel asked us to write about brand because we are Graphic Designers and most initial preconceptions on brand come down to thoughts of logos and rows of packaging in a supermarket.

Brand is the image of your company or organisation. It is, on a visual level, your logotype and identity which includes colours, typeface, image style and mark. It is an outward expression of the personality of your organisation and should be closely aligned to your target market.

But the visual identity can only go part way to expressing your company’s values. The identity isn’t the heart and soul of a brand which is, quite literally, a whole different story and one that you need to communicate clearly to the world whether they are customers or staff, shareholders or potential employees. So put away the Mac Mouse, stop the press and start here.

Successful brands are built on a company's ethos and beliefs, so start by evaluating what you strongly believe in as a business. You also need to look at the market, which will continually change. Look at what your customers want and how you can deliver on that. If you can match your brand vision and values to what existing and potential customers want, then you are heading in the right direction. Find out what potential and existing customers, suppliers and employees like and dislike about your business and how they feel about it. You may need some help at this stage from outside that will help you see the wood from the trees. You must also be very honest. Brands must be memorable, distinctive and authentic. It’s no good projecting yourself as an environmentally conscious business if you don’t have a recycling policy. And if you don’t live the dream then you will be caught… take the example of Sunny Delight.

Sunny Delight was launched in 1998 with a £10 million promotional campaign, within months it had become one of the biggest selling brands in UK behind Coke and Pepsi, with sales of £160 million a year. It had 'mum appeal’ thanks to the advertising, it’s position in the chiller cabinet as a fresh product, everyone thought it was orange juice, children guzzled it merrily, supermarkets ran out of stock.

The Food Commission, an independent consumer organisation, aware of all the hype about this ‘best thing since sliced bread drink’, started to point out what was actually in Sunny Delight. The healthy attributes that were being given to it in the marketing campaign were very, very questionable.

Consumers began to lose faith in the product. A little girl turned orange having drunk large quantities of it and the negative publicity which surrounded this story was not helped by a badly-timed Sunny Delight ad showing a snowman turning orange. Not surprisingly sales slumped dramatically. Mothers felt misled by claims that Sunny Delight was a ‘healthy drink’.

At that time another brand entered the fray with a completely transparent attitude to its product, which the public found refreshing and started to buy into as a brand. Now Innocent has a 71% share of the £169m UK smoothie market and the company sells two million smoothies per week.

So if you are taking the opportunity to ensure that your identity, ethos and essentially your brand are fit for purpose going forward, before you step into a design agency looking for a shiney new logo or corporate brochure, make a list. Present to yourself first a clear strategy based on the your strengths and vision. Find the story of your business and tell it in a way that engages people. You will understand your own brand better, have a much better brief for an agency and you will end up with a much more memorable, distinctive and authentic brand going forward.

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