Branding your business, an overview

Some may argue that an image is just an image and a color, just a color. To a marketer or Brand Manager, hearing that is like nails to a chalkboard – annoying and completely unnecessary. Whether you have a small business or large corporation; if you are a business to consumer or business to business organization; if you’ve been in business for years or are just starting out, the rules apply to all organizations.

Logo

A logo can be as simple as the name of your business, with a specific font size, color, and style. Keep in mind, while some software may recognize a font style, others may not, which may compromise the integrity of your logo design. To ensure accuracy and consistency, you may want to consider all your communications channels’ maximum pixels when designing it.

It may also be a good idea to include variations of your logo design. If you’re going for the name of your business as the logo, a variation may include the abbreviation or simply the first letter of the name.

Color

Online and print colors, if you do both, will vary. For accuracy’s sake, use a pantone book. You may also want to consider consulting with a professional printer; they can help you with color consistency for web and print.

Tone

How do you want your business to be perceived? If your business does online, print, radio, or television advertising, tone is an important factor in establishing the right voice for public awareness and perception. Are you serious, or light-hearted? Do you want to be all business, or would you rather be a little playful and humorous? Whatever you decide, stick with it and write it down for all your employees who work directly with communicating your message to the public.

Before you start to lay out your brand, you must write your mission and vision statement – it will help you with determining who you are, what you do, and how you define your organizational success.

Part 2 – How to write your mission and vision statements.