Branding and Rebranding. How and why?

By StanCategories: Branding, Graphic design, Tips & Tricks0 Comments

p>Each of us is confronted with dozens of brands every day. They are everywhere and we are so accustomed to them that we do not even pay attention to them. But some of them can not be unnoticed. In that article we will try to explain some of most important parts of the branding proccess and also few switable examples.

What is branding and why do we need it?

The brand is the face and the voice of your business. It is his visual and mental identity. The brand is born with the first idea of your business, the first stroke of your logo and the first letter of your message.

The brand is its identity, which distinguishes it from all the rest and an indispensable part of the road to success. It is a top position in the performance of your business. Its primary role is to leave a lasting impression on the clients’s mind to associate with your product or service.

If your business is not a brand, it is a commodity.
-Donald Trump

THE MISSION!

The first think that you have to do for you brand is Analysis and Research and to set your Mission. Build your plan answer the following questions related to your business:

Who are you and what you want to offer?
Who is your target audience and where it is?
Who is your competitors where they are?
Consider your business strategy. What opportunities, resources and ideas you have for launching your brand?
Are you still rady to invest your time, efforts and money to start building your brand and realise your ideas now?

After you are ready with questions above, and answer to last one is YES, you can start with the essential branding process. Let there be light!

THE VISION!

The secrets of colors.

The vision of your brand is one of the first and most important things for your future business. The design is not just colors and shapes. Even the colors and not just… colors. Behind every color is hidden deep symbolism, which is related to the relevant associations and emotions. Here I can sugguest you to make some resarch for cololor psychology or to read the article Color psychology in Wikipedia or the article What Your Logo’s Color Says About Your Company in FastCompany.

To choose right color for you brand… defnely is not a easy task. But things can always get worst. Even if you’ve managed to choose the right color, you’ll need to think about the second and perhaps the third color best suited to matching your chosen color. Maybe a color is enough to make a logo or a business card, but things do not just look the same when you decide to make design for your website or brochures.

It is hard to make good looking website design with one single color… In that article for example you can find 100 Brilliant Color Combinations and How to Apply Them to Your Designs. With basic knowledge of color secrets from that great articles above, you can use even online tools which can helop you to choose right color combinations. For example Paleton.com.

What about the logo?

One of the first stages of the establishment of a new brand is creating a name and logo. It will be the seed to be sown to grow from it the tree from which you will gain the fruit of your success. The logo is NOT your brand, but it is a key element of your identity and it will accompany your products and services anywhere. At this stage, you have to think about how to tell as many people as possible about your business with a small graph.

During the process of creating a logo you should take into consideration the core elements that will be part of your vision and identity. Colors? Wi talk about colors already, right? Shapes, Typography, Message and Associations.

The logo message is an important detail to consider. How you will make your customers to associate your logo with your services? No doubt you need to pay close attention to this small but important part of your business. The more your business grows, the harder any changes you make to your brand and logo. For the rebranding we will mention a little further down the article. Previously, we would like to give some examples of successful brands.

In spite of the importance of your logo for your business, it does not necessarily mean that it has to contain shimmering colors that can be seen in the eyes of consumers. Also complex forms on which the designer can work all day or long and detailed messages . On the contrary, it should be simple enough to remember in the user’s mind and at the same time to speak enough for you.

For example, Nike logo. It is not distinguished by special colors and shapes. On the contrary, it is just a few black curves. For his design, only $ 35 had been paid to graphic design student Carole Davidson, wich was hired as a freelancer to work for Nike.

Nike co-founder, Phil Knight, was adamant that his company’s new logo be a simple design that is fluid and conveys motion and speed. The logo is also said to symbolize the wing of the famous Greek Goddess of Victory, Nike.

However, Nike’s brand succeeds in establishing itself as a leading manufacturer of sports goods. Now if you see this sign on someones bag, your first thought will hardly be that he has bought a new blender or keyboard. This is the impact of the brand. Do not rush to regret the designer of the logo with her $ 35. A little later, after the success of the company, Nike invited her and gave her $ 1 000 000 + diamond and a gold ring with the Nike sign.

Message / Tagline

After the process of designing and realizing your logo, you should take on mind your future tagline that should say what the logo just shows. So if the logo is just part of the face of your business, the massage is part of his voice. Here is the time to focus on the message of your brand and to say as much as possible with as few words as possible. Here are some examples of creatives on some of the most famous brands:

Nike: “Just Do It“
Apple: “Think Different“
BMW: “Designed for Driving Pleasure“
McDonald’s: “I’m Lovin’ It“
Skittles – “Taste the Rainbow”

I am ready with my logo design and tagline. What else I should know?

GOALS AND VALUES

Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.
– Steve Jobs

So, we’ve already said the logo and the message are key elements of the face and voice of your brand, but they are a small part of the entire branding process . After you are ready with them, you are ready to go up the stairs of success (because there is no lift for it).

Be prepared to raise your voice. What you need so to be seen and heard from your customers? Exactly…

The Marketing

The branding strategy is strongly tied to marketing. You have to think about how to move up and to concider your strategy. Where are your customers and how do you reach them? How do you want to present your brand and how to link it to it? If your business is mostly online, then you must start with the overall branding and design of your own website. Also associated social networking profiles, future banners which you will use in your marketing campaigns, and so on.

To be even bigger, you can transfer your branding strategy in radio, television and even offline by printing business cards, brochures, billboards, car branding, and all sorts of promotional materials. The brand is the face and the voice of your business. Your goal should be to try and present them in their best light.

While we are talking about the relationship between marketing and branding, and considering that we are writing this article about the Haloween euphoria, we would like to show you some hilarious advertising battle between two of the most famous brands, that took place several years ago.

May be you remember that, because the viral of that campaign was insane and beneficial to both brands.
The left image is ad of the pepsi that was published first on haloween /2013/ with an attempt to mock a Coca Cola. No doubt the idea and realisation os original, but response of Coca Cola is even more hilarious, when they just take ad conception of Pepsi and replased just the text and brand logo of the image. We will use the brand of Pepsi in another example again below.

So if you still think the brand is just your logo, design or your products and services… think again.

Ofcorse we do not expect from you to be developer, web designer, graphic designer, analyst, strategist, marketing specialist, seo optimisator and businessman at the same time.
So thats why we crate VisiOne Design. To provide knowlage and help for people who care about their brands.

What is Rebranding and why do we need it?

Once you have built the vision and strategy of your brand that you have proven to your audience, you need to think about how to keep your position as leader for as long as possible. Every age comes with its tendencies and in the world of design they are changing with the speed of light. What would you think if you visit the Amazon site and encounter a vision of their website from the 90s of the last century? Hardly a consumer will be able to take them seriously once they are not taken seriously their self.

That’s why Amazon, since its creation in the mid 90s, has changed its logo design 6 times. 5 of them, just in a few years, and only the last change has been retained since 2000. It is with this process of rebranding that they create the logo with the arrow from the letter A to the letter Z in the word AmaZon, which suggests to the users that their site has everything from A to Z. Moreover, the arrow can be associated with the smile of a satisfied customer for example. Or the smile of the merchant who serves the customer, which is mandatory for each deal.

The Amazon example is just one of them. On the Internet you can find stories about the rebranding of dozens of leading companies such as Google, Apple Pepsi, Ford and others. The more well-known the brand is, the more time, effort and investment accumulate in the brand, but within 10-20 years, successful brands re-brand their vision to keep pace with time.

As we promised above, we will use Pepsi branding for one more exaple. So Pepsi has also changed its logo several times over the years. In 2008 has made the latest version of its logo.

The entire rebranding campaign took 3 years and over $ 1.2 billion, and $1 million just for the logo redesign.

Ofcorse we can not exlain all branding details and proccesses which are bild over the years just in 1 article. But that we was trying to explain in that article are the most basic and important things of branding, among which is the design proccess for branding vision.

Whole branding procces is strongly connected with brand strategy and marketing, but perhaps we will pay special attention to them in our next articles.

And for final, one last branding quote from Warren Buffett