But first, what do we mean by corporate image?
The term brand image refers to the way our target audience interprets the signals we send out through our brand’s products, services, and campaigns. These associations work to either foster a positive or negative bond towards the brand. We could also say that an entity’s corporate image is the meaning that weighs the most on the minds of a consumer.
As a result, branding’s importance is non-negotiable for any brand looking to forge a bond with its customers and sell its products. Branding is a working method to use to tackle any branding project from any context. It’s a universal, underlying tool that will bring sense to everything we do.
Why is an organization’s corporate image important?
Having an effective brand image is crucial for us to be in the recall of our target audience more easily and to transmit, increase, and preserve our company’s spirit and prestige. How can we do so successfully? We must be aware of the need to not skimp on any necessary resources since the investment in your firm’s corporate identity can result in multiple benefits. It opens the way to:
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More consumer purchases (User Experience).
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Maintaining brand identity through establishing unified communication across all touchpoints, ensuring consumers receive a clear message about the business’s focus.
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Creating brand equity through increasing brand recall in our target audience while cultivating brand awareness and loyalty that lets us be more competitive.
If you think your brand image does not satisfy these aims, perhaps it’s time for you to consider going through the rebranding process. These uses corroborate the direct correlation between your strategy and brand image.
Three phases for creating a successful brand strategy
When creating a brand strategy, your process should have at least three distinct phases: analysis, strategy, and activation. All of these stages are fundamental so your corporate image can stand out from your competitors.
1. Analysis: get to know your territory
We use this first phase to examine our surroundings to create our corporate image. We’ll try to explain:
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Market trends
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The meanings our competitors use
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Industry best practices
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Parallel categories to find the brand territory or competitive space we’ll use for our communications
The best way to make all this information tangible is by creating a benchmarking document that gathers all the findings from our brand study. The material includes both intangible aspects such as brand positioning and values, as well as physical components such as our analysis of font and color usage.
2. Strategy: Give your corporate image a direction
Your strategy will be the action plan you work on for your brand and to give your brand’s corporate image structure. This communication system offers structure and guidance for every single touchpoint within your organization, both internal and external, while always gearing it towards meeting business objectives.
An effective brand strategy ensures there is a central idea that serves as the basis for defining a company’s behaviors, actions, and corporate communications. The brand strategy will also give way to other essential brand identity components such as brand positioning, brand values and attributes, brand personality, or its value proposition.
The way of transmitting this essence to the world is through a communications platform. This timeless document serves as a basis for all communications by bringing together our brand DNA and letting other departments rely on it as a resource to differentiate what practices are aligned with our strategy or not.
3. Activation: Give your brand image wings
Let’s not forget that we design all our brand components in some way and that means the designer is part of every step in the process. Despite that, this is where they have the spotlight: it will be time to craft (or rethink) a brand image or brand identity that comes from a concept and encompass both its verbal identity and visual identity.
Our brand identity should be easy for anyone who is going to use it to activate. That means it’s imperative we create a manual where we develop basic guidelines for using and implementing the system. Ideally, we should count on an interactive, digital, dynamic tool that keeps us updated on the latest needs and applications for our visual, verbal, and strategic system.
In this phase, we also look at elements like fonts, use of color, illustrations, network of lines, logos, brand name, slogan, or tone of voice. They should all give off the same essence that we previously defined in our brand platform to create a cohesive unit that our target audience can easily decode.
This whole process culminates in achieving our goal of a corporate image that appeals and generates recall in the minds of our consumers.
