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Every single business, charity or entity has a ‘brand’ in the sense that they all have an identity rather like you or I have an identity as people.  To work out the details so that what you say, how you operate and what you promise to reflect the way you want to be known as a business and brand takes time to think through. 

Values and beliefs 

It involves working out which values of the founder are to be paramount in establishing what the brand of the business or charity represents. What its personality is, and what it wants to stand for – it needs to be something that resonates with its customers or those they serve. 

Working out what you want to uniquely provide to the market, and your marketing messages to evoke a desired response in the minds of your customers through your brand promise is the first step involved to brand your business. Until your business can consistently deliver that, you will not have a brand

Wally Olins, a thought...

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Possibly one of the most enjoyable aspects of branding is to have your brand identity designed for you. It’s the activity people associate with branding rather than all the introspection involved in working out your brand strategy, values, mission, purpose and so on.

Once you begin to see a visual manifestation of the designer’s interpretation of your brand it’s pure joy.

However, it’s really important not to jump in too quickly to having designs produced for your brand. Certainly, I’ve made that mistake when I was a start up back in the mid-2000s of spending a large sum of money on what was effectively just pretty designs.  Little did I know it, but I was not yet ready to undergo a brand identity exercise. Consequently, for years my business had a visual identity that wasn’t quite right.  This was evident from the fact that I...

People often ask the question, what is a brand, or what is intellectual property, and is a brand intellectual property. Before I answer that question let’s look at what the terms mean.

A good starting point to understanding what brand and branding mean is to note the word’s origins. It started as a term to describe the identifying mark that was burned on livestock with a branding iron. That was how people could tell who owned the cattle.

Although the concept of branding has its roots in this visual imagery it’s important to appreciate that branding has moved on considerably since those times. While the visual identity matters, of course, branding is nowadays about so much more than a logo, or visual designs.  The visual identity is the final stage of branding not the first.

The Design of Your Business is Key

Branding nowadays is much more about the way you design your business than the designs you get for your business to use. 

Even small...