Undergraduate Blog / Career Development

A Marketing Lesson – Brand Identity Creates Company Persona

I am sure we all have face a similar situation in which we look at certain color like red on a can, coke will jump into our mindset even if it’s not the first immediate thing in our mind. But color has definitely play a vital role in creating a brand’s persona.

In my previous blogs, I have mentioned that I am responsible in creating a brochure for the company and during the design and drafting process, not only did I learn how to communicate and work with an oversea graphic designer more effectively, but at the same time I learn the how important it is for a company to have its unique brand identity.

What do you think of when you hear the phrase “brand identity?” Color? Logo design? These two are definitely a major component of brand identity, but they are not the whole story. Brand identity includes not only color and logo design, but also font style for slides & prints, color to be use for a power point presentation, and unique graphic representations all make up the whole brand identity for a company. A major challenge that I face when designing a brochure is to figure out how to balance design with brand identity. Put it this way, components that make up a brand identity can be created by a professional design team from many years ago. The color that used to be “trendy” in the past may appear to be outdated now. So figuring out a way to maintain brand consistency while maximize on visual appeals can be challenging.

IXL Center, INC has a brand identity guidebook for all employees when they need to create materials for both marketing and business purposes which making brochure and/or giving presentations to clients. So in the brochure designing process, the brand guidebook tends to give answers to some basic design styles. However, learning how to modernize the design in addition to sticking with the guidebook is the value-added part.

I realized that sometimes by playing around with white-spaces, font sizes and even be creative to add some background graphic to inner-pages can help polish the layout. However, it is important to keep it mind that adding background graphic is only acceptable when it does not distract the contents.

Brand identity is a critical part of marketing, because when consistency is missing from marketing materials, then it will create noise and misrecognition for the target audience.