Keeping it simple: the complete solution for your new business logo or new brand identity.

Your Brand: logo, slogan, style

Every new person you contact interacts first with the image they have of you. Your image or brand precedes you, it determines whether they approach or respond to you at all. And after the first contact, your brand continues to mediate how they feel about you, including their desire to keep doing business with you.

The value of brand

Mature companies spend heavily on branding, to create and then to promote a consistent corporate identity.

The Commonwealth Bank famously spent over a million dollars on designing its new logo; love it or hate it, everyone knows it. Even quite small companies regularly spend tens of thousands on their branding. For many companies, brands are their most valuable possessions.

So how much should you spend on your new brand?

As a small or new organisation, you may have a tight budget. But consider this: when big companies re-brand, they do it at great cost in lost recognition and "brand equity". The money the Commonwealth spent on design was insignificant compared with what it then had to spend on advertising, signage and printing.

Big companies pay the cost of change when their existing brand is not up to their marketing objectives. A lot of the money they spend is to overcome the consequences of earlier decisions they have come to regret.

So the tighter your marketing budget is, the more important it is that you get it right first time.

What is a brand anyway?

Whether they admit it or not, most people make purchase decisions that include an emotional response to the brand of the product. Some people want a Mercedes, some want a BMW. Some people shop at Coles, some shop at Woolworths.

To understand brand, consider what happens when there is none. Say you need a truckload of yellow sand. Yellow sand is yellow sand. So you'll go for the cheapest price. That's called a commodity product; it doesn't matter who supplies it, the product is the same. Unless of course one supplier has a reputation for more reliable service and on-time delivery is important to you (perhaps you have a bricklayer booked). Then you might pay a little more for the reliable supplier, even though the sand they deliver is the same. The price difference is brand value.

How much can a brand be worth?

Consider Coke. In Australia, it's the most asked for brand of soft drink. Now, most supermarkets have a generic cola at two thirds the price of Coke, but Coke is still the big seller. Does it cost more to make Coke than it costs to make the generic version? Not really, certainly nowhere near as much as the price difference people will pay. That difference is brand value. And it's more than the price difference, it's also loyalty. Coke drinkers, Holden drivers and Apple users tend to stick with their brands.

(Incidentally, the Coke brand has been independently valued at US$6 billion, just for the name and logos.)

Consider a designer label dress. It contains no more fabric than a generic version. It may be slightly better fabric, but it may not have taken much longer to sew. Let's be generous and say double the cost. But the retail price will be most likely 10 to 100 times higher. That's brand value.

Brands can also earn customer trust. When Apple, a computer company, broke into the music industry, its success was based on the acceptance of a substantial core of users of Apple computers who were willing to trust Apple's claims and buy in. A good brand can be extended.

Summary: A good brand delivers higher margins and greater customer loyalty. A good brand adds value to an organisation. A good brand makes it easier to launch and market new products.

Every contact is an investment

If you sell a commodity then every sale has to be made from scratch, based on price. But if you sell a brand, people prefer to come back to you. And every contact you have with them is an investment in the cumulative strength of your brand.

In a very real sense, brand is the crucible that holds your accumulated customer regard and emotional attachment.

But it is also is the symbol by which they recognise you and through which they determine your emotional value to them.

If, further down the track, you have to change that symbol, then you will lose recognition and some of you accumulated value: when you pour from the old crucible to your new brand, there will be spillage that can only be minimised by heavy duty promotion.

Why would you want to change a brand?

Lots of reasons. Very often, growing organisations become more sophisticated and their old branding starts to look "back yard". Often they grow beyond the focus of their original brand. Or they discover that their old brand was specific to a set of circumstances that have passed.

The Commonwealth Bank, for example, had a very staid, conservative image that also came to imply a lack of modern services and initiative. They had to change, if only just to say that they were not like that. But ANZ and Westpac were able to enter the modern banking age with established logos, saving them on costs and preserving their established brand equity.

Getting your branding right at the beginning is not just a cost saver, it is a growth enhancer.

In our experience, mid-life rebranding can be a traumatic experience for an organisation. It can divert energy, consume time and even paralyse an organisation. But organisations with a strong brand that expresses who they are can power ahead with real focus. If a brand needs to be refreshed from time to time, it should be done within a sound, established framework that does not disrupt the symbolic value of the organisation.

The essentials of brand

Brand can be expressed through:

• Name: Your name is your identifier: it should help people remember you and find you in the phone book or on-line. Sometimes it may also convey information about what you do and even convey some of your emotional values to the user. See our professional article What's in a name? for more detail.
• Logo: Most people have a better visual memory than they do a verbal memory and visual recognition is faster than verbal recognition, so your logo is critical; it is the visual version of your name that can carry most of the meaning of your brand.
• Slogan: It's great if you can find a name that says what you do and what your promise is (say, Bill's Cheaper Plumbing) but most of the time such meaning has to be added, and a slogan is the first step in doing it (for example, Dominos – delivered in 20 minutes or its free).
• Style: Your logo is used in a setting: on a business card, a letterhead, a sign, an ad, in your office décor. Your style extends the colour themes and the other design elements of the logo in these settings, adding to the overall impact and increasing recognition. Style definition, extension and consistency is essential to maximum branding impact. Your style (including use of the logo, colours, fonts, slogan and associated design elements) should be documented in a written Style Guide, to ensure consistency.
• Useage: The thing about logo, slogan and style is to use it. Every time a consumer is exposed to these elements, your brand is reinforced. Every interaction they have with you should be a contribution to the growth of your brand, that is stored within your brand identity in the customer's mind.

That's one of the reasons consistency is so important – to reinforce the same message so its impact and recognition grows.