The Care and Feeding of Your Corporate Identity

By Barbara A. Truell
Truell Design

How do you feel about your corporate identity? Does it reflect your company’s image, personality, and vision? In today’s competitive business environment it’s essential that your marketing materials have a cohesive, unified look, and that your brand drives your message home across all marketing channels.

Let’s discuss some common identity issues. Perhaps you initially invested in a well-designed logo and identity system, but when you needed to reprint stationery and business cards, you found you didn’t have access to the original artwork. You asked your printer to reconstruct the logo, but it wasn’t reconstructed perfectly. In fact, even the typeface and color of the logo are slightly different from the original. Now when you put all your marketing materials together they appear fragmented and uncoordinated. This is not uncommon with busy, growing companies, but the inconsistencies don’t speak well for your company’s public image.

Every company should periodically undergo an identity review to ensure that the visual elements of their corporate identity package are still consistent with one another and that they reflect what the company does.

Among the materials that should be reviewed are:

• Logo
• Letterhead, envelopes, labels, and business cards
• Brochures
• Presentation folders
• Web site graphics
• Trade show graphics
• PowerPoint presentations

Once the review is complete, simple solutions can often pull your pieces back together again and update them to reflect changes in the company that you want to communicate to your customers. Updates can be as simple as choosing a new typeface or adding a new color to your logo. Your identity can also be expressed with the addition to your logo of a new graphic element. This new element can be used outside the logo, as well - maybe as an animated graphic for your web site. Because most logos are now digitally produced, they can be easily converted to web friendly graphics with the click of a mouse! Another simple way to update materials is to change paper stock. Paper is like the ever-changing world of fashion ~ new colors and materials regularly come onto the scene.

The care and feeding of your corporate identity is critical to your company, its image, and, ultimately, its position in the marketplace. So, take the time to ensure that it accurately reflects your company.

Summer 2005 -Volume 15, Number 3

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