Question 1

What is the purpose of branding?

Accepted Answer

Branding is the basis on which consumers perceive your company. It is the collection of emotions and ideas that are evoked when consumers think about your business. A brand is at its most effective when every aspect of the business is consistent and works together towards the same set of core values. It unifies your company image and can elevate your company from being a simple business to being an industry leader.

Question 2

Why is branding important?

Accepted Answer

The importance of branding cannot be overstated. It is the personality of your company and what sets you apart from your competitors. If no one branded themselves, the only companies that would get any business would be the best in the industry and the cheapest. Introducing branding into the mix muddles the definitions of best and cheapest. It raises questions such as, what defines best, the materials used or the skill of the worker? Or what constitutes cheapest, the lowest cost option or the most cost-effective?

Question 3

What issues does branding resolve?

Accepted Answer

To decide how healthy your brand is, step out of your ‘business owner’ responsibilities and take a look at your company image as a consumer. What do you see? If any of the following points describe your company, you need The Original Brander:
 • No company image exists
 • Branding in the company is not consistent
 • Branding does not reflect the size or professionalism of the company
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Call us. Let us help you create a brand that builds awareness and engenders loyalty. Your company needs a brand to stand out in the marketplace. Let us show you how.

Question 4

What are the main issues that branding guidelines solve?

Accepted Answer

Branding guidelines are essential to ensuring the integrity of your brand is maintained. For example, as your logo is used in different elements of your company, adjustments may be made for one reason or another. As the design gets continually altered, the original intent of the logo and the design choices associated with it begin to get lost in the shuffle. Something as simple as stretching the logo, removing taglines or misrepresenting the colours can have a detrimental impact on how consumers perceive your company. By implementing branding guidelines, you provide a clear set of rules governing what can and cannot be done with a logo. If you want to keep your brand development professional, then you have to create branding guidelines that are clear about the use of your brand.

Question 5

Why is it so important to do branding before other marketing projects?

Accepted Answer

A brand’s power lies in the collective synergy of all marketing materials. A brand has an established identity and presents this identity across different media in the form of visual cues. For instance, if you send out a letter or invoice, it needs to adhere to the visual essence of the brand. Every aspect of your printed and online media need to conform to the colour, style, and feel of the brand to reinforce its power. Developing the brand first ensures that all marketing collateral present a unified message. It also makes incorporating elements of the brand into marketing collateral easier. Trying to match your brand to existing collateral is not only expensive, it muddles the message you are trying to send to your audience.

Question 6

What are the most important elements in a brand?

Accepted Answer

The logo is the focal point of your business and the most important element in any brand. The logo is an intricate combination of colour, imagery, and typography, that blends together to form a unique icon for your business. Each element of your logo should be heavily scrutinized to ensure compliance with your brand: which font family should you use? what colours are expressive of your company? What kind of imagery should your brand evoke? These are all questions that need to be asked and asked again.

Question 7

Deliverables

Accepted Answer

Digital Resource Pack
The digital resource pack is a tool that makes your branding accessible to those that need it. It contains brand materials tailor-made for creating branded documents. The digital resource pack also comes with a comprehensive guide detailing colour specifications and dimensions. A typical digital resource pack can contain renderings of your logo in different resolutions, email signatures, presentation and proposal covers, digital letterheads or other ready to use media.
The information included in the digital resource pack is a comprehensive list of colour specifications, dimensions and different renderings of your logo. It may also contain email signature files, presentation covers, proposal overs, digital letterhead or other media ready for use when needed.
Specific Items
Some of the specific items we can include in a branding package are:
Logos / Visual Branding Guidelines / Branding Books / Letter Head / Envelopes / Business Cards / Presentation Covers / Proposal Covers / Custom USB Sticks / Banners / Signs / Brochures / Postcards / Web Sites / Catalogues / Digital Signatures.
Branding Book
A branding book is an in-depth analysis of each element of the design and each piece of marketing collateral. It gives very specific guidelines and measurements for each particular type of collateral. There is much more detail and much less room for interpretation than branding guidelines. It can be produced in either PDF format or in print.
Visual Branding Guidelines
A Visual branding guideline includes a portfolio of 5 – 15 designs of your logo on stationary and assorted paraphernalia. This allows you to preview potential promotional items before committing and helps you decide if the items align with your brand.
Branding Guidelines
Every company needs to have branding guidelines that define how the logo and brand are to be used. The ability of a brand to unify a company image is one of its strengths and must be kept under control to protect the integrity of the brand. If you neglect creating a framework of conditions to keep your company image in alignment, you will come across as inconsistent and unrecognisable as your brand visibility declines.
Logos
A logo is a symbol that defines your business. When your logo is viewed it inextricably links that image to your brand, so why not make that image as expressive as possible? Your logo is essentially a reflection of your company, your style, and your values and will represent your public image for a long time. Thus it’s crucial that you place the right amount of thought and effort into designing it.
At The Original Brander, we focus on several tried and true methods of logo design which will alleviate stress and expedite the process for you. We work closely with our designers to create letter-based designs, related image designs, abstract image designs, wordmark designs or some combination of the four until we engineer a logo that you feel completely satisfied with.

Question 8

What is the difference between Branding and a logo?

Accepted Answer

Although it’s easy to confuse a brand with a logo, they are very different entities. A logo is simply an image linked to your company. It may contain the name of your company, but it could be a monogram, keyword or image. A logo is what it is – a pictogram representing your name. A brand encompasses more than just the logo. The logo is a vital piece to a brand as you need a visual cue to trigger the recognition, but a brand is the emotions triggered by seeing the logo. You want your brand to be linked to feelings of prestige and positive emotional responses. This is achieved by reflecting the design elements of the brand across your whole company and maintaining brand integrity.

Question 9

What is a "Brand Re-Imagining"?

Accepted Answer

A brand is a company image that you want to use for life. In the long run, the amount spent on creating a company brand is a drop in the bucket compared to the marketing mileage you can leverage from it. What happens, however, if times change and it just looks ‘old’? Brand re-imagining is the art of taking an already established brand and modernizing it to be more expressive and powerful. Brand re-imagining is done in two different ways:
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1. We can retain the basic elements of a current logo and create a new image with the same overall effect
2. We can modernize the elements around the logo and create a new impression.
 
In both cases, we keep what is still working and build on them until a newer, more successful, more modern, re-imagined brand emerges.

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