Branding (bran-ding)
- noun
In marketing, the sum total of a company's value, including products, services, people, advertising, positioning, and culture.

These days, it’s not enough to name your company and get down to business. You need to think about branding your company in a way that represents the “personality” of your business. In the same breath, no one is going to buy from you or not because your logo is light blue or dark blue.

The goal of successful branding is to achieve customer recognition of your company. The well-designed branding of your company will set your business apart from the competition, and make you stand out. This four part series identifies how to approach the branding of your business.

Your Logo

Logo (lo-go)
- noun, plural -gos.
Also called logotype, a graphic representation or symbol of a company name, trademark, abbreviation, etc., often uniquely designed for ready recognition

An ideal logo will give your business a ‘face’ that people can easily recognise and identify with you. Like every person has a unique name and identity, every business needs an identity of their own. A logo will be reinforced on all the marketing ventures of your company: website, business cards, letterhead, advertisements, in cases where your company acts as a sponsor. Acting as the signature of your business, a logo stamps your trademark. An effective logo will be an ideal fit for your company, your market and your business goals.

The Three Main Types of Logo

• The text logo
• The symbol logo
• The combination text and symbol logo

What Makes an Effective Logo?

An effective logo will be clear, unique, and memorable. Coca-Cola is an instantly recognisable text logo, with unique colours that are repeated on their products and all forms of advertising. This very simple logo is one of the most recognisable in the world. The Cadbury chocolate company have patented the colour purple in the confectionary industry, proving the importance of colour in the branding of a business.

Colour

The colour chosen should be easy on the eye and professional. Black is seen as modern and serious, white as pure and innocent, grey as elegant and stable, blue as calm and harmonious according to colour theorist Faber Birrin. Think about the image that you want to put across for your company: a children’s party bouncy castle hire company might require a different colour scheme to a water purifier distributor, for example.

Simplicity

The logo needs to be simple in order to be reprinted easily, with a simple design. Ask yourself if your logo would look good on a pack of matches. Your logo needs to be able to look as good on the signage of your office building as it does on business cards, or a promotional golf ball. The more intricate the design, the more difficult it will be to print it on to different materials. A bold design is much easier for customers to recognise, as it requires them to memorise less detail.

The Netregistry logo, for example, contains a symbol and text. After repeated exposure, customers then recognise the symbol itself as representing Netregistry.

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