Managing Your Brand: Design 101

It’s all around us: Bad graphic design. Whether on a billboard, on a website, or in your mailbox, you know it when you see it. One of my team members even keeps a “Marketing Mishaps” folder filled with examples from over the years, just for fun. Thankfully, there are some rules of thumb to help you avoid design blunders and properly manage your brand. Here are a few:

Trust a talented designer. You’ve invested a lot in your brand, the visual part of it. Your logo, tagline, branding elements, colors, and brand standards/usage guidelines are the foundation pieces. With those in place, it’s up to a pro to know how to use them as a part of extending your brand, creating your brand presence effectively. A designer gets to understand your brand and knows how to artfully balance design and verbiage to propel your message.

Less is more. The recipient will remember your message when you communicate it CIMply and clearly. You don’t have to display all brand elements in every instance just because you have them.

While you may have built a treehouse in the backyard, you wouldn’t try to build your new home yourself. True designers have innate talent and training to use tools to pull it all together.

Stand out. When looking head to head at competing products and services, you want to best the competition’s offerings. How you do this is by having well-conceived, graphically pleasing designs that reach this goal. A designer knows how to accomplish this for you.

Don’t forget the family. Your brand family, that is. Your brand footprint is ever-expanded by using your brand elements everywhere you have a presence. Your printed marketing materials should match your digital marketing efforts. Whether one visits your website, views your social media pages, or receives an email or actual mailpiece from your company, it should look and feel like it’s something about your company.

Brand consistency doesn’t happen by itself, but must be managed, and that ultimately helps lead to a higher trust in a brand: “I know this company, I recognize this company, I like doing business with this company.” Think about Apple, for example. When this company touches you with a message, do you almost instantly know it’s Apple?

Investing in good design pays for itself in spades through building your competitive advantage, elevating your company’s products and services above others, increasing actual sales and revenue and, ultimately, driving marketing results. Step one: Make sure it’s being effectively led and managed by someone or a team you trust.

Happy Labor Day!

Quote of the week:

…knowing how to use a design or art software doesn’t make you a designer.

Adri M.

more posts

Constructing Your Content Marketing

As a full service marketing firm, CIM Marketing Partners has built our fair share of corporate websites. A question that always comes up in the planning process is, “Should we add a blog?” The answer? That depends on a few factors. Blogs die every day because of lack of commitment or passion, two integral factors in the success of content marketing. A content marketing strategy is essential to ensure the longevity and success of a

Read More »

A Salute to Our Troops

  My entire career has evolved around marketing and advertising, and I must say, I have produced, scripted and watched 100’s if not 1000’s of commercials; this is one of the very best I have ever seen! Before you watch it, let me explain why I think this is so well done. First, there are very few commercials that can hold the audience’s attention with not one word spoken! Second, the video production, visual scripting and direction

Read More »

The 2015 Planning Window of Opportunity is Upon You

Summer’s gone. School has started. Cooler temps are on the way. Thanksgiving is around the corner. December will be all filled up with holiday activities. That makes now the perfect time to prepare for and lock in an effective 2015 strategic marketing plan and budget. What’s in it for you? By planning now, you’ll… Avoid entering the New Year with no plan, leaving you to only react to opportunities that may appear. Clarify the New Year’s business

Read More »