With so many brands existing, how hard is it to create a truly unique brand icon?

greeNYC apparently found it quite difficult and Apple Computers is filing a claim against the trademark request for their “Apple like” icon.

I posted the gist of the claim and counter claim over on design review, along with images of the two logo’s.

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As you might know if you’ve been following along, we’ve begun work on Making the Brand’s winning company, Renaissance Adventure Guides‘ new brand. In addition to the Grand Prize, we awarded 2 runners up (Gift Basket Junction, and M&D Kitting Solutions) Brand Navigation Systems (BNS).

The BNS is a good alternative for a company that isn’t sure they’re ready to go whole hog with a branding or rebranding project, but still wants their current brand and marketing collateral evaluated, would like some suggestions on what to do next, and would like to keep their options open when it comes to working with other marketers, designers and writers.

A BNS starts out somewhat similarly to the heavy duty business and marketing brainstorming session that any branding process should begin with. Beth and her giant sticky notes lead us through the process of establishing a profile of the client which you can read about in a bit more detail at the first link above. Then, rather than Beth getting to work on the marketing plan, Kandra hitting the drafting table and Travitt chaining himself to the typewriting machine, the 3 of us sit down and draft a Brand Navigation System for the client that summarizes the meeting and our thoughts on their brand.

Besides a summary of the meeting, based on Beth’s, and Kandra’s notes and Travitt’s doodlings, the BNS includes an overall assessment of the client’s current brand (based on our examination of any current collateral), Kandra’s thoughts regarding the logo, typography, color choices and layout options if appropriate, Travitt’s on the current messaging, and Beth’s on the marketing. The BNS may include logo, color and typeface suggestions, core message, slogan, and name suggestions if requested by the client, possible budget and timelines – in short the BNS is a creative brief that we can use to craft a great brand for that client, or that they can take to another team to slap together a slightly less great brand.

Whether or not a client continues with us, goes to another branding team, or decides to abandon the project altogether, it’s a valuable exercise. Closely examining your brand (or correctly branding a start up), is a process that provides a type of business focus that you don’t get in any other way. It ties together all the thinking that might have gone into your business and marketing plans, guides your hiring practices and helps you qualify clients, and forces you to make vitally important choices regarding how you want your business to be perceived in the marketplace.

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The New York Governor’s recent troubles got me to thinking about a certain aspect of branding that we haven’t really touched on in the brief life of this blog – the brand promise. Also, I figured putting Client 9’s name in the headline might get us a little extra traffic.

A brand promise is “what audiences are assured of receiving as a result of their relationship with the brand.” It’s the one major core benefit your customers or clients should expect from your company. Apple’s brand promise is ease of use and great industrial design. Microsoft’s brand promise is universal compatibility. That’s why when you switch to a Mac after years of using Windows, it’s frustrating that you have to unlearn your old habits. The brand promise implies that there won’t be a learning curve. When your printer doesn’t work with Vista, the real reason it’s aggravating (beyond the lost productivity) is that the brand promise implies that because Windows is so pervasive, everything will work with it.

Spitzer’s downfall was so sensational and such big news all over the world not just because he was the governor of the 16th largest economy in the world, but because he had come to prominence based on his very effective anti-corruption branding (scroll about 1/2 way down the first page to the paragraph about “the Spitzer brand”). If he had been caught simply cheating on his wife, he would have been embarrassed, and his popularity and ability to govern might have taken a hit, but he probably wouldn’t have had to resign. Because his brand promise implied that he would be a crusader for clean government, however, his behavior was seen as a betrayal of the relationship he had built with his constituents.

The lesson for business and branding professionals is this: make sure your company’s behavior is in line with its brand promise, or get ready for a spectacular meltdown.

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About 2 weeks ago, Lyle and Max of winning company Renaissance Adventure Guides (RAG) sat down with us for the first step of their rebranding: an intensive brainstorming session where we grilled them for 4 hours about their business’ past, plans, and hopes for the future. The branding purpose of this session was to establish the identities and habits of RAG’s target market(s), its competition, its strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and internal and external threats to its success, and where and what the company will be in 1, 3 and 5 years.

Under Beth’s direction, and using no enhanced interrogation techniques, we were able to glean valuable information that’ll help Beth create an effective brand strategy, Kandra to design a logo that embodies the sense of professionalism, safety and trust necessary for RAG’s target market to feel comfortable hiring them, and Travitt to craft a persuasive slogan that will lodge itself in the brains of everyone who sees or hears it.

Really, what it all comes down to is this: to effectively brand a client, we need to figure out what the business and marketing needs of that client are. The brainstorming session allows us to figure that out, while also giving us a sense of that client’s business culture, how the people who own and work for the company think about and speak to each other about it, and more generally, what their aspirations for the brand are.

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What is a brand? Why should you care? How will branding benefit your company? These are great questions, the very basic questions in fact that you’ll need to answer in order to effectively market your company. These are the questions that Making the Brand was founded to help answer.

Branding is one of the most fundamentally misunderstood concepts in all of business, even by some of its practitioners. At the same time, a strong brand is one of the most powerful tools your company can possess, so understanding what it is and how to use it could determine whether your company succeeds, fails or flounders.

So, what is a brand? You have a logo. You have a tag line. Isn’t that what we’re talking about here? Not exactly. These are components – important components, absolutely, and probably the components most of your customers will see and hear more than any other component of your brand.

But a brand is more than the sum of its parts. A brand is the impression your customers and employees have of your company in their hearts and minds. If you have a business, if you’ve interacted with customers you have a brand. If you’ve hired and trained an employee, you have a brand. The question is, are you in control of it?

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Building a strong brand will benefit your company in ways that are easy to foresee and ways that are impossible to foresee. Think about the great companies of the 20th and 21st centuries: Coca-Cola, IBM, Apple, Nike. What do these companies have in common? All of them have weathered storms, hard times, and periods of struggle. Remember New Coke? The Nike sweatshop scandals? The Apple Newton? What allowed these companies to persevere and ultimately thrive?

Strong, flexible brands. They made it through the choppy waters because their brands helped them establish long-lasting, trusting relationships with their customers and their employees.

Strong branding can establish your company’s identity in the public’s mind, but it should be the basis for communicating with your employees as well, because they may be the main point of contact between your company and its customers or clients.

By forging a strong brand, using it as the basis for building long-lasting relationships with your customers and employees, deploying it as a tool to maintain your company’s focus, your brand will help your company weather downturns in the economy, marketing mistakes, poorly conceived advertising and a host of other impossible-to-predict challenges. In periods of strength, a strong brand will ensure that your company’s growth is targeted and intentional, that your customers always know what your company stands for and that its core values are communicated effectively.

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As branding professionals, we tell ourselves (and you) that branding is a business tool of almost mystical power. And some of you are probably skeptical. But every so often a piece of evidence comes along that is hard even for us to believe.

This study, from the April Journal of Consumer Research, finds that seeing the Apple logo for even a fraction of a second – too quickly to consciously register it – made test subjects more creative, while seeing the IBM logo for the same amount of time had no similar effect. Seeing the Disney logo made test subjects act more honestly than did the E! logo.

How does your logo affect your customers?

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A Brand is Reborn:

The Presenters and Sponsors of Denver’s Making the Brand 2008 have announced a winner. Denver’s Making the Brand 2008 is an annual contest designed to re-brand one small, independent, metro Denver-based company, and to educate Denver’s small business community about the importance of branding to their continued success. Renaissance Adventure Guides (www.raguides.com), a Denver-based adventure travel firm, has been selected as recipient of the $20,000 brand and marketing package offered as the Grand Prize in the first annual contest.

“I was so excited when we made our decision,” says Beth Boen, owner of CreativeXchange Marketing (www.creativexchangemarketing.com), who is presenting the contest along with Phases Design Studio (www.designfiles.net), a local graphic design company, and The Write Stuff (www.travitthamilton.com), a copywriting company. “Renaissance Adventure Guides is exactly the kind of business we were hoping to award the Grand Prize to. They are a small, local company on the verge of great things, and they have a real commitment to making our community and the world a better place.”

The official announcement was made to the public Tuesday morning on 9News Mornings during an interview with Renaissance Adventure Guides’ owner, Max Young. According to Young, “We’re really fired up about this, because it’s something we’ve known we’ve needed to do for a while now, but weren’t sure how to really get the ball rolling. We’ve been doing our own marketing for a few years, and really didn’t have a firm grasp on our branding. It just seemed like the time had come to step up. And then we heard about the contest, so the timing and everything has been just perfect.”

Kandra Churchwell, Creative Director of Phases Design Studio says, “Max and Lyle (Phetteplace, co-owner of Renaissance Adventure Guides) are exactly the kind of business owners we want to work with in general, but especially for the contest. They’re excited about the process, open to trying of new ideas, and willing to go through the whole thing in front of the entire metro Denver small business community. We think this is going be powerful experience for Renaissance Adventure Guides and the small business community alike!”

The two runners up were also announced today:

Gift Basket Junction (www.giftbasketjunction.com), and M&D Kitting Solutions (www.mdkittingsolutions.com), a mail order fulfillment company. The runners up will receive a branding assessment (valued at $795) provided by the Contest Presenters.

The Grand Prize Package includes marketing research and a marketing plan, a full custom design package (website, collateral, stationery, business cards), as well as brand and marketing messaging (tagline or slogan, web copy and brochure copy). The package will also include printing, SEO services and, if determined necessary by the Presenters, web video, product photography, and billboard advertising.

“All three of the finalists are great companies with a lot of potential,” says Travitt Hamilton, owner of copywriting company The Write Stuff. “So it was really tough to pick just one. All of them met the requirements of the contest and they all stand for a lot of the same things that we believe the contest is all about. In the end, it was a choice between three really worthy companies, which made the process exciting, but really challenging!”

Renaissance Adventure Guides’ new brand will be presented in June.

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Last Friday Beth Boen (Creative Xchange Marketing) appeared on KUSA’s Mornings program with Gregg Moss to promote Making the Brand, and to talk about the importance of using branding to drive small companies’ success. As always, she was persuasive and informative, and surprisingly energetic and wide awake, considering it was 5 in the morning!

You can view Beth’s appearance at
http://www.9news.com/money/article.aspx?storyid=83879

KUSA – Anyone who has bought Coors Beer knows the company’s claim for Rocky Mountain Water. If you buy a hamburger from McDonalds, it’s understood you’re at the golden arches. That’s proof that you can’t underestimate the power of branding when it comes to business.

To help small businesses tap into some of the power branding provides, several marketing firms are once again supporting the annual Making the Brand contest. The contest is designed to educate small business owners about how a strong brand can contribute and, oftentimes, drive a company’s success. The prize is a brand and identity package worth up to $20,000.

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Are you looking for a small business branding resource for Denver-based companies?

This is the blog you’re looking for.

Welcome to the official blog of Denver’s Making The Brand Contest. We’ll be keeping you up to date here on all the latest news concerning the contest and the companies of the presenters and sponsors, ideas and trends for small business branding in Denver.

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