Brand Communication
Brand Communication is an important part and tool of brand management by which the companies inform, persuade, enlighten, teach, remind, and enrich the knowledge of their stakeholders about the brand, its strengths, values, fundamentals, and its offerings of products and services.
The aim of your logo, brand, image is to get people to recognise your project. If you can use your logo, signature, website, newsletter, press releases effectively you present a coherent and memorable image of your project.
Brand and image is important not only for the organisation or company, but for the project, too. If you want your target groups to remember your project and to identify with the themes and issues, then a strong image and brand is important.
What is branding for?
Many people think that branding is simply a matter of designing a new logo for their project or organisation and possibly a tagline to go underneath it, often barely distinguishing between branding and marketing. A strong brand has to do with every aspect of the organisation's/project’s relationship with its target groups. The function of branding is to make us feel good by making our decisions easier and safer. It does this by reducing anxiety and doubt and enhancing the trustworthiness of the brand. Branding is perceptual management that works with such virtual aspects like values, associations, percepts, beliefs, metaphors and environments. Branding is one of the important part of Public Relations strategy.
The process of branding
The steps that you can follow to establish the brand identity of your project are similar to the process of communication planning.
What is the aim of your project?
Who are your target groups?
What benefits will your target groups get?
Does this all sound familiar? It should do – your brand identity is part of your communication plan.
Logos
Your name and your logo are usually the first points of contact with your target groups. Having a strong identity is very important. It is essential that the logo is seen as mark of quality and when a brand is marked with a distinctive logo, a target group can trust it to be good.
Things to consider when designing a logo:
Becoming more involved with your brand and understanding how branding works will help your communication. Whereas branding is a big subject here are some tips and ideas for logo design to start you going.
Avoid negative images and associations.
Colour is key. Enhance your logo with colours that are meaningful. Learn color psychology.
Check other organisations/companies/projects for ideas and make sure that your logo is a unique one.
Pay attention to logos and brands around you and learn what works and what doesn’t work.
Logos always work in their context. Don’t assess logos from just purely design principles.
Conduct a focus group within your target groups. What is their first reaction?
Sometimes the most obvious images can be cliché. Try to incorporate a creative visual into the logo.
Experiment with different fonts to see which resonate with your brand.
Draw yourself and create your own visual. We all are creative!
If you want to add a tagline you need to create a short and memorable phrase that will sum up the tone and premise of your brand. If you choose to have a tagline, make it to be seen on all your communications tools or don’t use it.
And finally... check that the logo or a similar design has not already been used by another project or organisation.
You will probably need to trademark a logo that you have designed or commissioned. You need to check the trade mark office in your country.
Use of photographs
They say a picture paints a thousand words. Good use of photography will enhance the visibility of your printed material and web site. Visuals are processed 60,000 times faster than text.
Imagery (mostly Photography) has become such an important part of communication in modern times. A photo can be priceless in books, newspapers advertisements etc. Or on the internet where people demand fast loading pages with web optimised images. The reason you click the shutter is because you want to share the best parts of your environment with others from your perspective. If you have communication in mind when you take the picture, then your photograph will have a communication value.
In photographic art, the most important communication is that of emotion. You want the viewer to share your feeling of when you were there. This basically comes down to being able to compose, expose and focus while being in the right place at the right time. Easy right? No! you have to practice, composition, focus & exposure and be at many different places at different times until you get the combination.
We are challenged to create more meaningful work than ever because we live in the era of endless content streaming. The most striking way to communicate is through photography. So to create meaningful work, therefore, we need to define our style and understand the audience that will be reading and consuming our images.