Identity Style Guides—Ensuring Consistency
Visual Style guides propose standards for design and brand representation that are a key operational tool in the launch and deployment of a brand. They are derived from a creative strategy, that is a core deliverable of a branding programme.
The benefits of adopting an Identity style guide are to ensure that brand assets are deployed consistently—this is the absolute essential element of branding.
Brand Strategy for Academic Organizations
BRANDING IS ESSENTIAL to any organization, it gives an organization true meaning, its provides relevance with your prospects, it assists in employee engagement and makes a connection with your current and prospective customers. The brand and creative strategies that we propose engage customers in a way that is personal and plausible to them. In an era of skepticism and low trust marketplaces, building a brand that communications relevance, engenders resonance and loyalty, and ultimately builds trust is of great value today, and of even greater value long term as growth and extension agendas become reality.
Erawan education is a seperate practice within the Erawan group that specializes in brand strategy solutions for education and non-profit organizations. We specialize in these type of organizations because they face very distinct brand challenges that require dedicated agency commitment. We offer this dedication, we explore the issues that challenge academic organizations and their offerings on a daily basis. We define and position organizations so that they can compete where competition is assumed to be defined on reputation and other intangibles that take decades to build. We bring hard data to this competitive landscape, we show organizations how to quantify trust, how to build their credibility and reputation through defined actions that dramatically shorten the development cycle.
A Brand is NOT a Logo
This is essentially where the branding "concept" is rather misunderstood. It is certainly not confined to visual issues and we would go as far as to say, "branding is NOT A LOGO." Logos are representations of a brand, just as colors, typefaces and written definitions are representations. But, in order to develop these representations in a principled manner, an organization needs to run through a classical branding programme. Such programmes involve considerable research phases— of opinions, markets and current materials, and are wide-ranging and involve all key stakeholders within an organization
If such a programme is implemented, organizations can develop their brand promise from where brand definitions and aspects of the brand identity can be derived.
The benefits of adopting a branding programme are:
- Branding is the starting point for giving the very definition of your organization, essentially what it stands for and what your customers believe your stand for.
- With a brand promise in hand, an organization can proceed with confidence to effectively market, advertise and conduct public relations exercises safe in the knowledge that these programmes are all consistent with the real essence and meaning of the organization
- Branding builds trust, consistent messaging carefully designed to show the unique qualities of your organization build value. Trust is an essential element in securing business, if your clients trust you, there are more likely to go in your direction.
- Branding builds value (equity) over time, consistent application of your brand promise builds equity that will assist in initiating and maintaining customer relationships, regardless of economic climates.