Coca-Cola, Marriott, Kraft - all company names familiar to most consumers. But there's more to building brands than just name recognition. Design is a key component in crafting and employing a strategy that builds brand loyalty, experts say. Just as smart design can help give consumers the right kind of feeling about a brand, poor design can weaken a brand's standing.
"A great design creates consistency and continuity in the marketplace," says Beth Remsburg, a Graphic Design Instructor at The Art Institute of Indianapolis. "If there is no consistency, a company or brand can be perceived as not being stable."
Today's marketplace makes building brands more challenging for companies because the Internet has removed most buying limitations and exponentially increased consumer choices.
All that competition makes it more important than ever to shore up a brand's identity. In the best cases, brand identity corresponds to the soul of a company, says Scott White, a branding expert who goes by the title Big Kahuna at Brand Identity Guru.
When building brands, living up to the established brand identity is everything, White says. Online shoe retailer Zappos is a good example, he says, of a company that lives up to its brand identity by providing great customer service.
"In the end, if you don't deliver on what you say, the brand image is going to suffer," White says.
While a company's brand identity is an expression of how a firm wants to be perceived, it can be distinct from the brand's image, White points out. The image is how consumers actually perceive the business.
Designers can have a positive influence over a brand's image because their work provides a visual means for consumers to connect with the product. A designer can work on anything from signage and packaging to websites and stationary, Remsburg says.
"These components continually reinforce the brand image in the minds of the end-user," she adds.
Another component that falls under a designer's responsibility is the company's logo. While White says the logo is just one part of building brands, it holds a lot of power and recognition for some companies.
"Initially the logo plays a big role just from a visualization standpoint," he adds. "But by no means does it always represent the brand. In some cases it does, in some cases it doesn't. Nike and the swoosh is clearly identifiable with everybody. But a lot of companies will never have that kind of power."
It's a different story at a company like Xerox, which changed its logo three or four times, White points out. If the brand identity isn't a key aspect of the product, it doesn't matter how often a logo is changed or updated.
During an economic downturn, a logo change can be particularly appealing to companies building brands because it can be a relatively small marketing tweak. Small updates like that to a brand identity lowers the risk of alienating consumers, Remsburg says.
"A moderate change usually shows that they simply need a fresh coat of paint, something more modern, for example," she says.
Even if consumers aren't keeping track of those types of changes, industry insiders are. The graphic design blog Under Consideration has a division, Brand New, specific to brand identity work. Their Best and Worst Identities of 2009 provides reviews for minor and major logo changes made during the year. AOL received top honors for "branding to create a new audience." But Bing, the new search engine from Microsoft, was criticized for its typography.
For those consumers who think they're immune to company branding, author David F. D'Alessandro says they are wrong. In his book "Brand Warfare: 10 Rules for Building the Killer Brand," D'Alessandro writes: "A lot of people think they don't pay attention to brands. But usually, they do - they may just pay attention to the opposition brands, the rebel brands, or the cult brands. They allow their distaste for the dominant brands to convince them they are too high-minded to hear the siren song of the marketers."
For the designer, the challenge is not delivering on the message when building brands, but attracting consumers and sending that message. It's a role that many cherish because they have a passion for it, Remsburg says. It's art with a business twist.
"They're not just making pretty pictures," White says. "They're making pretty pictures that mean something."