One Red Cow | Corporate Identity

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One Red Cow are leading brand strategy specialists, who re-brand for tomorrow

What is corporate identity?

When you hear ‘corporate identity’, you probably think of logos, letterheads and business cards and that’s definitely part of it.

Your corporate design is all those things you’d typically associate with a company’s visual identity, including logos and taglines, colors and fonts, stationery, flyers, web design, social media. It’s also your office décor, employee uniforms and any graphics that cover your company cars and trucks (if you have any!).

However, corporate identity is more than just design; it’s who you are as a company. So it includes those corporate design elements on the one hand but also your culture, your values and your internal and external communications.

Corporate identity is also different to brand identity.

Consider a big multinational company like Procter & Gamble: the company has one corporate identity one logo, one set of values and company culture and then it has hundreds of brands underneath that corporate umbrella Gillette, Pampers, Pantene each with an individual brand identity.

Even a smaller company with just one brand (for now) can still make a distinction between the customer-facing brand and the overall corporate identity.

Your vision and purpose

It’s not enough anymore to be selling a high-quality product. Companies need a bigger ‘why’ for people to get behind.

It all starts with your reason for going to work every day and why anyone else should care. As Simon Sinek famously stated, “people don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it”

Companies like Lush who have a powerful and, importantly, genuine mission are able to get not just customers but also employees fully engaged and committed to what they do.

Why is corporate identity important?

Whether you know it or not, you already have a corporate identity, just like you have a brand image, whether or not you manage it actively. It’s just a matter of whether you want it to be left to chance with a logo here, a social media cover there and whatever else creating a hodgepodge over time or if you want to create something that will support your business objectives.

It’s also important to consider both sides of corporate identity: your design, yes, but also your culture and personality.

Creating a holistic corporate identity means taking into account all aspects of your business and fixing what isn’t working.

Small business owners may think that all this is too big and unnecessary, it might seem silly to talk about ‘culture’ when it’s just you and a co-founder but it’s far more effective (and easier) to get things right from the start than to have to fix things later on.

Proactively building a corporate identity will:

Ensure that you’re consistent and coherent in all your communication;

Allow you to differentiate yourself against your competitors; and

Help you engage effectively with customers, employees and investors.

How do you develop the right corporate identity for your business?

You started this business for a reason and it’s important to not lose sight of that reason as you grow the business. Spend some time reflecting on:

What were your motivations for starting this business?
What was your vision and purpose?
What was your plan for how it would develop?

Although of course the business can and should evolve, having your initial motivations and plans clear upfront will give you a strong foundation and ensure that you build the business you dreamed of.

1. Consider where you’re coming from

2. Find out where you are

Before you start to look at where you want to get to, you’ll want to work out where you are today. Take the time to do some research to answer questions like:

What do your existing customers think of you?
What about your employees?
What impression comes across in your current company materials?

You may find some really positive feedback and keywords that you’ll want to keep but you may also find areas of improvement. You can use both positive and negative input to build your corporate identity of the future.

3. Look outside the company

Developing a corporate identity is a delicate balance between playing by the rules of the category and mixing things up so that you stand out. Do some more research now on who your competitors are and see:

What can you learn about the corporate identity of your competitors?
What do you like and what don’t you like?
What do you think makes one company successful and another not?

Make a note of the insights you get again, both positive and negative so that you’re aware of these distinctions as you craft your own identity.

4. Create a vision for the future

A corporate identity takes time to build and so there’s no point in developing something for where you are today it’ll be out of date before it has even had an impact!

Instead, you want to be looking ahead to where you’re trying to get to with your business, let’s say over a five-year horizon:

Where do you want to be with your company in five years from now?
What will your internal structure and team look like?
What new products and services will you be launching?

Looking ahead like this will help to ensure that the identity you’re developing now will not only be relevant in years to come but will even help you get there.

5. Develop your corporate identity

You know where you’ve come from, where you are today and where you want to get to; you know what your competitors are up to; and you’re now ready to craft your very own corporate identity!

Remember that this means both the design aspects and the culture and personality side of things.

How to get started:

Learn more about creating a brand style guide.

This is where you’ll keep track of all those elements of your brand identity

Learn more about developing your brand identity.

This goes into the details of your brand design including typography, color palette and form as well as how these will be brought to life in your logo, website, business cards, etc

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