BRANDING: Save your money and be good.

Generic Logo: You can’t buy your corporate brand.

We’ve been talking a lot about do-it-yourself design and how professional design (instead of a DIY approach) will help the professionalism of your corporate image. But is branding something you can hire an ad agency to do for you?

Because this company, Envision Sales & Marketing and this blog aim to support, encourage, teach and inspire entrepreneurs I wanted to touch on branding. What it is, how it works and can you buy it. I stumbled on this very excellent article from Jacob Cass’ blog Just Creative  that explains the differences between Brand, Identity and Logo. If you have the time, read it!

The one key take-away I got from this article is something all entrepreneurs should know:
a designer cannot “make” a brand – only the audience can do this.

To that end, the author (Jacob Cass, Graphic Designer) explains that a designer can help you with a few different components of your brand: color scheme, fonts, logo, a slogan, a communication style. But the brand is really the corporate image. What does the company do? How does it behave? What kind of reputation does it have? How is it perceived by the general public?

Many advertising agencies charge a lot of money for developing a company’s brand. They have long complicated processes and questionnaires to identify and develop your corporate brand. But, just as I’ve always suspected, your brand is not something you can buy. You can’t have someone do it for you.

It works the same way as your personal life. If you’re a good person, people will know it. It comes through in the things you do and how you carry yourself and how you treat people. If your evil and weaselly, if you use people for your personal gain – well, people will know that too. It can’t be designed away.

The bottom line is save your money and be good.
Do you know what your corporate image/brand is?