Hello everyone and welcome to the Working Image Podcast. I'm your host, Jarrod Michael Gordon. This is episode five Brand Unity. Let's get started. Brand Unity is a term that gets used a lot and is often not used correctly, so let's define it first. Brand Unity is the projection of your corporate vision to your customers. I know that's a little out there, but bear with me. It's basically your company's message and the overall feeling created in the same visual design. Well, what does that even mean? Let's use an example. Think about Apple, Nike, and Disney. These companies really know how to market their brand. If you take all the advertisements, commercials, and marketing collateral for any of these companies and you line them up in front of you, all of Apple's would have the same look and feel. All of Nike's would have the same look and feel, and all of Disney's would have the same look and feel. As they put these pieces of marketing into the world, they are displaying themselves the same way over and over again, and you as the viewer start to develop a feeling about these companies. Now, remember, the way you feel about a company is known as the company's brand. A brand is not a logo, and it's not the colors the company uses. Again, it's the overall feeling someone has about that company. There are many elements that contribute to a company's brand, not just a company's marketing collateral, but as an example, the way they treat their customers, either in person or on the phone. Think about it. If you need a plumber for whatever reason, you call them, you make an appointment and everything is great, but the plumber comes and is mean annoyed that you're asking questions and maybe even insults you. That horrible experience is now how you feel about this company, and when you have the opportunity to tell someone or leave a review, you will have nothing positive to say about them. This in turn, leads to a loss of future sales for that company because its brand is now compromised. You might be saying some customers complain and there's nothing you can do about it, and that's true. There are some customers who are just gonna complain and leave a bad review, and there's nothing you can do about it. Unfortunately, that's the nature of doing business. You're going to have some people who are not happy and they will leave a bad review and they will tell people they had a bad time. Every chance they get brand unity isn't going to change the minds of those customers. Brand Unity is going to show customers what your company's message is and how you want them to feel about your company. Whatever your message may be, your brand Unity will continue to express that message through marketing. How exactly do you achieve sending the right message through your marketing time and time again? Well, that's where your Designer comes in. This is exactly what they are trained for, whether it be for your marketing, whether it be for your website, whether it be for your business card, if it has something to do your business, your designer will be able to express your brand via the design. But how do designers achieve brand unity? The first item a designer will look at is a set of brand guidelines known as the Graphic Standards Manual. These are rules that were created to maintain the look and feel, there's that word again, feel to maintain the look and feel of your brand? Let's talk about graphic standards manuals for a moment. As a business owner, you should be able to take that manual and give it to a printer, a designer, a marketer, or anyone who's going to create something for your company to ensure your brand will be unified by staying within the guidelines of that graphic standards manual. Now, the graphic standards manual isn't just to show how your logo should be displayed in various situations or just to list the color scheme for your company, although it does do that, the graphic standards manual can go as far as and beyond all the ways you want your company's brand to be projected. With this in mind, some graphic standards manuals are a few hundred pages long, but in my experience, most companies usually have fewer than 10 pages in their manuals, although I'm sure Apple, Nike and Disney have hundreds of pages in their graphic standards manuals. So what if you don't have one? Unfortunately, I've seen this time and time again where a designer will create a logo and a basic branding package for a company and not give them a graphic standards manual. Or even worse, they just create a logo and that's all. The client will get a finished logo, nothing else, and that's just wrong. This is another reason why you as a business owner want to hire a true professional graphic designer and not your friend's son who knows Photoshop. If you've been listening to the podcast, I hope you realize that there is a lot of work, effort and education that goes into graphic and web design. Everything we do as designers is focused on your company's message, which in return should result in more sales for your company, and you don't want to rely on someone who isn't properly educated to help you with your company's message. However, if you didn't have a brand created or a logo created or a graphic standards manual, that's okay. A designer can always review everything your company has done and create those for you. So moving forward, you will be using Brand Unity to promote your company's message. It's important to understand that brand Unity works for all businesses of all sizes. You can be a small landscaping company or a huge tech company. You can be a lawyer, a doctor, a plumber, it doesn't matter. Brand Unity works for all companies. I've worked with some companies for 20 years, and if we take everything I've designed for them over those two decades and put them together, everything is unified under their brand. You can see their brand in those designs, and those companies are known in their industries due to that same message being marketed within. The guidelines set forth in their graphic standards manuals. So all you need is to follow your brands guidelines, and then it's just a matter of time before people start recognizing your company and have that branded feeling you have been marketing. This will lead to new customers, but you have to stick with it. You can't abandon your brand and marketing efforts because as long as you have a company, you have a brand and it should be unified. Well, that's it for episode five, The Working Image Podcast Brand Unity. All necessary links and information are in the show notes. If you have any questions, email theworking image@gmail.com. We know your time is valuable. Thank you for using some of that time to listen. Take care.