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The Trust Gap: How Brand Consistency Builds Credibility

Trust has always been essential to building a strong brand. Today, it may also be one of the hardest things for an organization to earn. People are navigating an environment filled with more information, more competing claims, and more reasons to question what they see and hear. Expectations of organizations have changed. Customers have greater visibility into how companies operate. Employees have platforms to share their experiences. Leaders are scrutinized not only for what they say, but for what they do. And now AI has added another dimension.

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3 Ways to Keep Your Brand Aligned, Authentic, and Ahead

The kind of brand strength that drives growth doesn’t come from one campaign, adding a tagline or even a stellar brand refresh. It's the result of many intentional choices over time that show you’re listening, understand your customer, and are committed to delivering the experience they expect from your brand. Listening. Aligning. Responding. That’s what builds trust over time. And it’s important to remember that brand-building is a cycle of continuous improvement and evolution.

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Brand Consistency and the Cost of Going Off-Brand

You've heard it before, your brand is the sum of every customer interaction with your product, organization, and people. But it's easy to underestimate the financial impact of a disjointed brand experience. From your website experience, packaging, and social media posts to the products and services you sell and your in-person presence, every brand touchpoint contributes to how your brand is perceived. When these touchpoints don't align, or worse, tell conflicting stories, you're looking at a costly problem: brand inconsistency.

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Maintaining Brand Authenticity in the Age of AI | 5 Guiding Principles

Brand authenticity isn’t just a buzzword—it’s an expectation. This craving for genuine, authentic human connection extends to every aspect of branding, especially in an era of AI-driven content. AI is transforming industries, with significant leaps in efficiency and potential for innovation. In the creative sector, generative AI tools are streamlining content creation and generating visual and written content at astounding speeds. As creativity becomes increasingly influenced by AI, brands must prioritize authenticity.

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Rebrand, Brand Refresh or Brand Evolution. Which is right for you?

If you’re considering a rebrand or a brand refresh, you should also evaluate the benefits of a brand evolution. Brand evolutions aren’t something new. For decades many beloved brands have chosen to evolve specific components of their brand identity over time instead of making drastic changes.

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6 Elements of an Effective Brand Strategy

A brand strategy is critical for any organization that wants to create a strong and recognizable brand. Whether the brand you’re building is for a business, non-profit organization, school, product or service, you need a robust brand strategy upon which to build your brand identity. We know there’s a lot of information and misinformation about what a brand strategy is and is not, so we want to share our perspective.

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Education Branding | 6 Ways it Can Help Public Schools

Expressing a public school district's distinctive qualities in a way that is authentic and helps it stand apart from other schools and districts is one of the biggest benefits that a strong brand can provide.

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Return on Marketing Investment: Strategies for Effective Measurement

A lot has been written about Return on Marketing Investment (ROMI), but there is little agreement on what constitutes the most effective strategy for measuring those investments. Especially when measuring the intangibles such as brand awareness advertising, brand identity revitalization or package redesigns.

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The Importance of Research in Brand Identity Development

Redesigning an existing brand or developing an identity for a new brand requires a sizable investment and, as with any investment, it’s not without risk. In the case of a redesign, the existing equity and loyalty to the brand could be negatively impacted. Or if it’s a new brand, it could simply miss the mark—and the target audience—with messaging and a visual identity that doesn’t resonate.

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Print: It’s Still an Important Brand-Building Tool

With the current focus on the importance of integrating social media in the marketing mix, the evolution of smart phones, e-readers and the necessary emphasis on sustainability and environmental responsibility, many companies are focusing heavily on electronic media when it comes to building their brands. And while we agree that e-communications are important brand-building tools, we believe it's important to maintain perspective about all media types when it comes to doing what's best for our clients. Though we have no vested interest in any particular type of media, we do have a vested interest in helping our clients build and sustain world-class brands, using whatever media is most appropriate.

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The Role of Packaging in Brand Identity—Not Just for Consumer Brands

Packaging design is a critical component in building a brand’s image and identity. Anyone marketing to consumers already operates from this paradigm. The same holds true though for the commercial marketplace. Whether it’s a cosmetic product, or a 5-gallon pail of commercial paint, the packaging offers a huge opportunity to positively impact a brand’s image. But what we frequently hear from many business-to0business companies is, “the packaging doesn’t really matter, our customers place their orders via catalog”. Or in other words, they don’t need the package to sell the product on a retail shelf.

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8 Steps to Effective Multilingual Packaging

In this global economy, your brand is likely marketed in numerous regions throughout many cultures—where a myriad of different languages are spoken. Faced with these complexities, you may wonder how to continue to build brand loyalty and influence purchase decisions most effectively while keeping inventory and efficiencies in mind. As always, simplicity should be your guidepost.

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6 Qualities of Great Brand Names

Crafting an exceptional brand name—one that is unique, memorable, easy to pronounce, and emotionally engaging—is crucial for building a robust brand identity. We all know that great brand names help set businesses, products, or services apart in competitive markets. Additionally, they also play a pivotal role in fostering brand appeal.

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5 Steps to Maintaining a Consistent Brand and Visual Identity System

As anyone who has ever launched a new brand knows, there’s a lot of time, energy, planning and soul that goes into creating the final product. Then, you launch it and watch it soar (you hope). But, what then? How do you keep it alive over time and prevent people from reinventing it, modifying it and misusing it?

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Leveraging Imagery in Visual Identity Systems

Of all the elements that comprise an organization’s visual identity system, none has as much potential for making a message more impactful, memorable or more relevant than imagery. It has the power to feed the mind and stir the soul.

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Effectively Managing a Global Brand Identity

Managing global brands has never been more important. On one level, all brands have global reach as a result of the Internet, whether intended or not. But this doesn’t make them global brands. While it is true that the world is much smaller as a result of the Internet, affordable travel and the reduction of trade barriers, a truly global brand takes more than having a multi-national presence. A global brand is a brand that is intentionally marketed, bought, sold and recognized in various countries around the world.

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Beyond Consistency: A New Approach to Identity Standards

Strong brands are built on more than rigid adherence to a set of rules and regulations. They have personalities and soul. And there's an opportunity to express that soul at every touchpoint—whether it's print, electronic or interpersonal communications, a trade show or a promotion. As one of the first expressions of a new or revitalized brand, identity standards should convey the brand's true essence. They have the ability to generate enthusiasm and unleash the creative spirit.

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House of Brands, Branded House or Somewhere in Between?

Whether you manage a B2B or B2C brand, if you own more than one, you’ve had to decide what type of brand architecture best fits your business strategy. So, what are the choices? And what makes the most sense given your long-term business objectives? Essentially, there are three options: branded house/monolithic, house of brands or hybrid.

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Experience Design: It All Begins with Understanding Human Relationships

When you’ve been in the business of building brands as long as we have, trends ebb and flow, and management philosophies shift with each new disruptive book that is published. Then, you hear terms being used like UX, BX and CX. When we first heard “experience design” we thought: isn’t this what we’ve always been doing? We decided to look into the true meaning of the term “experience design” and uncover how closely it ties to human nature.

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10 Critical Success Factors in Launching a New Brand Identity

Whether you’re repositioning an existing brand or developing an identity for a new brand, product or service, your success depends not only on a distinctive brand strategy and visual identity system, but on a well-executed launch. If you’re repositioning your brand, you’re making a change and everyone who has a relationship with your brand needs to know about it. If you’re launching a new brand, you need to create that relationship from the ground up. Either way, your audiences need to hear about it repeatedly so they remember what your brand stands for and why it’s relevant to them. In the end, it’s all about creating loyalty so they choose your brand over the competition.

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Engaging Leadership

Revitalizing a brand and developing a visual identity system that supports it, whether for a product, brand or an organization, touches everyone by the time it’s implemented. And, it’s no secret that it requires a substantial investment—both in dollars and personnel.

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Risks of the Incremental Brand Launch

After revitalizing an existing brand, or creating a new brand, there is the critical job of communicating your brand message clearly and consistently. And, it all starts with that first communication effort, the brand launch.

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5 Ways to Improve Internal Brand Alignment

Whether you’re managing your corporate brand, a strategic brand or a product brand, maintaining brand alignment within an organization is a key element in building the desired brand experience outside the organization. But keeping brands aligned internally presents ongoing challenges when employees come and go and the daily demands of running the business are top-of-mind for everyone, including the management team.

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Integrating Acquired Brands into an Existing Portfolio

Anyone who has acquired a brand and integrated it into an existing portfolio can attest to the multitude of issues that need to be addressed. From brand name retention, parent company endorsement questions and managing customer perceptions, to brand mark, trade dress and personnel issues, the list can appear to be endless.

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Using Audits to Enhance Your Brand’s Performance

Once you have outlined a well-articulated brand strategy, you know that you need to manage your brand against the strategy and implement accordingly to achieve your brand vision. The challenge, however, is executing against that strategy consistently over time. And things become more complex if your brand is wide-reaching involving employees, customers and suppliers worldwide. This is where audits can be extremely helpful.

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Building Business-to-Business Brands: It’s Still People-to-People

Many marketing and branding books are filled with examples and case studies about consumer brands, but leave us wanting more information on business-to-business brand building. So it’s our intent in this newsletter to offer some perspective on building business- to-business brands.

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5 Keys to Maintaining a Consistent Brand Voice

Whether you’re managing your corporate brand, a strategic brand or a product brand, maintaining brand alignment within an organization is a key element in building the desired brand experience outside the organization. But keeping brands aligned internally presents ongoing challenges when employees come and go and the daily demands of running the business are top-of-mind for everyone, including the management team.

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Rebranding: Knowing When It’s Time

When you consider all the points of engagement that carry your brand identity, and the cost associated with redesigning all of them, the idea of making the investment to redesign everything from your brand’s logo and visual identity to creating the necessary brand guidelines to enable consistent expression may seem like a monumental task. Additionally, you may suspect that a new brand name would serve you better, but you aren’t sure. Will it help you stand apart from the competition and help increase brand recognition?

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Visual Identity Systems: Why Your Brand Identity Needs More Than a Logo

A visual identity system is a critical investment in your brand to build familiarity and recognition. You might be thinking, “What is it exactly, and why do I need one? Isn’t our logo enough?” Comprised of a color palette, typography, imagery—from photography to illustration—grids and graphics, a visual identity system gives your audiences cues to associate with your brand beyond the logo.

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Successful Rebranding Should Reach Far Beyond Short-term Campaigns

When it comes to the term “rebranding” we’ve learned that there are about as many perspectives as there are marketers in this world. What we know for certain after focusing on brand identity development for more than 25 years is that in order to truly reposition a brand, the work MUST go far deeper than a short-term advertising or branding campaign.

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Building Strong Brands in a Fluctuating Market

During the last recession, some brands slashed marketing budgets while others embarked upon brand revitalization efforts. When the economy rebounded, those companies who invested in their brands—Cargill, Boise Cascade and UPS, to name a few—were rewarded. We want to share a few thoughts on what it takes to build strong brands in tougher times. And yes, we believe it is possible, but does take leadership and ingenuity.

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Taglines: To Use or Not To Use

In tough economic times, companies are looking for more efficient ways to market themselves, make an impression and be memorable. Which seems to have a lot of people wondering, “Should I have a tagline?” To use or not to use, that is the question. Taglines can cement a brand in the mind of consumers and have greater staying power than likely imagined (a la Nike’s “Just do it.”), but, depending on your business, a tagline may or may not be appropriate.

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Global Brand Identity Systems

As the world has become smaller through global expansion, we have seen and helped many organizations establish a consistent expression and common voice for their brand, worldwide. Organizations have relied on identity guidelines to reinforce the consistent use of their corporate logo or brandmark, but not always for their brand identity systems. This is changing.

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How Word of Mouth Shapes Your Brand

We all know from personal experience the power word of mouth has. Maybe a rave review from a colleague convinced you to hire a particular supplier. Or a negative experience at a local restaurant caused you to tell your family and four neighbors not to go there. Or a positive interaction with a customer care representative motivated you to blog with fellow techies about a wireless provider’s great service.

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About identityWise

Strategic and discerning, identityWise^® shares our perspectives on branding. We explore the brand issues that matter to you. From positioning and brand management to identity design. Actionable insight awaits.