Your Identity and Brand Promise
Updating your image is nothing to take lightly. Yet, you know when your whole look seems stale and out of touch. The range of expertise in the field is remarkable, yet we can all recognize a well crafted brand.
Brand promise is the concept that a brand means something to its users. More than a logo, it’s a commitment to deliver. It transcends stuff and gets into image, feeling, and becomes part of the thing, more than the the product.
Walt Disney wasn’t pushing an amusement park, he wanted to create a place where the wonder and magic of being a kid still exists. Nike empowers it’s wearers with the essence of a champion, of victory itself—it doesn’t just sell sneakers. And Apple promises that once you get a bite of the apple, a taste of their technology, that your eyes will be opened, and you can’t go back to the mundane.
The time I put into my small business, is immense. More than a job, we pour our hearts and souls into our business. It becomes a part of us. Yet when it comes to putting a name and a brand onto this venture, many barely give it a second thought. Maybe Fiverr or a Logo Mill is good enough for you, but when I consider what goes into my business, I can’t just throw some clip art at it and call it done.
Crafting an Identity
So, if we demand something more, where do we begin?
The most difficult part in working with a designer, especially with your image, is communicating who you are. Most companies can barely verbalize who they are to their staff, never mind an outsider.
Your identity must first and foremost, be conceived by leadership. Until you can identify who you are—not who you think you are, you can hardly begin the process.
Crafting your brand can be a tough journey, especially if you’re not all on the same page, out of sync, or trying to build consensus.
At Artemis, an IT company in Central Florida, we tried to work together as a team and it simply wasn’t working.
It was on a drive to Orlando to visit a client that I finally got our dissenter to open up about what he wanted. Once I got back to my desk, it took just a few hours to come up with a design that won him over—and they haven’t looked back since. Communicating who we are isn’t easy.
At Longbow, identity is at the core of what we do. Since 1994, I’ve personally been involved in identity for hundreds of organizations, corporations—and the products and services they provide. Our experience results in an inclusive process, where you have input at every stage.
WEDI, the Workgroup for Electronic Data Interchange, is a national member-based healthcare organization focused on electronic records in healthcare, their use and legislative compliance. Their core focus is to improve the quality of healthcare through effective and efficient information exchange and management. WEDI helped craft the mechanisms and processes we all know today as the paperless office. When the idea of taking healthcare into the digital age needed a plan, this group hammered it out.
For WEDI, it was imperative to retain ties to the past, yet look forward to the future. In their new identity we took cues from the original and refined the logotype, ever conscious of the healthcare industry and their relationship to it.
Longbow created their identity in 2001 and it’s still in use to this day, something we’re still proud to claim as our work.
Visit their site at wedi.org