Corporate Identity

From the very beginning, creating a startup is an exciting whirlwind involving emotion and reason; in fact, your heart beats wildly when you think about your idea and your business model and your mind roams freely thinking about all of your future opportunities.

But the real challenge begins once you try to face the market.

You may feel a bit frustrated when you realize you have created something fantastic, but you are not be able to make the audience fall in love with it and consequently, you will have to make some new considerations along the way so that you can find out what went wrong. Marketing often gets blamed, but the problem lies in the wrong corporate brand identity. Below you will find out what that is, why it is important and above all who to contact for the best corporate identity for your startup.

Corporate identity: what it is

One of the most commonly misunderstood terms in the startup world is corporate identity. Many founders confuse the term with the logo or mistakenly think that it only applies to large corporations, multinational corporations, or scale-ups. This attitude generates one of the biggest of the many misjudgments that you could make when establishing your startup, that is, dealing only with the development of a brand and then having to retrace your steps once the marketing efforts are exhausted.

Those involved in startups often give up building on a solid system of corporate identity because they immediately want to immerse themselves headlong into marketing. Marketing is sexy. It is tangible. It also has the ability to completely ruin you if you are not fully prepared to master it!

The reason for all of this is that you simply cannot market a product or service successfully without a strong system of corporate identity.

Basically, any communication or information you see when interacting with a brand is part of its corporate identity. Although the design of the logo is part of the corporate identity, the term goes far beyond this visual icon to include elements such as mission, vision, values, business model, unique selling proposition and then graphically, fonts, illustrations, colors, photography, and animations.

When the intimate and visual elements of a business are implemented correctly and consistently, they work together to create a corporate identity that is instantly recognizable and memorable.

The right corporate identity can only be built after your internal team has become aligned with your startup’s positioning, mission, values, messages and personality. With this solid foundation in place, you can then work with a design company to create a visual language that reflects who you are.

These brand visuals should be as strategic as they are creative. Rather than rigid fixed components, your corporate design elements should also be agile, keeping your business continuously relevant in an ever-changing market.

Difference between corporate image and corporate identity

Corporate identity vs corporate image: a titanic clash between two key marketing tools, which, although distinct, actually represent two sides of the same coin. Indeed, the essential difference between the two is that the corporate image is the public perception of your company, i.e. how your business is perceived by the target audience, and generally refers to the accepted image of what exactly your startup “represents”.

Corporate identity is how the company wants to be perceived by the target audience, the main reason for creating brand awareness so that it can become easier and more convenient for people to identify your business within the crowd.

Successful corporate identity with B-PLANNOW®

Consider this situation: you need a new watch. Would you rather buy a Rolex from the official dealer or get a cheap Chinese “watch” on the subway? You certainly have more trust in the world-famous brand. The quality of the original watch is beyond question and, moreover, in the official shop, you will receive excellent service even if the watch itself costs you a lot of money. Likewise, your product/service should inspire trust and leave no doubt about its quality. The question is: How do you do that? How do you become a Rolex in your sector? To compete with the giants in your market, you need a strong corporate identity.

The importance of the corporate identity for startups is often underestimated; however, it is one of the factors that can help your company become a leader in its sector; then there are other reasons why a startup should invest in its corporate brand identity: the identity of your corporate brand represents the voice and personality of your company, it strengthens your credibility, helps you build trust and loyalty with your customers, and having a strong brand identity makes you stand out among the crowd; it helps you keep your corporate message consistent with your team and channels, and establishing a solid corporate identity for the startup can help you win investors, grab the attention of your target audience and attract the best talent.

B-PLANNOW® provides you with talent and professionalism in setting up the corporate identity of your startup in an omni-channel way using various tools:

• study of your unique selling proposition
• study of mission, vision and values
• study of naming with analysis of world domains
• creation of the logo and related applications
• design of web site, M-site, social-site, e-commerce
• organization of photo shoots with video footage
• digital image processing and retouching
• production of exciting videos and commercials
• brochures and catalogs
• packaging

Your brand identity is much more than just a logo … it is what makes them trust you. It is what makes you uniquely YOU!

Examples of successful corporate identity

If you are looking for inspiration to create your startup’s corporate identity, these examples can illustrate how powerful a successful corporate identity can be.

Apple

Let’s start with one of the most famous brands in history. The iconic Apple design was born from its co-founder Ronald Wayne, who drew an ancient black and white parchment that had the words Apple Computer & Co. and a young Isaac Newton reading while sitting under an apple tree (a symbolic image of the day when Isaac Newton discovered gravity). A very detailed logo, that of Wayne, difficult to remember and, above all, to reduce without losing details and in which the apple – there is one hanging from the tree just above Newton’s head – is barely visible. In 1977, Rob Janoff, corporate image manager, after going to the supermarket and buying apples – so they say – presents Jobs with his graphic idea: a monochromatic apple with a leaf on top and a small side bite. This logo got Jobs’s approval, but he only asked for one change: the colors. The monochromatic apple then becomes a rainbow, divided into horizontal colored bands which, according to Jobs, would have humanized the image of the company. The 1977 version was also meant to appeal to younger people and over the years the colors and shades of the Apple logo have changed, but the distinctive symbol has remained the same.

Meaning: The idea of the bite dates back to the time of Adam and Eve, who bit into the apple of knowledge. Therefore, the image suggests the human thirst for knowledge and using Apple products would help people gain knowledge and appease it. Furthermore, the bite symbolically plays with “byte”, the unit of digital data.

Google

The company’s first logo was actually for “Backrub”, the first name Larry Page and Sergey Brin came up with for their search engine. This name was inspired by the main function of the search engine, which is to scan Internet backlinks. The Google brand was first conceived in 1988. While some sources attribute the first design to Page, other sources claim that Brin created the logo with GIMP, the popular free image editor. This first logo shows the concept of mixing the colors of the letters as initially envisioned and would become the precursor for later versions of the logo. The order of the colors was not the same as in the next version, but the basic idea had been born. Google later added an exclamation mark at the end, presumably in line with the Internet trends of the time, led by Yahoo! The refined version of the logo was introduced in 1999 by Ruth Kedar, without the exclamation point, and remained in use until 2010. On May 6th, 2010, Google launched a new, updated logo, but over the years the image has been modified a lot from Kedar’s design. Of course, today you can see new adaptations of the Google logo every day, which is a great proof of creativity and one that is far-reaching.

Meaning: “Google”, a misspelling of the Latin word “googol“, which means 10100 (from 10 to the hundredth power). The general idea for the name was that the search engine could provide hundreds of results, or googols, for their search terms.

Amazon

When it comes to corporate image design, many companies choose graphics that represent their inspirational values. Amazon is a brand that has quickly become one of the most recognizable in the world. The logo not only displays a memorable name, but also a devotion to selling a wide range of unique products. The arrow that travels from A to Z in “Amazon” is a small subliminal deception meant to remind you that you can get almost any product that comes to mind from this seller. It also demonstrates the company’s fast shipping ethic. The arrow and character placement also look a lot like a happy face, which indicates the brand’s focus on customer satisfaction.

Meaning: When you first look at the Amazon logo, the arrow at the bottom looks like a smiley face, but it’s more than that. The arrow points from A to Z, representing the fact that Amazon offers a large variety of products for sale. And the smile represents the customer’s satisfaction.

BullsnakeFit

BullSnakeFit is indeed a startup demo, but above all an experience and an opportunity to experiment and “experience first-hand” what corporate identity applied to a startup means for B-PLANNOW®: naming, logo design, catalog, photo shoot & e-commerce, emotionally-exciting video, packaging, marketing mix and much more.

Meaning: Bull snake is the bull snake; the snake symbolizes the strong bond with life itself as it emerges from the depths of mother earth; precisely for this reason it is also considered the symbol of knowledge since it re-emerges from the darkness towards the light. However, it is not only linked to the land and water, but to all the elements, thus responding to the mythologies of numerous cultures that make it the bearer of life. The bull, on the other hand, is seen as a symbol of invincible strength, sacrifice, altruism. BullsnakeFit introduces itself to the world of fitness with ecological products imbued with sacrifice, strength and knowledge.

Visit our demo site at: bullsnakefit.com

Now that you know everything about what it is, why it is important and how much it costs to have a corporate identity for your startup, all you have to do is contact us, talk to us about your idea and give it uniqueness together with us!