Brand Identity & logo design

Logo, identity, brand, branding – whats the difference?

A logo or identity is simply your fingerprint – a form of identification. It acts as a focal point and the gateway to your brand.

A brand is your personality – what people think of you, how someone would describe you. It’s what people think of (often subconsciously) each time they see your logo. It takes time to build, and there are no shortcuts – a strong brand is a by-product of having an excellent product, service, passionate people and a unique selling point (USP).

One of the best examples of the value of a brand is Coca-Cola, where an executive once summed it up as:

“If Coca-Cola were to lose all of its production-related assets in a disaster, the company would survive. By contrast, if all consumers were to have a sudden lapse of memory and forget everything related to Coca-Cola, the company would go out of business.”

Branding is the word that causes the most confusion. It originates from thousands of years ago when farmers would brand livestock with their own unique symbol using hot irons, so it’s logical that ’branding’ would be used to describe what we now know as a logo. But in more recent times the term ‘branding’ has come to mean the creation or shaping of brands which, as explained earlier, isn’t really something you can just magic up at will. So what is most commonly meant by branding is in fact creating or developing a brand’s identity in alignment with a strategy. Therefore, designers and agencies often use the term ‘brand identity’ to describe the creative execution part of a branding project.

Anyway, enough of my jibber-jabber. Whether you’re a startup or an existing company looking for an evolution or revolution of your brand’s identity, Beanwave help businesses of all shapes and sizes to make their mark and stand out from the crowd.