What’s The Difference Between Corporate Identity, Brand Identity, and Brand Image?
It’s important for businesses to understand how: corporate identity, brand identity, and brand image are different concepts. Often these get lumped together, or one is confused for the other. Let’s take a look at each one in more
detail.
Corporate Identity
The visual manner in which a business presents itself to the public eye is known as ‘corporate identity’. A business will typically have a recognizable trademark or logo design that represents their company, as well as an approved design, color palette, font type for their website. All printed marketing collateral, including business cards, letterhead, product packaging, even staff uniforms, need to conform to this design.
Having a well-defined corporate identity is important so your brand is memorable for customers and enables you to stand out from competitors. Corporate identity is often confused with brand identity, but it’s more about how the entire business presents itself in a coherent and consistent way with all marketing communications.
Establishing a set of brand guidelines for everyone working on marketing can help keep voice and messaging consistent.
Brand Identity
Likened to the essence or soul of the company, a business’ brand identity encompasses things like: reputation, the quality and benefits of the product or service offered, the value of it and how it performs.
A business will work hard for their brand identity to be perceived a certain way in their customers’ minds. They’ll use printed or online advertising to differentiate their product or service and if done well, this advertising can persuade customers to choose them over competitors.
Brand Image
Brand image is what customers actually think about a business’ brand identity and their product or service. This can be affected by the experience of the customer and how they’ve interacted with the brand.
Positive customer experiences are important to reinforce brand image, build customer loyalty and a strong competitive advantage. On the other hand work needs to be done to address any negative experiences in order to change the perception of a brand for those customers.
Ensuring that brand image is aligned with brand identity is an ongoing task but necessary so customers perceive a business in the way that it wants them to. Having a ‘good name’ is a valuable asset, some would even say the most important asset for any business who wants to succeed in a competitive marketplace.