Profile and brand are built up of a kind of holism, i.e., where the whole is greater than the parts. Everything works together in building the company profile and the brand, from the operator's voice on the phone to the product quality, from the business card to the CEO's press conference. To arrange the typography - basic rules - to facilitate the work when producing. Giving all printed matter a common family character allows the recipient to easily identify the sender.
The sender is recognized and thereby becomes a stronger player.
Profile work begins in the business concept.
The company must always behave clearly, consistently and uniformly in all communication with the outside world. This coordination of communication is called company profiling. In this context, the concept of holistic is often mentioned, a philosophical theory (related to design psychology) that the whole is something more than the sum of its parts. The profile is vital. It not only benefits, in the long run, the sale of goods and services but also ensures, in an even longer perspective, the company's survival.
A crisis means the same difficult and dangerous situation for a company as for an individual. The work with the company profile really starts with the business idea. This marks the bay where profile issues get a real and necessary anchoring at a high and executive level in the company. Management of the company profile must be based on strategic decisions with the highest priority.
The profile (business idea / business idea) expresses how the organization / company wants to be perceived by its surroundings. Never carry out a profiling without having something concrete to say that is of interest to the recipient, who you are, what you do and what you can do.
Important questions for the company's profile work
These questions become important in the work with a company profile, the goals of which can be summarized as follows:
Clarify the company's business concept.
Match the company's corporate culture and management style.
Contribute to increased awareness of the company.
Contribute to a consistent and positive image of the company.
Contribute to a sense of belonging internally and externally.
Contribute to "rational" marketing and advertising production.
Four profiles
When working with the company's profiling, you must take into account that there are four different groupings in the profiling work. These are Product Profile, Environmental Profile, Individual Profile and Graphic Profile. To make it understandable, I have chosen that we should examine these four groups a little deeper.
Product profile
Product profile includes the products themselves but also research and development. This area of profiling in combination with product design has in recent decades been of most interest to the business community. Under brands.
Environmental profile
includes exteriors and interiors in terms of both offices and points of sale.
Individual profile
is about the appearance of management and staff.
Graphic profile
involves a kind of translation of the company's goals, vision, and core values into a visual language.
We start by looking at the graphic profile.
The Graphic profile
Rules for the visual profile are usually collected in a so-called design program and more concretely and practically in a graphic manual. Today, most graphic manuals are fully digitized and located on the company's network. This means that from the beginning, one must consider the limitations and possibilities that technology entails.
The graphic manual includes logo (or word mark, company name or product name in a certain font), company mark (figurative mark, a simplified image that tries to capture the company's business), coloring of logo and mark and rules and templates for everything between business cards to cars color.
What is also usually specified clearly is how the use / application of the logo and any mark should be done on:
• visit and correspondence card
• stationery
• e-mail signature
• press release
• printed matter of all kinds
• packaging
• signs indoors and outdoors
• ads, product ads and recruitment ads
• Online ads in digital media
• websites on the Internet
• Company pages on social media
• In some cases also instructions for applications on cars and clothing.
Profile carrier
Company profile is the sum of what the profile bearers convey. These can be logos, annual reports, buildings, interiors, signs, advertisements, websites. And of course, people.
Every employee, at every conceivable level, acts as an ambassador for their own company.
Strong profile creates strong motivation, belonging, security for one's own staff. The employees understand the company's purpose and business concept, its problems and opportunities and realize the importance of their own work effort, which ultimately affects the result. Internal marketing, staff care, training, gratuities, and kickoffs are important in the context Not to mention information.
Mass Media Profile
Important profile bearers are the people who often, publicly, and mass media, present and represent the company, for example the chairman of the board and the CEO. These have different appearances. Sweden's industry and other companies in the private sector have for many years had prominent mass media profiles.
Being a strong profile bearer rests on four foundations:
The functional that is about what function you have. Marketing manager or chairman of the board.
The social that includes social skills at work and in private life.
The mental that is about how you are as a mentor and role model.
The spiritual that includes goals and visions.
It is important to be good at all four.
When individuals set themselves ahead of the company
One never ceases to be amazed at what happens in companies where performance-based bonuses are built up for those who are to safeguard the company's profile towards the market. Most often, it emerges how employees in the companies' management groups do everything to rob themselves as much as possible, if possible and ignore the company as a whole.
Unfortunately, I have to say this from my own experience considering what happened to one of my previous companies in 2017 who was exposed to a management team that put the self before the team and before the company with a series of decisions that went against the previous management team established and years of work were sent to the dump. A company I spent thirteen years building up and could now see dismantled and where all assets were moved from the company to the management team to collapse within thirteen months.
One might ask what the people who act in this way consider themselves to be for spiritual, mental, social, and functional profiles for others who work in the company. Their actions let everyone else know that it is free to move forward and that the individual is ahead of the company.
Today I work to ensure that other companies do not fall into the same trap as myself. What was missed in these companies may be that you could not perform what was expected of them and they then had to bear the brunt of the big speculations that prevailed in the market. It may also be the case that the companies did not have the right profile in the entire chain.
The right profile throughout the chain
Important profile carriers of course include what the company achieves with goods and services as well as the points of sale that the company provides. By using different types of ambassadors, a company can create a profile consisting of customers, distributors, shareholders, opinion formers and authorities. Here is also the tool that many of the successful companies in the late nineties were incredibly good at handling, namely PR and lobbying. They are considered as important as often as dubious instruments to process a market.
The Halo effect
The halo effect is an interesting perspective when using profile carriers for your organization or company. The halo effect occurs when you look more at who is conveying a message than at the content.
You listen e.g., more on a professor who speaks in a subject, even if it is outside his normal area of knowledge. Getting a person with such a status to speak for the company's cause can be a good part of the mass media profiling.
Sponsoring
There are two types of sponsorship which are charity and marketing activity. Charity is based on when a company donates money to an association or an organization. It is a job that shows goodwill.
Ericsson has for a long time worked with goodwill in its sponsorship work. Ericsson contributes through the UN in a part of goodwill that is usually called Good Citizenship, which means that you seek goodwill by showing your community involvement. What Ericsson has long contributed to, we could see most recently as news from the terrible things that happened in the earthquake disaster in Southeast Asia. The media was already able to say on December 28 that Ericsson would donate money, send interpreters to a hospital in Bangkok and build up temporary communication networks. At a time when the Swedish Foreign Ministry did not act forcefully enough, several Swedish companies show their chin and take "responsibility" for our Swedish citizens.
Ericsson was of course not alone in showing the company's fine side through good citizenship. Several others such as KappAhl who donated winter clothes to the so-called "Returning" tourists who got rid of all their winter clothes in washed-out hotel rooms, Astra Zeneca and OM contributed in other ways and Tele 2 and Vodafone removed their call charges for calls from people who called from Southeast Asia to Sweden. These are actions that are all basically about profiling companies by showing what responsibility these companies feel for all prospective customers in each market, through hidden charitable actions.
As a marketing activity in sponsorship, when companies in different ways openly sponsor various sporting and cultural events and then show the public that they are generous sports and culture lovers.
Advertising
Ads are like alcohol, the more you have the less you remember. After only two or three drinks, your ability will deteriorate. After an exposure of only one or two competing ads, the memory of the first one will deteriorate.
The logo
The design of the logo must be consistent and harmonize with the company's or organization's overall profile / business concept. It must also be easy to recognize, readable and work in different sizes. Some logos should work for a short time, others should work for a very long time.
Some should only be used on business cards and on stationery, others should work in many contexts. This, of course, places different demands on the design and on how much time you must spend.
The company brand.
Many companies choose to supplement the logo with a company brand, which is often based on a simplified image. Sometimes called a figurative mark. The choice of color is an important part when it comes to design. With the help of it, you can further amplify the signal effect. The color must harmonize with the company's profile / identity / business concept as well as the font.
In long historical perspective, one can imagine the resemblance to the mark, or sign, that was carved into the wooden shaft of the stone ax. The mark became the trademark of the Stone Age man and everyone could see that the ax was his and no one else's or the 18th century nobles who had their own marks and the bar iron that was stamped with the mark of the mill.
Since childhood, we have learned to see, interpret, and remember different kinds of images and therefore an image tag linked to the logo can make the company even easier to recognize.
A well-known and established brand can be used separately, separately from the logo, for example on company clothing and in sponsorship contexts.
A company brand also bridges barriers such as language and culture and thus has a limitless area of use. However, it is important to probe properly at foreign establishments. The large Swedish construction company that has a beaver as a company brand. The American market reacted very negatively, which readers with good knowledge of American slang will surely understand.
Business brands can be divided into the following categories:
1. Ideogram
2. Pictogram
3. Symbol image
4. Letter mark
Ideogram
Ideogram is a brand that shows and should convey the very idea content of a company's business. The capital company Skandia's umbrella refers to the protection and security that pension insurance creates. How much does it rain through Skandia's umbrella after all the scandals?
Pictogram
Pictogram is a greatly simplified pictorial stylized by a concept, e.g. a sign for road work. The pictograms are not only common in corporate contexts but also important elements in, for example, the Olympics' design program.
Symbol image
Symbol image is an image that should symbolize the company's operations. The newspaper Expressen's wasp is a very cheeky symbol for a newspaper with investigative and revealing journalism. Their main competitor Aftonbladet's dog fights against the buyers only buying the paper from time to time.
Letter marks
Letter marks (monograms) work almost in the same way as a company mark, as they usually only consist of one or more letters, initials or other abbreviations and are often used in company profiling.
In summary, a company brand must be:
• Simple and graphically clear
• Distinctive
• Useful in all contexts regardless of material and surface
• Clear both in large and small size and in both color and black and white
Coloring
Something the graphic designer must be careful about is what colors are used in the coloring process. A special company color should be chosen for the company, which should be reflected in the company's overall graphic profile, from the logo on business cards to the colors on company cars.
When choosing a color, you must keep in mind that the print result will be the same regardless of the printing technique or number of colors used. We must also not forget that the Internet's color management has become a strong factor in how the colors should be set in the profile program, using Hex code in the color program is nowadays a common complement to RGB, PMS and HSB (Hue, Saturation, Blackness).
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