You’ve spent countless hours coming up with the perfect name for your business. It’s unique, brief, descriptive, and expandable. Beautiful. The next step is one that is often given a bit of a short stick… after all that brand naming wordplay, you now need to come up with a short, positive and catchy slogan for your business.

Many people are simply tired of words at this point. And that’s fine, but your tagline is important enough to warrant your full attention. So take a break, and come back to it when your mind is refreshed.

In today’s highly competitive environment, the strongest brands are the ones that transcend the products and services they represent, and form a solid connection with the consumer.

While new business owners invest substantial amounts of time and resources into product and concept development, package design, advertising, PR and distribution, the act of choosing a name for their brand is often treated as an afterthought. As a result, we end up with generic and damaging brand names like ‘x place’ or ‘y barn’… or names that are already shared with dozens of other companies.

The fields of branding and marketing have a credibility problem.

More often than not, consumers associate brand-speak with trickery, exaggeration, misdirection and outright deception. The sad thing is, I don’t blame them. A lot of brands are disingenuous. What those brand managers don’t realize is that tricking someone into buying once is far less profitable than earning customer loyalty and trust over the long term.

Investing in your Brand for the Long Haul

Branding is so much more than just looking good. You need to pick up where we leave off.

Design in business is much more than just catchy ads. You can use design to generate new ideas and turn them into innovative and competitive products and services, improve your business processes and strengthen and deepen your marketing approach.

If used systematically across your business, design can bring a range of measurable commercial benefits:

• Improved sales and conversion rates
• Improved market position
• Greater customer loyalty
• A stronger and more credible identity for your business
• The ability to open up new markets

When you’re not around to make a personal impression, your materials are doing it for you. So naturally, you want to be sure that your materials are making the right impression. In this article I’ll go over a few specific bits of advice to ensure that your corporate identity materials are projecting an image of competence and success.