Corporate Identity, Brand and Branding: What does it mean?

Corporate identity and branding are often confused and get lumped together to mean the same thing. Clients even refer to it as ‘corporation’ identity. You could argue – who cares?

Well, I do. So I’m going to explain what the terms mean and how they ‘fit’ together.

Brand and branding

Branding gets used to describe a visual identity for a product or service. It often relates to a wider application, rather than just a logo and colour palette for instance. 

The actual term for this part of a brand is ‘corporate identity’. A corporate identity is the visual elements a company uses to identify itself.

The term ‘brand’ encompasses a much wider set of values and ‘elements’. A brand, depending on what sort of product, service or organisation, can include:

  • The visual language

  • The feelings, loyalties and responses from its audience

  • Its customer services

  • Its history

  • Its associations (for instance, a celebrity or the founder)

  • Its perceived value or positioning in the market.

And much more.

Let’s look at three diverse brands:  

  • Marmite

  • Facebook

  • The Sun (newspaper)

When you read the names above, instantly, your mind pictures the brand. You might visualise the logo, the jar (in Marmite’s case), the owner (Facebook) or the front page (The Sun). What comes with that is the brand’s ‘baggage’; good or bad. 

Brand managers work hard to reduce the bad brand connotations and promote the good. They do this in a number of ways, through press, through customer communications – even advertising.

Marmite has an amazing brand that starts with the iconic jar shape and ‘ribbon’ logo. The cleverest marketing and brand management move ever was to celebrate the fact that some people love it, but some people hate it. So successful is this bit of branding that people use the term Marmite to describe any situation where someone might love it or hate it. I’m described by some as a ‘Marmite person’!

The brand values are so ingrained in the product, they are inseparable. And while the design does play a part, it is only a small part of the product’s overall brand.

Facebook, the global platform, free to use, enables people to share their own stories and content. Happy days, except the brand, is mixed up with people’s perception of Mark Zuckerberg, data infringements and shady practices. These all damage the brand’s perception. There is very little design or identity in Facebook’s brand, they have a logo and a colour palette, but there is no visual scheme to speak of.

The Sun newspaper is one of Britain’s best-selling newspapers. Its brand is a bit cheeky and celebrates British (perhaps leaning towards English) culture in a lighthearted way. The design of the newspaper is deliberately unrefined and has a ‘cut and paste’ feel about it.

Combined with the reporting style, the red top banner and the headline puns, it defines its brand.

The Guardian, whilst still a newspaper, has a very different brand altogether.

So, brand, branding, corporate identity and visual identity all mean different things. But people will still just call in branding.

If you want a deeper understanding of branding and corporate identity, Drew de Soto’s book, Know Your Onions: Corporate Identity is a good start: https://tinyurl.com/3vhnyfmt



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