A corporate identity manual defines how your company’s brand, image and messaging is delivered to the public and particularly to your key audiences. But before we answer that burning question, let’s dig a little deeper.

Defining our terms
In their book, Brand Identity Essentials, authors Budelman, Kim and Wozniak define a Logo as, “a picture that represents the collection of experiences that form a perception in the mind of those who encounter an organization.” They describe an Identity as the logo plus the name, color, and music, as well as the applications where the logo appears.

Clive Chajet writing in Corporate Image makes these distinctions about Corporate Image and Corporate Identity. Corporate Image is what is perceived by its various audiences—how it appears to outsiders such as the financial community or potential consumers. Whereas, Corporate Identity is what the corporation chooses to use to shape those perceptions.

According to designer Wally Olins, author of Corporate Identity: Making Business Strategy Visible Through Design, your identity must be visible, tangible and all-embracing. Olins says you affirm the identity through: Products, Services, People, Buildings and Communications materials.

Identity=Brand
Laurence Ackerman, a former partner at the legendary design firm, Anspach Grossman Portugal, says that besides comprehensive design standards, companies manage their identity through:
1. Language (specific words and phrases for services)
2. Distinctive themes and messages (“taglines”)
3. Actions and policies (CSR: Corporate Social Responsibility)

As a company grows and more people are involved, the very essence of the brand is being expressed by multiple managers and communicators. How do we reign in all of this and maintain standards, as well as build upon a brand as the company and its story evolves and grows?

The Corporate Identity manual is the critical tool in positioning a company, no matter how big or small. The importance of consistent typography, color use, logo placement and such cannot be taken for granted. Good identity manuals help designers and communication managers establish a visual voice for the company that may include photography libraries and image standards as well as professional publication templates. These guidelines build a more powerful corporate identity that in turn influences the public and ultimately the company’s corporate image.

The real power of your ID Manual
When I was the manager of corporate communications at an insurance company, I inherited a new logo and an unyielding binder full of identity standards and recommendations. (This was back in the days when you had to print everything and a PDF was not possible.) The “work in progress” standards were too cumbersome and the page length made it prohibitive to print. So I sat down and sifted through the content and prioritized everything to see how I could get the final manual down to 16 pages.

Once the Corporate Identity manual was published, life as the internal “logo cop” and defender-of-the-brand became easier…but not in the way that I had expected. I thought everyone would now follow the carefully worded rules and exacting details that we had labored over in writing and designing the manual. What I found was that most people didn’t actually read the document, they just called me with their questions and asked me what the rules were. So the manual became my reference guide, it kept me on track, consistent and—more importantly—it became the law of the land within the company. Once I had the manual in place I could call the Vice President of Pensions and say with confidence that the logo could not be published with that drop shadow against a dark colored background because it says so on page 4. And why would he listen to me? Because, on the first page of the Corporate Identity manual, there was a signed letter from the President introducing and endorsing the branding standards. That was the most important page in the book.

Is this a sight for sore eyes? As reported in a recent New York Times column by David Brooks:
“People remember information that is hard to master. In a study for Cognition, Connor Diemand-Yauman, Daniel Oppenheimer and Erikka Vaughan found that information in hard-to-read fonts was better remembered than information transmitted in easier fonts.”
So let’s read the fine print. The study from Princeton University says, “information in hard-to-read fonts was better remembered than easier to read information in a controlled laboratory setting.” And furthermore, “in some cases making material harder to learn can improve long-term learning and retention (Bjork, 1994). More cognitive engagement leads to deeper processing, which facilitates encoding and subsequently better retrieval.”

Now they warn you that if you can’t read it, or it’s really too hard-to-read, then most people will not read it at all. But apparently, learning is taking place in the struggle. Essentially the use of hard-to-read fonts slows down readers, forcing them to spend more time deciphering the content — and that leads to better retention and comprehension.

My daughter, Rachael, was doing improv acting at our local Barnes & Noble where they were soliciting input from the audience. She was handed a message written in crayon that she found impossible to read. She spent more time and effort trying to determine what it said but eventually she gave up and just improvised a response and continued the performance. Later that evening when she was telling me about the performance it was the hard-to-read message that dominated her recollection of the evening.

BrandmakerNews Reports on 10 Top Tips For Entrepreneurs
BrandMakerNews recently asked business owners, including David Langton, to share critical tips that every entrepreneur should know.

Here’s David’s tip:
Tip #4: Choose your projects wisely. “As a small business you will be constantly defining yourself by the work you do…and by the work you decline to accept. You can’t do everything so you must develop a criteria for work: 1. Money-based; 2. Passion-based; 3. Leads to something bigger.” -David Langton, Langton Cherubino Group.
Click here to see the other 9 tips.