The most important elements of a brand should be:

Brand Position

• Who is addressed by company’s branded products or services. What the company does and for whom
• The company’s unique value and how customers benefit from products and/or services
• Key competitive differentiators, what makes the brand be chosen, be different from its competitors

Brand Promise

• The ONE most important thing that the brand promises to deliver to its customers — Every time!
• What customers and partners should expect from every interaction, how should they feel as brand’s customers

Brand Personality

• What the brand is to be known for
• Personality traits that customers, partners, and employees use to describe the company. What comes to the (potential) customer’s mind when addressed about the brand

Brand Story

• The company’s history and how the history adds value and credibility to the brand
• A summary of products/services/solutions

Brand Associations

• Physical artifacts: name, logo, colors, taglines, fonts, imagery
• Ideally, it must reflect the all the above statements about the brand and the company

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Here is an interesting list, Michele Schermerhorn President of Online Business Institute Inc. has put together:

1. Know Your Customers Better Than You Know Yourself
2. Understand Your Competitive Environment & Competitors
3. Define Your Brand Personality
4. Make A Brand Promise
5. Define Your Brand Strategy
6. Identify Your Branding Game Plan
7. Be Consistent in Action

Now, the second point is not the most commonly use when setting-up such branding rules lists, but I find it very true and usefull:

Your competitive environment has a major impact on how you brand your products or your company. For instance, retail is a highly competitive environment. There are companies that deal in the high end of the market and those who don’t. WalMart has chosen to compete in the low price arena of retailing. They work hard to build a brand of “low price, friendly company”. They obviously do it well. All one has to do is look at their financials to draw that conclusion.

You need to understand your competitive environment as well as WalMart understands theirs. But how can you do that effectively, without WalMart’s budget?

Start by asking your existing customers, “If you weren’t working with us, with whom would you be working?” Identify the companies to whom you most often lose business. Learn as much as you can about these competitors, including how customers perceive them, what makes them unique, and why they win the business they do.

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Here is a checklist of 23 brand health criterias as presented in Peter Cheverton’s excellent book Understanding Brands (Creating Success):

1. is based on a proposition of genuine substance and value to the target customer
2. communicates a clear and powerful brand definition
3. communicates a clear ‘emotional charge’
4. communicates an attractive and relevant personality
5. wins, builds and retains customer loyalty
6. is well known by the target customer
7. is held in high esteem by the target customer
8. communicates and evidences a unique match between the company’s capabilities and the customer’s needs
9. is a source of competitive advantage
10. is an investment of increasing value that others will want to own
11. maintains its relevance over time by evolving in response to changing customer expectations and perceptions
12. increases the profitability of the business is consistent with the business strategy
13. makes sense within the business’s brand architecture
14. provides a protective ‘halo’ for growth strategies
15. provides a barrier to entry for new entrants or substitutes
16. is uniquely positioned in the market and creates a relevant space in the customer’s mind
17. communicates and demonstrates a clear sense of value
18. interacts consistently with the customer on as many fronts and on as many occasions as possible
19. cements the brand definition into the customer’s mind through interactions and positive associations
20. is managed and supported consistently over time
21. has values that can be applied consistently and successfully to all parts of the marketing
22. mix and through all promotional media
23. makes people want to get their hands on it

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Identity can be defined on two levels.

On a definite level, it aims to increase the chance of recognition, uniqueness in comparison with others but still be continuos enough to be recognised. On the second level, the abstract, identity expresses the symbolic description of an organisation’s character, goal and origin.

On the other side product identity can be approached from the following three kinds of information:

1. Information about existence as a material object; the object expresses “here is a thing”.
2. Information about origin; its designer, manufacturer, country and culture.
3. Information about quality; function, use and maintenance.

According to the theory, the better the product informs, the stronger its identity.

Finnaly corporate identity is a complex combination a company’s artefacts and those incidents that ideally have their origin in the company’s business idea, strategic concept and what makes the company unique; its character. Corporate identity both profiles and visualises the company’s business idea and strategic concept. There is also an increase of sense of belonging to the organisation, and an emphasis of its origin and character. This makes the corporate identity valuable both as an external competitive power and internal instrument for building strategies. A clear corporate identity creates a feeling of “us” that makes the employees identify themselves with the company.

Identity is often perceived as a name or a brand regarding market communicative perspectives. In an organisational perspective, identity is defined as notion of analysis which describes how the organisation looks at itself and its relation to its surroundings. Profile is not equivalent to identity. It refers to what is unique in the corporate identity. The impression of a company’s conscious behaviour, in addition to its unconscious or uncontrolled activities, creates an image of the company. Image is a picture of the company which is conceived by the market.

There are six steps to improve/establish your corporate identity:

1. Get a view over the market, its size and perfectibility, what the rivals do and where they are headed.
2. Find out where you are by how things work both internally and externally in your organisation.
3. Work on the differences between you and your competitors, and benefit from the positive differences. In this way you initiate a strategy for your company.
4. Define the goal and the way to reach it. It is a question of how to manage what is the basis for the company in the best possible way.
5. Tell your co-workers what you are up to developing and make the new identity as visible as possible.
6. Evaluate your new identity and be assured that it corresponds to the goals you set for positioning and personality.

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• Communication medium that conveys image. To take advantage of the inherent strengths of the Web — potentially endless depth and two-way communication — sites must provide content and function that support Brand Image. For example, to back up Apple’s claim to “lead the industry in innovation,” its site must describe the innovative aspects of Apple products and provide standout function like a best-in-class configurator. To reinforce multichannel marketing campaigns, sites also need elements like language, imagery, typography, and layout to be consistent with both the intent of the positioning and the style of ads in other media.

• Delivery channel that enables action. Sites don’t just appear before customers the way television ads do. If a customer sees a home page, it’s because she typed a URL or clicked a link — and that means she arrived with goals like finding specific information, making a purchase or getting service. To avoid frustrating and annoying her — a bad way to build brand — sites must supply the content and function she needs to achieve her goals. For example, customers looking for a low-cost American Express card need content that includes annual fees and APR plus function that lets them apply online. Sites also need navigation that makes it easy to find the content, and they need presentation that makes it easy to consume the content.

The Web’s dual role as an image and action-oriented medium challenges the best of firms. To fulfill the online potential of their brands, Web decision-makers should:

• Build usable sites that won’t frustrate and annoy customers. To design sites that deliver great Brand Action, follow the principles of Scenario Design: Know your users, know their goals, and then use that knowledge to help build streamlined paths from the home page to the goal.
• Create a “brand persona.” User personas — which represent a customer segment as a single human with a name, face, attitudes, and goals — make it easy for companies to focus on the most important needs of their most important customers. To help Web teams focus on the top aspects of their brand positioning, teams should create a parallel document summarizing the key image attributes they need to communicate online. This brand persona shouldn’t try to copy the user persona format by turning the brand into a faux human. Instead, it should borrow relevant elements like a narrative description of the firm’s mission, vision, and values to set context, a logo in lieu of a face, the tagline from the current campaign instead of a user quote, and bulleted lists of the most important benefits, personality characteristics, and desired behaviors.
• Make Brand Image permeate the site. Companies should check every page of their sites during creative reviews — and on an ongoing basis — to ensure that brand positioning attributes are there and that, more importantly, no elements that contradict the positioning are there.
• Conduct full Brand Image reviews on a quarterly basis. Evaluating site Brand Image is a straightforward job. Start with a relevant user goal to direct reviewers to the parts of the site they’ll check and a brand persona to remind them what they’re checking for. Then have reviewers attempt to complete the user goal while checking how well each page supports the positioning summarized by the brand persona. Borrow the Brand Image evaluation criteria from this report, then check your closest competitors against brand personas you derive for them by reading how they describe themselves on their site, in their press releases, and in their annual reports.

See full Forrester Research Study(registration required)

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