Managing the Credible Brand Image
Press Release - February 9, 2004

How do you stack up as a successful company manager by today’s standards and requirements?

In short, do you manage for success? Are you achieving? It is all about your marketing mindset. In particular, your mindset toward managing your company’s marketing communication should be to establish a credible brand image.

This is not managing any brand image. This is about managing a credible brand image so your customers will better accept your messages to move them to achieve your company goals – sales for example.

This is what you need to ask yourself in today’s competitive marketplace where product and services differences are made by you.

Do you have a clear-cut understanding about the persuasion value of your Credibility Based Logo?

You do if you understand that the only value of a logo communicating with credibility. It says you are an “expert” in what you do by symbolizing the company business. Historically, Joe the key maker used a key symbol in his shop sign. This says Joe is an “expert” at key making. Same thing with all logos. Except now, AT&T, the communication company, must symbolize “communication” and look “trustworthy” or “believable” by looking high tech. This is easily done with a contemporary style in the logo design.

Logos are credible if they symbolize what the company does. This is its “expertise” in a design form. It also looks “trustworthy”. These are the two major prongs of being credible. We call this Credibility Based Logo Design™. It has proven over and over to achieve company goals. Just like credible people move us as sports announcers or news anchors.

Do you create demand for your products/services with a credible brand image, or do you cost-cut?

Surprise! You can be doing both. That is what Credibility Based Logo Design™ is all about. Logos are the cornerstone for your branding efforts. Logos create the brand image in application. Credible logos create demand by supporting what the company says. Adopt a credible logo then apply it throughout all customer touch points such as your letterhead, envelope, business card, vehicle identification, signage, advertising – everywhere. This is a powerful marketing communication system. It works with management attention to consistency and coordination with attention to logo placement on these elements. Managers create demand and cost-cut.

Do you nurture employees to build company substance?

Company have to be what they say they are in marketing communication. Particularly in a Credibility Based Logo Design™. Companies have to live up to the promise. This is nurturing employees to make the company function as it is suppose to function.

Managers find that a company brand image works two ways. It sets the management outward expectation. And it sets the outward expectation management wants from employee work habits. Notice how this works in a fine restaurant. The wait-help get “caught up” in the total mood of this high end dining experience. Or walk into a Tiffany then a K-Mart.

The employees in each level of store give a different customer experience. In fact, the brand image as expressed in marketing communication such as advertising, logos and direct mail is high end/low end too. Not wrong. Just different positioning requiring a different credibility based brand image – from employees to marketing communication.

Managing the company credibility based brand image and employees to fulfill the brand expectation are essential to bringing strategic vision and direction to the workplace. This is in pulling the entire organization, internal and external, together to influence customers based on the philosophy that the company must be judged as credible in order to succeed.

This is not difficult to do, just a determined attitude. Just follow the example of the great ones such as Frank Stanton of CBS; Thomas Watson, Jr. of IBM; Hans and Florence Knoll of Knoll Furniture; Walter Paepeke of Container Corporation of America; D. C. Burnham of Westinghouse; Steven Jobs of Apple; and Peter McColough of Xerox.

They all understood the value a powerful and credible brand image based on an equally powerful Credibility Based Logo Design consistently projected in all touch points. The success of their respective companies under their tenures backs up this highly important attitude toward managing their marketing communications and employees.

© William L. Haig, Ph.D. or Bill Haig, Ph.D. 2006

This is an original work of the author. All rights reserved. Copyright registration will be applied for. No part of this article may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic, mechanical photocopying, and recording or otherwise, without prior written permission of the author.