Linden

You've invested in a professional "look and feel" to brand your company, set yourself apart from your competitors and convince potential customers that you deserve their business. If you're hesitating taking the financial step because of the ongoing commitment, you've already taken an important step to prepare!

Like caring for yourself, a child or a pet, maintaining a brand requires a commitment and attention to its basic needs. With the right care and feeding, your marketing will stay vibrant and productive for years.

Start by getting everyone on board - your department, your company, your marketing and communications partners, the newspaper, the sign company. Everyone. For a healthy brand, you all have to agree to know what the rules are and keep them. Limiting the number of people who touch your materials is a good idea, and assembling a manual of graphic standards - the Do's and Don'ts - will help keep decisions objective.

You'll need to make an honest assessment about how hands-on you, your department or your company can be with the graphic look of your brand. Regardless of whether you look in-house or to a marketing vendor, the ideal partner will:

• Be able to recognize visual elements that undermine the brand
• Feel empowered to say no
• Give creative direction that is on-brand
• Make decisions about image and strategy that are based on what's best for the brand, rather than what they like or dislike personally
• Know when it is more efficient to "DIY" than use a vendor
• Have a basic understanding of the limitations and advantages of media where the brand will appear
• Have at least a basic understanding of graphic design vocabulary, file types and software (and not be offended by references to "your PMS color")
• Resist the urge to concept-hop (remember, it takes a while for the public's awareness to catch up.)

Five basic brand needs

You and your marketing partner will also have to cater to your brand's five basic needs. Upholding these will foster a brand that thrives:

1. Graphics - Design elements such as your logo, watermark, use of rules, gradients and shadows, illustrative elements and icons are included in the very broad heading of "graphics." Recognizing what elements not to add to your design is just as important as knowing when and how to use the allowed library of graphics.
2. Color - More pervasive than any other element, color can deliver instant brand recognition. In a world of hundreds of oranges, The Home Depot knows which orange is its orange, uses it everywhere and will never substitute another color. Your marketing partners should be in agreement about how much color variation is acceptable and what alternative colors are allowed within your brand's palette.
3. Photography - Make sure all thousand words are saying the same thing. If you use photography of your staff, your location, your product - even stock images - be aware that subtle differences among photos can confuse your customers. Are people shown in headshots, torso shots or full body shots? Are they posed or gesturing? Making eye contact with the camera? How is the scene lit? What about background and depth of focus? Can you replicate a certain style, if you need a similar image later?
4. Type - In addition to font choice (printing your body copy in Helvetica versus Franklin Gothic, for example), typography refers to all the devices designers will use to enhance page appeal and readability, including stretching or shrinking the type's proportions (scale), altering the space between letters (kerning), altering the space between lines (leading), determining the relationships between headlines and paragraphs, and striking harmony among type faces. All these elements allow you to identify (and judge the contents of) The New York Times or The National Enquirer without ever having to read the header.
5. Voice - Whether or not your customer sees the words behind your brand, copy influences the way they think about you. From the most basic decisions, such as using the third person versus saying "we," chillin' with slang, inventicating imaginous vocab, LOLing n txtspk, or preserving pristine punctuation, you have to know your audience and commit. Your voice must work with your message. "Bud." "Wise." "Er." Gets a lot of laughs from beer-drinking football fans; "Bee." "Em." "Double-you." Not going to sell many expensive cars.

Image is only part of the branding package. A marketing partner can help you look and sound your best, but the integrity of your marketing also has to pervade every customer experience and interaction with your product, service and personnel.

Caring for your brand inside and out consistently will foster the healthy company image and ongoing relationships that breed success.

Doug Hay is business development manager for Linden in Fort Collins.