Corporate Identity: Why Jewellery Industry needs it?

Corporate identity is an extension of a logo that serves as a wider visual identity for your company. For instance, use of company colours or a particular design to represent company or its philosophy is corporate identity. Creating a corporate identity involves setting up identity guidelines to deliver visual consistency in your company. This consistency creates a professional image and most importantly, it increases the recall value of your brand. Corporate identity guidelines lay out the visual devices to be used across marketing platforms and other communications, which include:

• Marketing collaterals – business cards, envelopes, letterheads, notepads, t-shirts, mugs, staff uniforms, interior and exterior design of the office, etc..

• Promotional materials – flyers, brochures, catalogues, posters, sign age and banners, product packaging, and much more.

• Digital media – website and social media.

Jewellers in India are highly  un organized and lack corporate ethics. Such businesses cannot sustain in export markets, regardless of product Excellency. Visual identities should become the emblem of jewellery businesses through communication that is simple, powerful and easily reproduced, and recalled by consumers and general audience.

As a Creative Advertising Agency for jewellers in India, we believe that the important and advantageous functional roles of corporate identity are:

Building Goodwill for Jewellers: Corporate Identity is a sign of longevity that is not only attractive to customers, but also is desirable to potential investors. It’s an indicator that the company is serious about being successful and that it is reliable in the industry. It is important for the jewellers or any business to build goodwill in the market by standardising corporate communication tools.

Aiding Jewellers in Brand Recall: Strong corporate branding is essential because it subconsciously shapes consumers’ feelings about an organization and its services or products. The feelings of the consumers about an organization’s service or product are subconsciously reinforced, from the moment they interact with the corporate identity of a company. Often, these feelings last a consumer’s life-time. In creating a consistent identity, a company must ensure that they are recognized and remembered.

Providing Jewellers a competitive Edge: A uniform and strong corporate identity makes the brand instantly recognizable amongst its target audience. It also improves customer awareness and increases a company's competitive edge.

Reinforcing the identity: Maintaining consistency in your corporate identity is essential because it reinforces the brand identity every time the customer encounters brand’s products or services. So, it is important to consider all the touch points such as social networking platforms, newsletters, email marketing, sales brochures and the like for corporate identity.

To summarize, every jeweller who wants to be successful and known should seek for building corporate ethics. Corporate Identity Design creates a single and clear visual identity for an organization, its divisions, brands, products and services. Overall, it leverages the brand equity and standardizes an organization’s visual presentation consistently across media applications.

Logo Design mistakes to be avoided

It is not easy to design logos. Even the most respected designers in the industry encounter challenges when it comes to creating highly professional and effective logos for their clients. All logo designers know and value the importance of a professional logo to any business, large or small.

Jewellers often tend to overuse elements while deciding upon a logo. Though it represents the company, it tells their story and symbolizes their brand to the world. They often fall victim to mistakes done by a logo designer. A jeweller, like any other businesses, should focus more on corporate essence whilst designing the logo. This is because a good logo elevates the brand assets. Few of the mistakes that can be avoided in a jewellery brand’s logo are listed below:

Hollow Taglines:  We have observed that every jeweller has a fetish to use a tagline. It may seem like a good idea to add a creative content. However, it could prove to be less helpful if the tagline doesn’t relate to what you do or act as sub-title or if it’s too long. The focus should be more symbolic with minimal message. The tagline need not be a component of the logo. However, it can be used more effectively along with the logo as a brand marketing tool.

Typographic confusion: Typography is one of the most important components in logo design. We still see designers stumble upon this error, either by choosing inappropriate fonts or imbalance in font weights and spacing between them, and much more. Almost every page that you read on-line on logo design mistakes to be avoided, typographic issues is one of the core concerns upon which the authors and acclaimed graphic designers have raised their voice. I pick two important ones which can deteriorate the value of a jewellery brand’s logo.   

 Typefaces : From a jeweller’s point of view, they should avoid logos which contains too many varied fonts. Three, four or even more fonts in the same design are over-complicating and simply create confusion. Different fonts can take away attention from the logo and has a lesser retention value.

               Extremities of Weights : Fonts can be thin, fat, italicized, bold, super fat, etc. There is a certain fundamental which has been observed, that is, excessively thin fonts can look glamorous. Super fat fonts can be playful and bold. However, for the majority of logos, a better balance needs to be struck between message and legibility; which is what a jewellery brand needs - Look Glamorous and Corporate.

Complexity: We need to decide whether you want a logo or a graphic image. Clip arts, images, several colour combinations clutter the logo. They can be used creatively in advertisements. Further using effects such as gradient, shadowing and embossing can look pretty on the page, but they are difficult to reproduce on different materials (corporate identities). Complex logos can also come off to customers as confusing and too complex for them to decipher.

Lacking Adaptability and Scalability: Keep in mind that your logo will need to be transferable across a range of different mediums. Make sure that the colours, size and overall design work on printed materials such as corporate identities, packaging, advertisements and clothing. It must also work across various touch points technology such as websites and mobile sites. Don’t create a logo that relies solely on stylization or fancy effects to get the message across – it must work in the simplest of forms. 

How to create an effective Brand Design Structure - Corporate Identity

“Why fit in, when you can stand out?” In a fast paced competition where consumer has innumerable options available to them, a company needs a strategy to establish a solid presence in the market place. Corporate Identity helps you to achieve this business Objective. It differentiates your product and services from others. It expresses your business’ brand personality and sets you apart from your competitors.

A business makes itself distinct through the image that it presents to the world, which are marketing collaterals like business cards, letter heads, brochures and other options. One such work of Audelade that you can see includes a complete identity built not only with business cards, but also extending it to packages, dairies, warranty books and many more. The identity is built to bring in uniformity in everything associated with the company or brand. This is because the uniformity in communication designs generates greater recall value and wins consumer loyalty. These are two strong reasons why businesses need to emphasize on brand design structure, which constitutes of Corporate Identity.

One of the best ways to practically understand the power of corporate identity is to place your brand as a most important contender in the market. Completely designed marketing collateral is going to assist you to present your trade name as a most important player inside the market place. Even in the event of you being novel to the trade, by means of generating a strong visual image you’ll be able to convey that you happen to be dedicated to quality and excellence.  This simply means that the strong visual image determines your progress in the market. So, creating a great corporate identity of your brand is the most essential thing to survive for a long time in the mind of your target audience. One good example of it is India Bullion and Jewellers Association (IBJA) that has recently held its second bullion awards ceremony, which is only of its kind in India. It went on to build complete identity from event logo to stationary, event invitations to badges and other marketing communication designs for the ceremony that provided impetus in marketing and making the event known amongst other industries too.

The consistency in design with attention grabbing logos, impressive-innovative business cards, elegant letter heads & envelopes, inviting brochures makes a lasting impression. As you know, “First impression is the last impression.” So, invest in your corporate identity to develop trust, a sense of values and ethos, and a lasting connection with your customer.

Click here to find out some examples of Corporate Identity