HAVE you ever wondered why everyone seems to have heard the name of your competitor’s company but not yours? Or why your rivals are always the ones being asked to speak at industry conventions rather than you? Their secret is having a strong corporate identity. The good news is that, provided you follow a few straightforward rules, you can have one too.

Dan Vivian is joint managing director of Design Group, whose clients include Royal Mail, Direct Line and Sony. He said the first step is to decide what kind of identity you want your company to have.

“You need to decide what is the core proposition of the company — what you do and what you sell,” he said. “If you don’t know what the company stands for it is difficult to create an identity. You can come up with the funkiest identity but if you have no vision or proposition for the company, it will fall apart.”

He said that if you don’t know what your company stands for, the best way of finding out is to hold a brainstorming session with your key staff and ask them. “Sit down with a team made up of representatives of all the key departments and brainstorm ideas.”

The aim is to come up with an image and a message that will lodge in people’s minds. Vivian said: “The identity should be as consistent as possible, because if you are talking with a single voice, the message will be magnified, whereas if you have lots of little voices talking, it gets confusing.”

He points out that the key to creating a strong corporate identity is to get everyone in the company backing it.

“Having a strong corporate identity is a flag for everyone in the company to march behind. The most important thing is to get everybody in the company motivated by it. If you focus too much on the end-users and fail to communicate it appropriately to your staff, then that can raise fear and uncertainty among them. When the Post Office became Consigna, for example, the poor old postman thought it had been bought by a German company. If employees are confused, there is no way they are going to be motivated by being a member of your company.”

Creating a strong corporate identity is about creating an all-encompassing identity for your company that reflects every aspect of what it does, from the first point of contact with the customer to how employees feel about the organisation.

Graham Hales, strategic director at Interbrand, a branding consultancy, said: “When we talk about identity we are talking about anything that is going to identify your business. This can range from a logo to a visual system, but above all it should encompass the way you go about doing your business. A corporate identity acts as a signal for the type of business that you are. It should be an idea that pulls together why you do what you do, what it is you are actually going to do and how you are going to do it.”

Laura Haynes, director of Appetite, a brand and identity consultancy, also says that before trying to create a strong corporate identity for your business, you need to be clear about why you are doing it.

She said: “The first and most important step is to identify your reasons for change and the development of your corporate identity. Those reasons could be anything from entering a new market, the emergence of new competition, mergers and acquisitions, the need for reinvention because of big problems, the need to find new relevance in a market full of change, or to play more appropriately in the area you are working in.”

It is important for chief executives to recognise that creating a corporate identity is not just a job for the marketing department — it is vital to get the support of the whole board if is to be a success. “Corporate identity is aligned to business strategy and lies at the heart of the organisation,” said Haynes. “For it to work and have lasting value it has to reflect the ongoing and developing business strategy of the company. If the processes are out of line, the corporate identity will fall flat on its face.”

Haynes says that once the board has drawn up a sound strategy for introducing a strong corporate identity, it’s vital to get the support of all employees from the top to the bottom of the organisation.

“You have two key audiences you have to satisfy: internal and external. Often organisations will think only of their external audience and not of their internal audiences,” she said.

“A corporate identity is not simply the creation of a logo and some communications material. It is an identity. This does not mean it has to cost millions and millions of pounds and take years to produce, but it is important that it identifies and confirms core values in the organisation.”

And once the corporate identity is in place, you need to maintain it to ensure that it stays relevant to the company. Haynes said: “This is an ongoing process and it needs to be continually cared for and checked to ensure that it is working properly.”

Richard Hasseck, director of Portman Business Consultancy, said the secret of finding the right identity for your business is to look ahead at what you want it to become.

He said: “Start with the end in mind. Take yourself five years into the future and think about what you want your business to look like and what you want it to be regarded for.

“The trick is to get that running through the whole organisation and get everyone in your organisation behind you. You want to have everyone pulling in the same direction.”

Creating the right image

When you have chosen a new identity, make sure it is continually monitored to ensure it remains relevant