Today, I want to take a little bit of time to talk about the recent redesign of the Northbridge Consultants website and the importance of consistent branding.
A brand image is, in the most basic sense, everything that a person thinks about your company. So, if we were to take Tim Horton’s, for example, what’s the first thing that pops into your mind? For me, it’s fresh coffee. I also think of fast service, a (healthier) alternative to fast food, and (of course) hockey.
Brand identity is how you want a person to think about your brand. Brand image and brand identity are not always the same thing – usually the most challenging part of branding is making the brand identity and the brand image consistent.
So, now that we have a bit of background on branding, why did we redesign our website? The easiest answer is that we wanted to make it more consistent with the other marketing materials that we use, and to make the underlying messages across all marketing materials conform with each other. So the website had to reflect this too.
In order to do this, we made some changes to the design (the colour scheme, as well as streamlining the organization and appearance of the content being the biggest changes design-wise). But most of what we changed had to deal with the content itself – we’ve made it more readable. Each page was broken up into several smaller, more coherent pages. We’ve made the text less technical and easier to understand. And we’ve added content that we feel is important for those looking into SR&ED and other federal funding.
So, how would something along these lines help a company’s brand identity? In our case, we want people to think of us as an authority on SR&ED and federal funding. We want people to know that we are working with them to help them further their business. And we work towards putting those values in everything we do, whether it’s marketing materials, our seminars, or our face-to-face meetings with clients.
Because in the end, a company’s website is only one small piece of brand identity, and needs to work well with everything else your company puts out. As a whole, branding comes down to everything that is used to get in touch with your clients – newsletters and bulletins, customer service, the quality of your product and, of course, your service.