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How to Design Your Brand

brand Apr 20, 2020

The silo approach to branding whereby creatives produce brand designs and names without any reference to Intellectual Property lawyers, while IP lawyers protect IP that they’ve had part in advising upon, does not give business the best outcome either from a branding perspective or from an IP one.

The separation between the worlds of branding and IP protection is a hangover from the 20th century and has no place in the fast-paced digital world we now live in, and into which we have been catapulted more completely by the Coronavirus.

A 21st century approach to branding needs to emulate the likes of Google who understand that achieving a strong brand requires an inter-disciplinary approach. They break down the silos in their organisations to enable powerful brand creation.

The small business end of the market is not even aware of the problem that the silo approach entails. The upshot is that founders of businesses undergoing branding get poor value for money.

 

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How to Create Your Brand

brand Nov 10, 2019

Every single business, charity or entity has a ‘brand’ in the sense that they all have an identity rather like you or I have an identity as people.  To work out the details so that what you say, how you operate and what you promise to reflect the way you want to be known as a business and brand takes time to think through. 

 

Values and beliefs 

It involves working out which values of the founder are to be paramount in establishing what the brand of the business or charity represents. What its personality is, and what it wants to stand for – it needs to be something that resonates with its customers or those they serve. 

Working out what you want to uniquely provide to the market, and your marketing messages to evoke a desired response in the minds of your customers through your brand promise is the first step involved to brand your business. Until your business can consistently deliver that, you will not have a brand

Wally Olins, a thought...

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Brand Identity

brand Sep 15, 2019

If you prefer to listen/watch a video instead of reading then click here to go to my Youtube channel.

Possibly one of the most enjoyable aspects of branding is to have your brand identity designed for you. It’s the activity people associate with branding rather than all the introspection involved in working out your brand strategy, values, mission, purpose and so on.

Once you begin to see a visual manifestation of the designer’s interpretation of your brand it’s pure joy.

However, it’s really important not to jump in too quickly to having designs produced for your brand. Certainly, I’ve made that mistake when I was a start up back in the mid-2000s of spending a large sum of money on what was effectively just pretty designs.  Little did I know it, but I was not yet ready to undergo a brand identity exercise. Consequently, for years my business had a visual identity that wasn’t quite right.  This was evident from the fact that I...

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Is a Brand Intellectual Property? Definition of Brand and Intellectual Property

People often ask the question, what is a brand, or what is intellectual property, and is a brand intellectual property. Before I answer that question let’s look at what the terms mean.

A good starting point to understanding what brand and branding mean is to note the word’s origins. It started as a term to describe the identifying mark that was burned on livestock with a branding iron. That was how people could tell who owned the cattle.

Although the concept of branding has its roots in this visual imagery it’s important to appreciate that branding has moved on considerably since those times. While the visual identity matters, of course, branding is nowadays about so much more than a logo, or visual designs.  The visual identity is the final stage of branding not the first.

 

The Design of Your Business is Key

Branding nowadays is much more about the way you design your business than the designs you get for your business to use. 

Even small...

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