Identity Kits Part I – What You Need First

One of the most overlooked marketing tenants is consistency.  Both large and small companies alike are guilty of this cardinal sin of neglect.  Even for the smallest of businesses, having a business card, website, letterhead, email signatures, envelopes, and all promotional materials tied together is crucially important.  Think of it as business Garanimals. Only in this case, not only will you look snappy, but you will also create a synergy that will help customers remember you even in different context than they are used to seeing you in.

What your identity kit should look like. Mix and match any line from monkey, bear, or rhino, and you are good to go!

 

In this first part of the series we will discuss what you need before you even get started with your identity kit.  In the next article, we will discuss how these elements come into play in forming your identity kit, and what identity elements you need.

Business Name

Like a baby, most people have a name picked out before the moment your business is born.  Unlike a little one, you have the benefit of knowing what the personality will be long before it becomes a teenager – Kind of like a fat girl with a stripper name. 

(*Authors Note: Being rubenesque in stature myself, I am allowed to say this. Also, my writing coach told me controversy encourages readership, so blame him.) 

Naming a business is a tricky endeavor.  The best names tend to be memorable and communicate the purpose and personality of your business at a minimum.  

Primary Marketing – Offline

If you plan to make organized directories such as a phone book or business directory a big part of your marketing plan, (a plumber or electrician for example) you need to take into consideration that the first name listed in the yellow pages outpulls the number 2 spot by 60%.  If prime placement is your goal, and it should be, consider starting the name of your business with double “a” or a number depending on how your source orders.  (For example AAdvantage Plumbing, or A1 Electricians) 

Primary Marketing – Online:

If you plan to use the internet as your primary marketing medium, you need to take into account domain name availability.  If you can’t get the .com to your business name, then don’t even bother.  Surfers have already been trained to search for yourbusiness.com when looking for you. Now you must understand that by 2008, pretty much every domain imaginable is already taken. 

• www.thesecretofburritos.com is owned by Google!
• www.midgetswhoworkattarget.com is taken, I kid you not. 

If you are just getting started, you will most likely have to think of some derivative of your name.  For example, my company is called Evil Genius Interactive.  You can bet that evilgenius.com has been taken for a loooong time. So are it’s derivatives including evilgeniusmarketing.com, theevilgenius.com, and so on. That made my choice www.evilgeniusinteractive.com.  My angle is that I have 2 factors in my favor.  First, my company began as an interactive advergaming and development business, and is still in the web business, so the name is not a stretch. Second, I have a very memorable and iconic logo that lends itself to being stuck in a lot of places – You bet I use that to my advantage. 

As a side note, conventional wisdom used to be that you want a very short URL.  While that is still true, you probably won’t get one.  What is more important now is 2 things: 

1. That it is memorable.
2. That it is easily spelled. 

Clever spellings may be catchy (thanq.com or phizzle.com) but they do NOT translate into web traffic. Also, take into consideration how many people misspell words.  Where do I lose the most traffic? It’s not that I have a 21 letter URL, it’s that about 20% of people misspell the word genius. 

Again, don’t forget that .com matters more than anything. As proof, I own both evilgeniustv.com and evilgenius.tv, and the .com gets 50% more natural search hits. 

The pros and cons of branding your own name:

Seeing your own name all over the place is definitely an ego boosting event. After all, it is you who poured the blood, sweat, and tears into building the business. It also makes you much more relatable on a personal level to many of your customers.  In addition, if your name already is branded, whichever business you choose to move on to will reap the benefits of your audience and reputation. 

However, branding your own name has many potential pitfalls.  The most significant of which is that you BECOME the business. If you get hit by a truck or decide to step back and have others do all of the work, you have no other choice but to begin the marketing and branding process all over again. 

What’s more, because your personal reputation is tied to a product or business, that means that you will have a very difficult time growing your business because any work that is created by your crew will ultimately have an impact on your own personal reputation.  This tends to put you in a position where you have to personally oversee anything that goes out with your name on it.  It may not be a problem now, but by the time you reach 6 or 7 employees, you will become the company bottleneck and inevitable turf wars will ensue.  Trust me, I’ve seen it happen.

Legal Name:

Please keep in mind that you will probably want your legal business name to be the same as your corporate identity.  When you form your LLC (I would strongly recommend an LLC or LLP over any other legal entity) you will need to make sure that no other business in your state is using the same name.  Important Note* If you are setting up your business as a Delaware corporation, you will have a lot more competition for your name than most other states. (Deleware is the most popular state for business incorporation due to it’s favorable tax laws and softer regulations) 

If you have no options for your business LLC name, remember that you can set up a DBA (doing business as) very easily in most states, and few people will ever actually see your legal name other than on bills or tax forms. For example I have DBA’s set up for Evil Genius Interactive, Evil Genius Gaming, Evil Genius Marketing, Evil Genius Arcade, and Evil Genius TV, but all ultimately point to my LLC which nobody ever sees.  My legal business name could be Morten Fizzlesnot LLC, and it would make no difference.

 

Logo 

So what makes for a successful logo? Ideally, one that is easily recognizable, iconic, memorable, applicable to many different mediums, and communicates something about your company without saying anything more. 

Try several different designs and test, test, test. Bounce ideas off friends, customers, spouses, co-workers, peers, strangers, your favorite call girl – everyone.  Get lots of opinions and find out why they did or didn’t like something. 

I tend to prefer logos that have both an icon and stylized text.  This gives you a lot more freedom of use, but still has the advantage of maintaining consistency. 

Logos can be stylized text:   

An image or icon: 

 Or a combination of the two:   

 

Fonts

Fonts have a lot more to accomplish than just readability.  The right font and the right color can communicate professionalism, playfulness, aesthetics, or any of dozens of other planned responses.  

 When working in the online world, please remember that you have a set amount of fonts that are browser friendly.  That said, in most cases you will need to make your logo text a graphic versus straight html. The font I use for Evil Genius is Handel-Gothic.  Everyone with Photoshop will have it, but I will always have to include it as a graphic if I want it on the web somewhere.

 

Color Theme

Not only will your color choice set a tone for your business, but they will actually provoke a psychological response.  Research has shown that time and again, certain colors work better in different situations, and your choice of color in your marketing materials is no different. 

Also keep in mind the expansion of your business and/or diversity of your product offerings.  Under the right circumstances, differentiating your groups with different colors, but following the same theme can be a great way to tie together disparate divisions under the same flag.     

• White: sense of newness, awakened interest, and openness to new ideas
• Red: inspires action, decisiveness, and evokes desires
• Yellow: cheerfulness, hopefulness
• Orange: excitement, vibrancy, and warmth
• Blue: trust, calmness, stability, and peacefulness
• Green: elegance, balance, harmony, peacefulness, and freshness
• Black: somber, introspective, withdrawing, suspicion
• Brown: down-to-earth, casual, reliable, quiet
• Grey: non-committed, neutral
• Purple: subdued, mysterious, spiritual

Wrapping it up 

Once you have all of the requisite pieces in place, you can start branding your company and building your identity kit.  In the next article, we will take all these concepts and put them into place to build your marketing juggernaut. 

As an unfortunate side note, I will probably not be able to publish the next article on many sites other than my own.  This simple reason is that I will be using my own business identity kit in the majority of examples.  Although I am using them as expletive examples of how to build your identity kit, the fact that it will refer to my own businesses several times will no doubt be frowned upon, and as a result deemed “unacceptable.”