Branding for Online Media
Having your branding recognised is undoubtedly one of the most sought after aspects of growing a business. For people to recognise you is extremely beneficial when they come to make a purchasing decision, suddenly they think “I need that service, who provides it?”
If you’ve managed to expose them to your brand beforehand or on more than one occasion then you have a good shout for being in their minds when they are looking to go with the provider of that service (or product).
It’s not something new that a company will look into their branding and ensure that it is representitive of themselves and their demographic (the specific group(s) of people they are looking to sell to). A logo and corporate identity will be established and settled upon (usually after great deliberation) and then this will be used in all company correspondence and, importantly, in the media. So they essentially have to be concerned about their branding in the media. It has to get across the message to those sought after purchasers and must be done right.
A question I’d like to raise is; does this concern have to be altered or reconsidered in anyway when creating branding for online media?
It might be easy enough to suggest that you simply copy what you have onto the web and then you are retaining ‘brand standard’. I would actually tend to agree with this ethos, for the most part. Underlying issues can complicate things, however. For example, is your online target market the same as you are going for offline? I bet in more cases than not, that the demographic becomes slightly altered online compared to offline. Then there is also the issue of whether or not your offline branding is easily transferable to online branding. Your old logo might be far too complex in terms of colour which makes the visibility less effective on screen, worst case scenario is that your offline branding immediately becomes inaccessible when put online.
Online media works pretty differently also, so should your branding reflect this? How much, these days, do we see new brands being created to make the online growth easier/more possible?
This is surely quite a wide topic and I would welcome comments to the discussion. It would be my opinion that, in business, you should consider your offline media branding as a separate issue to your online media branding!
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