Asset – A generic term describing any creative elements pertaining to the company’s official branding. See Creative Elements.
Brand – A company’s purpose, visualized;
Brand Harmonization – Ensuring that all products in a particular brand range have a consistent name, visual identity and, ideally, positioning across a number of geographic or product/service markets.
Brand Identity – The expression of a business and can be flexible and evolutionary, changing as the company grows. It’s the face of your business. It represents your company’s values, services, ideas and personality. It can generate loyalty from your clients and make your employees proud to work for you.
Brand Personality – A set of human characteristics that are attributed to a brand name. A brand personality is something to which the consumer can relate, and an effective brand will increase its brand equity by having a consistent set of traits.
Brand Value (Brand Equity) – The value premium that a company realizes from a product with a recognizable name as compared to its generic equivalent. Companies can create brand equity for their products by making them memorable, easily recognizable and superior in quality and reliability.
Collateral – the collection of media used to promote the brand and support the sales and marketing of a product or service. It’s the tangible evidence of the brand, designed congruent with the brands core values and personality.
Convention – In the context of a ‘design convention,’ a convention is a standardized and proper method or way of doing something.
Creative Elements – logos, slogans, colors, shapes, typefaces or fonts, characters, celebrities, jingles and/or music, sounds, advertising style, tastes, textures and scents or other items created to be used as official company items. Many creative elements have the potential to become distinctive assets. However merely using one of the elements described above as part of your brand identity does not necessarily mean it is an ‘asset’ for your brand. For an element to be an asset, it needs to meet two criteria: uniqueness and prevalence.
Distinctive Asset – Distinctive assets are non brand-name elements that are able to evoke the brand in the memory of consumers. Some of the most famous examples include the Nike ‘swoosh’, the Aflac duck and Mastercard’s priceless advertising. All of these elements are able to represent their brand name without needing any other prompting.
Intangibles – Incapable of being touched. Intangible assets include: trademarks, copyrights, patents, design rights, proprietary expertise, databases, etc. Intangible brand attributes include: brand names, logos, graphics, colors, shapes and smells.
Intellectual Property – Also referred to as IP, Intellectual Property covers any inventions, literary and artistic works, symbols, names, images, and designs used in commerce.
Logo – The mark that makes a company identifiable, much as names give people a place in the world.
Tangibles – Capable of being touched. Tangible assets may include: manufacturing plant, bricks and mortar, cash, investments, etc. Tangible brand attributes may include: the product and its packaging. Tangible brand values may include: useful qualities of the brand known to exist through experience and knowledge.
Visual Identity – What a brand looks like, including, among other things, its logo, typography, packaging and literature systems.