The Blog

How to Keep Your WordPress Website Safe

How to Keep Your WordPress Website Safe

October is Cyber Security Awareness Month and what better way to acknowledge it than by brushing up on your WordPress security best practices?! After all, you’ve put a lot of time, energy, and money into your website over the years. Don’t you think it’s worth protecting? Here are five best practices for keeping your WordPress website safe from hackers.

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Six Easy Steps For a Website Refresh

Six Easy Steps For a Website Refresh

In the ever-changing business landscape, a brand refresh can be a powerful tool for staying relevant and connecting with your audience. By embracing change, fine tuning your unique brand essence, engaging stakeholders, crafting a compelling story, and updating your visual identity, you can reestablish meaningful connections with your most important stakeholders.

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Savoring Simplicity

Savoring Simplicity

In the ever-changing business landscape, a brand refresh can be a powerful tool for staying relevant and connecting with your audience. By embracing change, fine tuning your unique brand essence, engaging stakeholders, crafting a compelling story, and updating your visual identity, you can reestablish meaningful connections with your most important stakeholders.

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Embracing Change: The Power of a Brand Refresh

Embracing Change: The Power of a Brand Refresh

In the ever-changing business landscape, a brand refresh can be a powerful tool for staying relevant and connecting with your audience. By embracing change, fine tuning your unique brand essence, engaging stakeholders, crafting a compelling story, and updating your visual identity, you can reestablish meaningful connections with your most important stakeholders.

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Time For A Brand Refresh?

Time For A Brand Refresh?

A brand refresh is one of the easiest and most effective ways to add new life to your brand – as well as new relevance in the eyes of your clients, customers, and prospects.

What exactly is a brand refresh?

In simplest terms, think of a brand refresh as a makeover, update, or renovation of your organization’s image, while maintaining its core identity and positioning strategy. It is not a complete overhaul of your company (even though that can be a tempting option), but more like a reimagining to break free from outdated perceptions or old ways of communicating with your audiences.

While it usually centers on an updated visual identity, a brand refresh can also affect company culture, processes, and offerings, and go a long way toward breathing new life into employee morale and performance. A refresh can’t solve deep-seated issues like core values misalignment, broken processes,  or major shifts in an organization’s positioning — that would be a much more extensive rebranding – but it can:

  • Preserve and reinforce your brand’s existing integrity
  • Infuse new energy into the business
  • Ensure your company image keeps current in a changing marketplace
  • Improve customer retention
  • Create buzz and expand your reach
  • Attract top talent

If it’s been a decade (or more) since you’ve refreshed your brand, it’s time to take a look. Is your brand image and messaging standing out within your industry? Does it work in your marketing presentations and on LinkedIn? Social media has changed the way we communicate and opened up so many opportunities for businesses to reach very targeted audiences. Does your brand make the kind of visual impact you want it to?

While still a really important organizational decision, a brand refresh requires less risk than a complete brand overhaul and can provide some very positive outcomes. You might argue that you already have a strong logo that works well, and besides, your clients and prospects know it. But how well is it really serving you? Have you become outdated? Often a refresh can be the thing that gets clients and prospects interested again. It can provide an opportunity to retell your story, share exciting changes, and reconnect with longtime customers (and their newer employees and partners).

How do you know when it’s the right time to refresh your brand? 

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Branding, Differentiation, Corporate Identity, and Positioning Defined

Branding, Differentiation, Corporate Identity, and Positioning Defined

Last updated April 17, 2023.

Corporate Identity. Differentiation. Branding. Positioning. Even among the business savvy, it’s not at all uncommon for these marketing terms to be used almost interchangeably. In fact, they are quite different and play very different roles in business development and marketing. We thought it was time to revisit the terms and clarify the differences, so you can be better-informed about marketing, design, and branding services.

First, What is a Brand?

A brand is the idea behind a company’s identity, the impression people have of you. A brand is what you stand for, believe in, behave like, and how you are perceived by those that conduct business with you or otherwise experience interaction with you. It’s the collective sum of who you are as an organization and how you communicate your value and culture in a variety of ways.

A brand takes time to build because it’s defined by what others think about you, and such impressions (be they positive or negative) take time to form and build.

“A brand is a person’s gut feeling about a product, service, or organization. A brand is a person’s gut feeling, because brands are defined by individuals – not companies or markets. A brand is a gut feeling because people are emotional, intuitive beings. A brand is not what you say it is, it’s what they say it is.” — Marty Neumeier, author

Corporate Identity

Corporate identity is how a company or organization presents itself to the public. It’s the intentional image and aesthetic that is created to help form its public image. Think logo – an image that is both a recognizable mark, symbol, or icon plus a specific type treatment – and colors, tagline, or definition statement of an organization. A corporate identity includes the key visual and verbal elements that work together to create a definitive, consistent, and recognized persona for the business. It should represent the key ingredients of a brand but ultimately it serves to identify, not explain or sell.

Differentiation

What differentiates you is not your logo, tagline, slogan, or what your website looks like. Your differentiation is what you offer or do that sets you apart from other organizations that are similar to you. For professional services businesses, which is our area of specialization, it can be a minor characteristic that a company embraces as its signature difference. Without an obvious or expressed and declared differentiation, it can be difficult for potential customers to detect how you are different and even harder for them to choose you as their preference.

Branding

Branding is the strategy behind corporate identity and brand, as well as the process that ensures they are representative of who you are — the why, what, and how of your organization. It’s as deep as the core values and as detailed as crafting messages and communications materials that will help to form the impressions people will have about your company. It is also the implementation of consistently applied communications that express who your company is at its core. Branding is rarely a destination. It is nearly always an ongoing process that evolves as a company evolves and grows.

Positioning

Positioning refers to where you stack up within your industry, relative to your competitors and in the eyes of your customers. Branders like us use positioning strategy as a way to tell customers what you do, for whom,, how you help, and how you are different. Your differentiation (see above) is a function of your positioning strategy. If you know how you can help and how you are different, you can tell potential customers what your position in the industry is relative to them. This is very helpful information for customers to have. It’s one of the key ways they evaluate you; customers will assign a position to you in their minds even if you don’t tell them your thoughts on the matter.

Bringing it all together

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WHY BRAND AUTHENTICITY MATTERS (and How to Make Yours Shine)

WHY BRAND AUTHENTICITY MATTERS (and How to Make Yours Shine)

When it comes to marketing and communications there’s lots of talk about brand alignment, core values, and brand authenticity. The truth is, those have always been important, but the more virtual and online our lives have become, the more we seek genuine connection and authenticity. Your customers, audience, or clientele need experiences that are transparent, real, and engaging. They want trust in the buying experience and the brands they support to – quite frankly, my dear – give a damn.

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<strong>Share the love! Your Valentine’s Day Cards are here.</strong>

Share the love! Your Valentine’s Day Cards are here.

Valentine’s Day is almost here and you know what that means – it’s time for us to reveal this year’s shareable Valentine’s cards! While we wholeheartedly believe in showing love and appreciation for others every day of the year, we particularly enjoy leaning in to the sweetness of V-Day to do what we love most -- Design!

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REVISIONING YOUR BRAND. WHAT IF…?

REVISIONING YOUR BRAND. WHAT IF…?

What if you could redesign your brand vision based around your ideal business? What would it look like? What value will you provide? Who would your best customers be? By starting with your brand vision, and then re-envisioning it, your true brand will show itself. Read more on our blog post.

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