The Importance of Brand with Kaizen
As part of the Belfast Design Week, I attended a lunchtime talk on the Importance of Branding with Kaizen Brand Evolution.
I attempted to do some rough sketch notes of the talk using Procreate on my iPad and my apple pencil. To sum up the talk I learnt the importance of branding in the design process from Ryan Stanfield who has worked at Kaizen for over 10 years & is apart of the ISTD - Institute Designers Ireland.
He began the talk by asking:
A brand is a gut feeling about an organisation and it ISN'T just a logo. A brand represents a product well and you know what you can expect from seeing the symbol and instantly recognisable.
The importance of Brand Identity has 3 different steps:
It’s important to start by investigating your business initially along with investigating your competitors. The main responses of this investigate stage include:
“by having lots of ideas”
“by having lots of influences”
Showed some main examples of companies Kaizen have worked with - Punchestown and the 4 target audiences they had to identify. For instance, they are modern and elegant in how they designed their brand.
You need to always ensure it works, for instance through Signage, menus and the small details
Toalsbet & leanbean are two examples of companies Kaizen worked with to create their branding. They created a set of brand guidelines for lean bean to follow, these guidelines were fresh and very sophisticated in style. Whereas, Toalsbet created a Toal language with a range of colloquialisms and carefully crafted strap-lines from the name and they ensured the graphics they created for the brand were bright, colourful and young and humorous for their targeted market.
Another one of their customers included Tribal Burger. For this brand, they wanted to create an identity that was hip and new and a next level of “cool” in order to compete against their main competitor, Boojum. Their logo for Tribal Burger is simplistic, cool and demonstrates truth as it’s kept very minimal and straight to the point.
