Brand, the sentiments your visual language and positioning evoke, is your most valuable asset. Your brand is a product of a complex relationship between your products and services and your customers and employees. These stakeholders embody the company’s mission, vision, and values—not as they are written down but as they are realized. It is their actions that will determine the success of your company’s products and services. The brand’s existence hangs in the balance. Each touch point will either erode or strengthen your brand.

A Booz Allen Hamilton survey conducted with Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management indicates companies that invest in “relational assets” (relationships with customers and suppliers, alliance partners, and employees) outperform other companies financially. Trust-based, mutually satisfying, long-term relationships between people have enormous value. Your brand is what ties your relational assets together. Understanding that connectivity makes your brand more powerful.

Brand is often misunderstood because it is an abstraction. People make complex claims about what a brand is and what it can do. We believe all brands have two components:

• Brand Elements are simply the name, logo, logotype, shapes, colors, products, and services by which a company is represented and ultimately recognized. These elements can be touched, seen, and easily defined.
• Brand Self is what we call the more intangible, but equally vital, piece of brand. It resides at the crossroads of your elevator pitch and the mission, vision, and values of your company.

Together the Brand Elements and the Brand Self are affected by where your company has been and where it is going. Your brand is your company’s culture and products, as much as the visual and verbal language representing your company. Each touch point is a vital opportunity for your company to position itself through a consistent, clear, meaningful identity relevant to consumers and employees. Therefore, defining and developing a strong brand is not optional. The branding process has well-defined steps, elements, checks, and balances. Branding is a science as much as an art form. Brand and web strategy development is a process that separates companies from their competition.