Brand identity includes all the visual elements associated with your brand, from your logo and typography to colors, product packaging design, website design, and even your social media graphics. Typically, any brand asset is a component of your brand identity.
Nike’s iconic swoosh logo, for instance, is part of the company’s brand identity, and it’s an important one that has become synonymous with the brand – even though it doesn’t include the company’s name. That’s how powerful your brand identity is when done right and executed consistently.
Brand consistency relies on making brand assets and other visual brand elements available to your marketing and creative teams when they need them, and that’s where a digital asset management solution like MerlinOne comes in. With MerlinOne, your team can find, edit, manage, approve, and even distribute brand assets with ease. With version control and user access permissions, MerlinOne ensures that an outdated logo or your company’s old color scheme doesn’t creep into important marketing or sales materials, throwing brand consistency out the window. Download our white paper, The Importance of Version Control in a DAM, below to learn more about why having a strict structure for organizing different version of your assets improves your production workflow.
Looking for some inspiration for creating your brand identity? These examples illustrate just how powerful your brand identity can be.
Mastercard: Brand Identity That Stands the Test of Time
Screenshot via Mastercard
Everyone knows the Mastercard logo, two intersecting circles in Mastercard’s signature red, yellow, and orange color scheme. Believe it or not, Mastercard’s brand identity hasn’t been static all these years; in fact, it unveiled a new, modernized brand identity just a few years ago, in 2016. You’re probably thinking that the change was barely noticeable, and that’s the key to an effective brand identity overhaul – maintaining the core brand identity characteristics and elements your audience recognizes while interjecting a fresh, modern feel.
Screenshot via Mastercard
Mastercard’s robust brand center is a fascinating study in maintaining brand consistency, too, using similar brand identity designs for the company’s family of payment brands, but using a different color scheme to reflect the distinct identities.
Casper: An Overnight (Pun Intended) Success Driven by a Strong Brand Identity
Screenshot via Casper
Boasting more than one million sleepers and counting, Casper is the widely recognized mattress brand that seemingly came out of nowhere overnight. One contributor to that success is the company’s consistent brand identity, perfectly in tune with the brand’s personality. A simple logo and a soothing color scheme of blue and warm beige tones are consistent not only in the brand’s website design, but also in photos and other visual elements.
Screenshot via Casper
Casper gets packaging and product design right, too, with a minimalistic, yet instantly recognizable label in Casper’s signature blue on Casper pillows.
PayPal: A Consistent Brand Identity Across the Digital and Physical Worlds
Screenshot via PayPal
PayPal got a brand identity overhaul in 2014 with the help of fuseproject. Like Mastercard, PayPal kept its recognized brand identity characteristics while adopting “an identity to better express its innovative DNA and future as the leader in digital payments,” as fuseproject explains. “The result is a system with a bolder wordmark, stronger monogram, more vibrant colors and a dynamic angle graphic that increases user perceptions of trust and innovation.”
Screenshot via PayPal
PayPal’s logo is also strategically placed on its credit card readers, fully aligning the company’s brand identity across both digital and physical products and properties.
Screenshot via PayPal
PayPal’s logo center is an innovative approach to ensuring brand consistency while providing tons of visual tools and badges companies can use to let their customers know they accept PayPal payments, offer free return shipping for customers who use PayPal checkout, and more, all of which pull double-duty as on-brand promotions for PayPal.
Coca-Cola: An Iconic 130-Year-Old Brand
Screenshot via Coca-Cola
Coca-Cola was created way back in 1886, and while its brand identity has had some updates over the years, it retains the core characteristics that it started with 133 years ago. (That’s right: Coca-Cola’s brand identity is 130 years old.) The brand’s signature bright red and white colors are instantly recognizable, especially when paired with Coca-Cola’s widely recognizable typeface.
Screenshot via Coca-Cola
Fun fact: Coca-Cola is the origin of the most widely used depiction of Santa Claus recognized in popular culture today. Coca-Cola capitalized on this unique opportunity to associate its brand with the holiday season over time with festive advertising campaigns, trucks featuring that famous image of the Coca-Cola Santa Claus.
Screenshot via Coca-Cola
Later, Coca-Cola added their iconic polar bears to the mix. The brand is well-known for its festive packaging design and holiday advertising campaigns, which in some years feature Coca-Cola’s Santa Claus, and in others, the Coca-Cola polar bears – but always instantly recognizable as the time-tested Coca-Cola brand. Coca-Cola is so committed to its legacy as a festive holiday brand that it maintains a holiday-themed portal featuring holiday news, recipes, and videos to complement its annual holiday marketing campaigns.
Netflix: A Simple Brand Identity Lends Versatility
Screenshot via Netflix
One of the most popular on-demand media streaming services, Netflix’s reputation centers largely on its offerings, but that doesn’t mean that its brand identity is unimportant background fodder. In fact, with companies like the upcoming Disney+ giving Netflix some challenging competition, Netflix’s brand identity is more important than ever. The simple style of the Netflix logo lends well to the company’s easy-to-use service offerings, in a signature red color with a clean, bold typeface.
Screenshot via Netflix
Don’t let the simplicity of the brand’s identity fool you; Netflix makes use of its basic logo design in unique ways in print packaging and digital advertising materials, often used in conjunction with branding elements for the company’s various shows and movies. The beauty of its simplicity, according to Gretel, is its versatility: it can be scaled easily and used in any medium, allowing the brand volume to be turned up or down as needed for desired prominence.
With so many elements to keep track of, maintaining a consistent brand identity seems an impossible task. Download our white paper, The Business Case for DAM, below to learn more about how a DAM simplifies your life by making it easy to find, organize, approve, version, and use your digital brand assets.
Contact MerlinOne for Leading DAM Solutions
Interested in optimizing your digital asset management best practices? Curious about what a digital asset is or how a DAM solution can benefit your organization? Contact MerlinOne today! Our industry-leading image management system and video asset management solutions are trusted by the world’s most iconic brands.
Schedule a demo now to explore how MerlinOne can empower your team with lightning-fast searching, automated workflows, versioning, and access control. Discover how our built-in distribution tools can help you maintain a strong brand identity by ensuring that the most up-to-date and approved brand assets are readily available to your team whenever and wherever they need them. Don’t miss out on the opportunity to elevate your digital assets with MerlinOne’s DAM software and services.