Branding and Re-Branding

As Graphic Designers, we should constantly be aware of our surroundings, paying attention to design styles, trends and branding.   Branding can be defined as the process a company uses to build awareness about their products and organization, as well as to extend customer loyalty.   The branding process involves several steps to ensure successful branding of the company and its products.   The steps involved include conducting research, clarifying strategy, designing identity, creating touchpoints and managing assets.   Many companies have modified their branding strategy in the last step in order to change their branding, diversify their branding or limit their branding.

A good example of a company that has managed its assets in order to change and diversify its branding is Federal Express.   Founded in 1993 as Federal express, the company later changed its name to FedEx Corporation.   Later, the company acquired different logistics and shipping companies to provide a wider list of services.   The company now has several different company services such as FedEx Express, FedEx Ground, FedEx Freight, FedEx Custom Critical and FedEx Trade Networks.   Each logotype for each service is the same; the difference is that the word “Ex” is color coded to each service.   For example, FedEx Corporation is grey, FedEx Express is orange, FedEx Ground is green, FedEx Freight is red, FedEx Custom Critical is blue, and FedEx Trade Networks is yellow.

Image by Crystian Cruz via Flickr

The choice to diversify and expand the company branding was ultimately beneficial.   Because of their diversification and expansion, FedEx could now provide different types of services to their loyal customers under the same recognizable branding.   The identity risks of expanding the company’s branding to a number of different services is that the customer could be confused when identifying the company, a particular service or the parent company.   The visual branding considerations that a company must keep in mind when expanding its brand identity is, like in FedEx’s case, to not alter the original branding so much that the customers are unable to recognize the parent company.   Looking at FedEx’s decisions to expand and the branding that they chose, I think it was a good idea and it was executed perfectly and it ultimately was a success for the company.