YOUR BRAND IS MORE THAN YOUR LOGO
When developing webvideo projects we sometimes find that clients may not have a fully developed sense of what their corporate image is or how they want their business to be perceived through their visual materials, both old and new media. This includes clients ranging from a small ‘local’ business needing help with developing a video style that is more than just a simple logo through to a large organisation with multiple cross platform requirements who need to use video and/or motion graphics to bring their brand to life.

Your ‘look’, your ‘brand’ is your company’s face, its style and its attitude. And just as in our personal appearance, the way we speak or make eye contact with potential customers or clients, the style and ‘cut’ of your organisation’s clothes say a lot about you.

In a webvideo, your brand is expressed in numerous ways, from the colour scheme and graphics, the type of language and cinematography, through to the music and the style of editing.

DIFFERENT BUSINESSES – DIFFERENT NEEDS
With a webvideo for a new business one obviously has the benefit of beginning essentially with a ‘clean sheet of paper’. This is a great opportunity to get things right, right from the start. Careful work, research and visualisation can help you develop a brand that will express the company’s style, attract key target customers and be flexible enough to used in a multitude of ways for many years ahead.

With an existing business you have the benefit of building upon what is, hopefully, an established, successful brand. Bringing that ‘style’ to life in a corporate video is most likely an ‘evolution’ rather than a ‘revolution’.

WHO IS THE TARGET CUSTOMER
Some new business people will be very keen to “have a style like *******” which they very much admire. This is usually a mistake as the admired style is either a completely different type of product (would an Apple computers ad be suitable for a Cornish pasty company) and/or there is a totally different target customer (Body shop, ethical-style for a motorbike manufacturer?).

You need to get to know your target viewer intimately, know what they’re reading, wearing, thinking and… watching! Your webvideo style isn’t there to attract you, it’s there to appeal to your potential customers. It could, in fact, be the case that you have to accept that you may not even be able to like your own corporate style very much, as long as it hits all the right buttons for your target market. An online video for 12 -18 year old mountain bikers may have style, aggression and music that leaves you cold.

Visualise and even write down a description and character profile of your archetypal client/customer. Develop your style/attitude with them specifically in mind. This won’t necessarily exclude a wider market from being interested in your video but will ensure that you don’t fall through the net by trying to be all things to all people.

PRACTICAL STYLE AND CHASING FASHION
Different businesses use their webvideos for very different audiences and therefore have a variety of needs for their corporate brand. A small-scale fashion design business, for example, might feel that the tiny label sewn into its garments is going to be at the heart of its video image. The webvideos would be filmed and edited with this key branding / name recognition in mind both in style and content. For another business that is developing training videos for its staff we may ‘soften’ the corporate message and build an inclusive style that would make the training experience more comfortable for its users.

Unless you having a deliberate plan to be out of business in under five years, it’s probably a good idea to be careful about chasing the most fashionable look of the moment. While the Zeitgeist can be for particular editing styles, effects, music colours, fonts, etc these can rapidly become outdated and single out your company out as being of a particular time or type. The effects and graphics of hit film ‘The Matrix’ became much copied, and doomed many projects to looking dated very quickly. After the arrival of the internet there was a brief fashion to dispense with capitalisation on text in general and on logos in particular. This was cool for a while and, in the case of purely internet based businesses, perfectly relevant. However, many years on this trend has trickled down and we regularly see completely inappropriate non-web businesses adopting this look for no good reason and looking very ‘90s’ .

Certainly, we all want our corporate video or training video to look great and to look ‘up-to-date’ but be careful of adopting a style that is ‘bang-on-trend’ as you could end up looking ‘bargain-bin’ next year.

PUTTING IT ALL TOGETHER
We’ve outlined some of the issues that we as Wide Eye examine when working on expressing clients’ brand identity through webvideo. What we haven’t been able to cover here is the extensive discussions and analysis we go through with clients to fully realise the solution their business needs. It is those discussions, questions, re-analysis and cross-examinations that help us ‘set the compass’ for developing the project. Once that direction is set the work moves deeper into the storyboard and visualisation stage which we will discuss in another blog post.