ABSTRACT

What’s Your Business? offers a comprehensive pathway through the subject of corporate design clarifying the relationship between corporate design and corporate strategy and the terms identity, brand, image, communication and reputation. The book explores the impact of developing digital technology on brand creation and positioning in a marketplace, through symbolic and coherent design. A local market trader may buy a van, promote his business on a blackboard and proclaim ’daily special offers’. Corporations use computers, design websites and communicate with global clients through social media. Yet each business started with an idea and developed a distinctive existence. What’s Your Business? helps you turn a business idea into reality by establishing its existence, ethos, message and activities. By integrating corporate and design strategy with creative inputs Claire Tomlins illustrates the subject’s diversity. She ensures businesses set goals, strategies and plans whilst ensuring they recognise an identity that sparks the corporate design strategy and creative inputs that manifests the company’s aesthetic for marketing purposes; including design management, Intellectual Property topics and measures. Business people wishing to know how design can provide added value to their organisation will find this book useful, including where they could contribute. Academic concepts and definitions are updated and explanations are provided to business and design students on where each of their skillsets can contribute to a business.

part I|2 pages

Ground Base – How Corporate Design Started and Evolved

chapter 1|4 pages

Corporate Identity and Image Development

Where do businesses come from?

chapter 2|12 pages

Corporate Identity and Branding Debate

Am I marketing a concept, product or service?

chapter 3|8 pages

New Media, Communication and Reputation

How do I communicate the business message?

part II|2 pages

Setting the Strategy

chapter 4|15 pages

Corporate Strategy

How do I start a business?

chapter 5|11 pages

Storytelling and Identity

How does a good story differentiate a business?

chapter 6|17 pages

Corporate Design Strategy

How do I position my business in the marketplace?

chapter 7|18 pages

Perception and Perspectives

How do people recognise my business and who are the stakeholders?

part |2 pages

Summary Setting the Strategy

part III|1 pages

Cohesive Design Management

chapter 8|14 pages

Cohesive Design Management

What design management has to be in place?

chapter 9|11 pages

Business and Intellectual Property Law

What legal requirements are necessary?

part |3 pages

Summary Cohesive Design Management

part IV|2 pages

Navigating Symbolic Practice

chapter 10|8 pages

The Symbolic Aesthetic

How do I communicate the business story?

chapter 11|34 pages

The Visual Identity Creative Process

What should the business look like?

chapter 12|7 pages

Symbolism – Organisational Behaviour

What personality should the business project and how should it feel?

part |3 pages

Summary Navigating Symbolic Practice

part V|2 pages

Digital Corporate Design

chapter 13|15 pages

Digital Branding Strategy

Do I need a website and what does it contribute to the business?

chapter 14|19 pages

Designed Website Content

How is the business ‘look and feel' projected online?

chapter 15|21 pages

The Social Business

Do I need to have wider digital conversations?

part |2 pages

Summary Digital Corporate Design

chapter 16|7 pages

Summary and Conclusions

Brand and Corporate Identity Today