I am sure you often hear about the need to produce a brand or special image for your business. Your brand may be the image that the customers think of when they consider your product. Maybe you have studied the brands of larger corporations? Whenever you have a look at what large companies are doing with their brands you receive a better understanding of what must be done to obtain your image out in front of your prospects.
Since I have been a small company owner since 1995, I have learned a lot about producing a brand in my business. I understand that your logo, your images, your colors are a part of your brand. I have also found that I should be putting my brand on my marketing materials. However, I do not think I truly fully understood the extent of branding until a couple years back.
I had been using a team of developers and designers to create a completely new web application for Adidas. Lots of people know Adidas' brand to become black and white with three diagonal stripes. Everything my son owns that is Adidas is black with white stripes running down somewhere around the item. For example, he's black warm-up pants with 3 stripes running down the sides of the pants. His soccer cleats are black with 3 diagonal stripes across the outsides of the cleats.
However when the design team with this web application put together a black, grey and white design for their new application, Adidas croaked. Apparently, it had not been the appearance these were going for. Come to discover, Adidas has another piece for their brand that includes colors. It's brilliant actually.
The design that Adidas finally decided on included a certain shade of blue with bubbles everywhere. These bubbles or circles were the form employed for their buttons, their link spacers, their website effects and their background frames for images.
I had been interested in all these bubbles.
One day I was searching for my daughter and noticed a connection. She selected a bundle of socks she wanted. They were pastel with dots, or bubbles, throughout them. Among the pairs was light blue, the precise blue we were using in the web application. I noticed around the packaging that they were Adidas.
It had been then that it struck me. When Adidas is using colors that are beyond their monochrome, they will use these bubbles rather than the stripes. After all, sometimes monochrome just doesn't work, particularly if you really are a girl. I walked around the store and sure enough everything produced by Adidas within the girl's section was pastel with bubbles in it. It was ingenious branding for action.
I walked over to the boy's section. Everything made by Adidas there was black with white stripes.
Going back to the website design
Once we launched the new web application making it public around the world, I realized that Adidas had also modified their main website. To their website they added many of the same look-and-feel features that are in the web application. This helped to streamline the branding for action and help their clients make the link between Adidas as well as their new web application.
Other features
Adidas even includes a signature font they created for their only use. They use this font everywhere. The exact color of blue that people see on a single application continues to be used with every web page they own. The buttons made with a bubble has been carried over to all webpages as well.
However i was still being interested in those bubbles. What went down to the stripes?
The stripes remain, however they incorporated the bubbles into their brand too. By studying their sites, I noticed the bubbles are actually representations of balls. Oftentimes they are bouncing along a picture or a page. The stripes appear to represent performance or speed while the bubbles are representing the balls that their customers are using to savor their sports while wearing their Adidas clothes.
Browse the Adidas website. Observe that every single thing they offer has their brand attached to its design. EVERYTHING!

Posted by: sandyyy0708 at 03:07 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 703 words, total size 4 kb.