What is Brand Identity?
Brand Identity represents a company's values, services, ideas and personality, it can generate loyalty from the company's customers, however, it isn't just a logo, it is the whole identity; name, terms, design, symbol, websites, logo, colour, fonts and font colour.
Why is Brand Identity so crucial?
A strong and distinctive brand identity can position a company above it's competition and in the film company, the requirement to be above the rest is evidentially crucial in the fight for ratings, viewings and reviews.
Brand Identity in the Film Industry.
Most cinema tickets are one-off purchases. Most people don't buy a cinema ticket, in the same way as you might buy a particular brand of soft drink, knowing that you will go back to this brand again and again. Millions of pounds are spent making the film, however, nearly the same amount of money is then further spend marketing and advertising the film, as each new film release needs it own 'brand'.
An example is the Harry Potter sequels, millions of pounds were spent on making the initial film but Warner Bros. spent alot of money creating the 'Harry Potter' brand, as before the film release there was an equally successful series of books from which they were able to further the brand identity. The techniques that were deployed on the creation of the 'Harry Potter' brand were:
- The typography has remained a constant design feature in all of the products from the Film title's, DVD series, film posters and magazines.
- The brand does not rely on the use of 'Stars' or actors names or faces, all of the products do not contain any pictures of the actors.
The steps of Brand Identity in Film.
The Film:
- The film needs to be clearly identifiable in its advertising and marketing; the genre, actors, story, special effects and style all need to be easily identifiable to the audience.
Release:
- Films need to be released at very specific periods of time. e.g. a Christmas film at Christmas.
- Do not class release dates with other big release's.
Advertising:
- Print (Posters, Adverts in newspapers and magazines).
- Trailers (Shown at the cinema, TV, Radio or Internet).
- Internet (Social Networking sites, fan sites and forums).
- Merchandise (Books, T-Shirts, DVD's, Soundtracks, games, toys or anything related to the brand).
Publicity:
- Actor interviews.
- Director commentary.
- The 'Making of' tv shows and documentary's.
- Reviews.
- News stories.
Brand Identity for our Product.
As we are creating a new product, we will require a new brand identity, however, we have not got a budge so all of our brand identity will be based around the actual design of the products (film, poster and magazine review), rather than the release, advertising and publicity side of brand identity. Below, I have made a list of a few things that we could do to achieve brand identity throughout all of our products;
- The use of the same type of font and colour for the colour of the title in the film and poster, however, magazine film reviews are normally generic fonts used in the magazine.
- As we are a small product company, we will need to include photo's and the name of our actors, as a means of further audience attraction and a 'unique selling point' (USP).
- The use or little use of colour across all of the products. e.g. Love is often symbolised with the colour red. Could we use red for the titles, filter over the film, effects in the poster, titles in the poster, titles in the magazine review, background colour in the review?
- Tag line - can it be used through all the products?
Specific Brand identity;
Magazine Review:
- Empire use the same layout through all reviews. Do we use a standard layout for the review or do we create another new identity by changing the layout?
- Image from footage or just location? Include actors? USP?
- Do we only reveal certain pieces of the plot in the review.
- Colours used?
- Fonts used?
- Title and tag line importance? Are they identifiable?
Poster:
- Image from footage or location? Include actors? USP?
- Target audience identifiable?
- Genre identifiable?
- Tag importance, positioning, size, font and colour.
- Title importance, positioning, size, font and colour.
- Layout represents the product?
- Fonts used?
- Colours used?
- How does the tag line work? USP?
- How is attention gained?
Film:
- Music used: Does the music represent the brand, is the brand recognisable from the music? USP? e.g. Harry Potters theme is recognisable even without the visual branding.
- Ident used to further the brand? USP?
- Are the credits also linked to the brand identity?
