In today's global marketplace, businesses can find maintaining a coherent brand increasingly challenging. The internet has enabled brands to expand their reach internationally, opening up opportunities to connect with new audiences and establish a presence in diverse markets. However, as regional audiences make their own demands upon a central brand, centrifugal forces can pull it apart, resulting in a disparate and disconnected brand identity. Resisting this requires a brand that leverages the axioms of good design, allowing it to retain its basic messaging across a range of environments. Since the opening of our office in Berlin, this issue has been particularly relevant to Kooba’s own branding. Here’s a brief insight into what we’ve learned:
The Fundamentals of Good Design: Universally Effective
Good design is the cornerstone of any successful digital presence, regardless of the market. Certain aspects of aesthetic appeal, such as clean layouts, balanced colour schemes, and high-quality imagery hold a universal appeal. From a semiotic perspective, some colours and shapes denote meaning almost universally. Red and yellow indicates danger, not only across human society but also in the animal kingdom. Curved shapes generally represent softness and warmth, and sharp angles mean a colder, more serious message. Of course, local vernaculars always exist, but it can often be wiser to trust your own brand rather than make a poorly-informed attempt at emulating regional fashions.
It's not just visual symbols that matter here. Simplicity and clarity in your core branding makes it far easier to adapt to local conditions without your brand identity being pulled apart. The most successful global brands can be defined by one element which is kept consistent across all their marketing campaigns. The three stripes of Adidas, the red of Coca Cola, and (maybe most obviously) the apple of Apple. It can be worth boiling down your brand to its essentials in order to accomplish this level of simplicity. Ask yourself what single colour, image, or feeling is the most important to your company's identity, and prioritise that when exporting your brand.
Finally, it's crucial that everyone your brand reaches can actually access and engage with it. A simple, clean brand will generally prove more recognisable and inclusive to a wider audience. Conversely, a low contrast design may restrict your design from users with vision impairments or colour blindness. Normally at Kooba we focus on accessible web design, but the benefits of an inclusive design philosophy can easily extend to our visual branding work for this reason.
Risk and Reward
Going international with a brand might be challenging, but it also provides a valuable opportunity. A brand that is recognisably global seems more well-rounded, modern, and competitive. Take, for instance, our logo, which is green in Dublin, but yellow in Berlin. This is a deliberate choice, and one which shows off our European presence as a company. Rather than treating our Berlin office as an offshoot of an Irish company, we’d rather show both offices as equal branches of a global brand.
Of course this is just one approach, and many companies deliberately embrace their origins when marketing to foreign audiences. Kerrygold, for instance, have seen great success from emphasising their Irish roots when exporting abroad. Either way, what matters is the ability to leverage your brand rather than being restricted by it. Whether this means embracing an international identity or doubling down on your origins is up to you, but consistency is crucial either way. Trust yourself, trust your brand, and you’ll be fine.
