Branding, in its entirety, entails a lot of activities.
While many organizations are quick to think of logos, taglines, and corporate statements as the main branding elements, it’s necessary to take a step beyond the norm to consider other iconic components of branding such as buildings.
Why Brand Buildings Matter
From company headquarters to retail stores, buildings can represent your brand.
The use of buildings as brand icons has gained increased popularity over the decades, signaling the relevance of building structures in modern-day branding.
Companies that intentionally create and market a compelling brand consider buildings as platforms to showcase their values.
Hence, they align building designs and structures to capture and express what the company stands for accurately.
They buy metal sheet stocks and other resources, blend them with architectural designs, and bring out the marketing appeal.
In fact, top organizations put buildings at the heart of their brand images.
They ensure building structures aren’t only suitable for commercial purposes but also brand-identifying.
Nowadays, office spaces, architectural lighting, and facades constitute the essential elements of brands as they’re often strategically designed to align with core organizational values and give proper brand representation.
Benefits Of Iconic Brand Buildings
The purpose of constructing iconic brand buildings goes beyond demonstrating architectural prowess.
While iconic buildings represent outstanding achievement, it offers significant benefits to organizations.
Companies can advertise their brands not through products and signage alone but also through their buildings.
Brand buildings can set the success, mission, and vision of organizations in stone, making it visible and concretized for users to experience.
The benefits of iconic brand buildings also extend to employees within the organization.
Structures that set brand identity in stone help employees grasp a clear understanding of their organization’s brand and ingrain the dominant values of the brand in their hearts.
By doing so, they can embrace and communicate the brand’s identity through their work.
How To Use Buildings As Brand Icons
Having established the essence of iconic brand buildings, it’s essential to consider practical ways to use buildings as brand icons. Some of the ways to do that include:
Have A Clear Big Picture
The big branding picture is the overarching idea that a brand intends to communicate.
The brand’s aspiration is what it tends to achieve and where it plans to reach in the coming years.
Before making architectural drawings, the big picture has to be clarified.
Having a big picture not only gives an idea of intended goals but enables organizations to think beyond just having a usable structure to synthesize their message and solution into buildings.
Have A Corporate Vision
Every brand should have a corporate vision it’s striving to accomplish.
In most cases, it’s expressed as vision statements and serves to guide the daily operations and future aspirations of organizations.
At the commencement of a building project, organizational vision should be considered the basis of building design.
This way, the building not only gives a physical representation of the brand but also contributes to the accomplishment of the brand’s vision.
Consider Users’ Appeal
As much as buildings are built to represent a brand and contribute to its vision, the users of the buildings must also be well considered.
The building environment facilities should be shaped to communicate brand ideals and enable customers, workers, and investors to understand the brand and have a friendly and enjoyable user experience.
One way to achieve this is by noting what users desire to experience in a building and integrating their feedback into the architectural process.
This way, a user-oriented building can be constructed.
Acknowledge Trends
Trends are the direction of the future.
For a building to stand as an influential brand icon, it must align with local and global trends.
Ignoring trends and failing to gain market insight can lead to a flop in building design.
Keenly observing trends is key to having buildings that are capable of serving as brand icons in the present and also in the future.
By looking at what’s happening across the globe, organizations can adapt global building models to their local environment.
Equip Buildings With Essential Brand Elements
From the exterior part of buildings to the interior zones, essential brand elements that communicate the brand’s identity should be strategically positioned.
By doing so, everyone who comes into the building can experience the brand regardless of their location.
From placards that contain the mission, vision, and values of the organization to symbolisms that speak of the brand’s essence, these brand strategies make iconic brand statements.
Conclusion
Buildings have gone beyond being structures that occupy people and equipment.
Today, they can be used as brand icons. With the right strategies, organizations can leverage building structures for branding purposes effectively.