Brand Identity Traps — Amati and Associates

The brand identity combines the strategic and execution elements that make a brand. So it includes both the name and the logo design, the choice of colors and the tone of voice, the Personality, and its related design elements, like typeface and shapes, icons, and graphic elements. The most apparent manifestation of a brand identity is the brand book, which outlines all possible design elements related to the brand.

Professor Kapferer ‘s Brand Identity Prism is notably the best framework for understanding what Brand Identity includes. In this model, there are six critical components:

The elements of the brand identity prism are clustered in meaningful ways, for example:

• Picture of the Sender is the combination of Physique and Personality
• Externalization refers to Physique, Relationship, and Reflection
• whereas Internalization deals with Personality, Culture, and Self-image
• finally, the Picture of the Recipient includes Reflection and Self-image

An important caveat: the notion of brand identity is often confused with brand image, which is the external…