It's the same with a new corporate design: it is impossible to evaluate in the short term the benefits of what marketing experts and would-be gurus might come up with. In other words, the return on the investment is difficult to assess. And whatever you can't explain or assess is consigned to the "black box" of the marketing people...

It is thus not difficult to understand why many sober company bosses and decision-makers find it hard to see the value of things like corporate identity, corporate image, branding and now social media as well.

What very few people realize is that all of these marketing measures have their origins in findings from the fields of psychology and sociology – and based on this, I would like to try to explain briefly and in simple terms what the new soft-nrg corporate design is about:

Every organization, every company, asks itself at more or less regular intervals whether the image the market has of it corresponds to the image it has of itself. Is it important whether the style, tone and colors are contemporary and attractive? Well, nobody wants to go to the theater in sandals and become an object of ridicule, do they?

The question of whether your self-image corresponds to the image others have of you throws up two further questions:

  • Question 1: What image does the market ideally want to have of a company? This shouldn't be thought of as seeking to curry favor or being opportunistic. After all, if you are looking for a wife, you would be well advised to try to go some way toward meeting her expectations.
  • Question 2: To what extent do we want to fulfill this expectation and conform to this ideal picture – and at what point does it become more important to put across our own attitude and corporate culture and present the image we have of ourselves?

We have been considering both of these questions over the last 13 months, with the help of a marketing concept and communication agency, to mark the occasion of our 15-year anniversary – and, as with any synthesis, we have emerged with something new at the end of the process. About 70% of this work was content related, which illustrates very well that good corporate design is not just a question of design and intuition; a great deal of the work focuses on content.

Right at the start of the design process we considered the following question: What are the positive attributes that are unique to us and difficult for competitors to emulate? "Soft factors" such as being likable, communicative, etc. must not become too prevalent here – companies exist only for as long as they continue to offer their markets real, hard benefits.

Our value proposition was – and still is – "process-optimizing software solutions for automobile service organizations", which we abbreviate to "automobile business solutions". These software solutions are primarily used in seven application areas ranging from appointment planning to fleet management – and have interfaces that make them compatible with existing DMS and other IT-based systems.

From this we developed a new metaphor as a key feature of our corporate design, thus symbolizing the attributes that define us: tidiness, stability and compatibility – not least with the requirements and wishes of our discerning customers. That is what we want our new corporate design to convey going forward...