Corporate Design Report 02/24

I really enjoy experiencing these changes, leveraging them for the benefit of the business, and taking my colleagues along for the ride. Automated communication strategies, AI-powered chatbots, and predictive analytics are some of the topics that lie ahead.

As a central element of customer interaction, it was important for us to design the website that clearly differentiated us from our competitors and underscored our leadership in innovation and technology.

Using web analytics tools during the relaunch process helped us make data-driven decisions about prioritizing changes. We also received direct feedback from users through A/B testing and customer focus groups, which we provided with a click dummy, on which we tested elements of the design needed to be improved to enhance usability and user experience. That allowed us to optimize the design on the fly to meet users’ needs.

Those practical measures ensured that adapting the corporate design as part of the website relaunch was not only strategically sound, but also effectively implemented. A purely theoretical refinement of the corporate design could never have achieved such a customer-focused result.

Developing the right design for our website began with a detailed analysis of the competition and a review of best practice examples from advanced technology and software companies. That, combined with the objectives I mentioned earlier, led to a detailed brief that we gave to two selected agencies with a dedicated focus on UI design. We didn’t have the necessary skill sets in-house at the time.

The agencies first developed basic design approaches and presented them to us using sample pages. We then chose a design direction and thus a partner for the project.

When selecting fonts for our website, we followed the agency’s recommendations, which took into account technical factors such as load time, browser compatibility, cross-device accessibility, and licensing terms, in addition to good readability. We wanted to choose visually appealing fonts that had a positive impact on the user experience.

Following the basic design decisions, we developed a click dummy that we A/B tested with customers. The user feedback drove further detailed decisions, which we eventually compiled into a component library that now serves as a digital storybook or style guide. Components include call-to-actions, buttons, forms, headlines, and text blocks. In addition, visual language guides were developed for product presentations, photos, icons, and illustrations.

Many companies have a corporate design that was created in an era when traditional forms of communication were prevalent and has evolved only slightly since then. However, digitization has created new platforms and media that have a significant impact on the creation and evolution of corporate design.

• Corporate design must be consistent across these channels to maintain brand identity.
• This requires flexible and scalable design elements. Logos, fonts, and other design elements must look and function well on different screen sizes and resolutions.
• The user experience in the digital environment is also critical. The corporate design must not only be aesthetically pleasing, but also enable intuitive and user-friendly interaction.
• Last but not least, corporate design needs to be less rigid and more dynamic and responsive to market changes and new trends.
  

This evolution requires continuous education and flexibility. Given the rapid evolution of the digital world, it’s a misconception that simply mastering traditional design principles is enough. It’s imperative that designers stay abreast of the latest developments, tools, and technologies in order to survive and remain relevant in the job market.

The overwhelming variety and complexity of new technologies and tools can be intimidating. Designers may find it difficult to decide where to begin their education or what skills are most in demand.

To overcome these challenges, it’s critical that designers are willing to learn, open to personal development, and supported by their managers.

Our corporate design, which is reflected in various touchpoints, aims to appeal to a wide range of professional groups and personas among our customers. For a B2B company like Basler AG, the challenge is to effectively reach and engage these different personas. For example, the user experience and specific needs of software developers are very different from those of our customers’ purchasing groups.

In some cases, a more flexible application of design standards may be necessary, especially in rapidly evolving fields such as the software industry. This flexibility allows us to keep pace with current design trends and user expectations, and to keep our brand modern and relevant without the need for a comprehensive corporate design overhaul across all areas.

Large software companies invest heavily in research and development to make their designs contemporary, attractive, and functional. A corporate design based on such leading standards can also give smaller companies confidence in the professionalism of their software. Software developers, who work with a variety of tools on a daily basis, benefit from a consistent and intuitive user interface that increases their productivity and reduces the time they spend learning new tools. The corporate design should support these needs and expectations, not hinder them.

Our main takeaway from this website redesign project is that it’s no longer appropriate to rigidly adhere to fixed design specifications. The rapid evolution of the digital world and the changing expectations of our target audience require a more flexible design approach. At every touchpoint, we carefully examined what really made sense and tried to interpret our corporate design framework in a flexible way. The goal of creating a great user experience was more important to us than strictly following a design manual. At the same time, we’re convinced that our brand will remain clearly recognizable despite a more flexible interpretation of the design.

To translate the new look and feel into different formats and channels, we first focused on those formats directly linked to our website. These include online banners, online ads, and our e-newsletter. That step was critical to ensure a consistent brand experience and avoid inconsistencies in the look and feel, especially for visitors who arrive at our site through these channels.

Other formats where the direct link to the website was less obvious, such as trade show booths or printed materials such as brochures, were adapted in a second phase. That adaptation was targeted and made only when the format became relevant. Our goal has always been to ensure a consistent and recognizable brand presence across all touchpoints. However, we plan to spread the implementation of the design over a longer period of time in order to make efficient use of our resources while maintaining brand consistency.

In the future, digital corporate design will follow aesthetic criteria, and also be influenced by technological innovations, social values, and user expectations. I expect that companies will increasingly develop dynamic design systems that allow corporate design to adapt quickly and efficiently to different contexts and user needs. This means a move away from rigid design manuals to more flexible, adaptable guidelines.

In addition, companies will increasingly need to offer personalized experiences tailored to the preferences and behaviors of individual users. This may require greater diversification in visual communications and corporate design to better appeal to different user groups. Other trends include accessibility, sustainability—through the use of eco-friendly colors and materials in visual communication—or the use of AI in the design process to streamline workflows and open up new creative possibilities.

Just as a strong building foundation allows architects to create incredible, long-lasting monuments of engineering, a robust brand foundation is vital to developing and maintaining your corporate design.

Having a brand-building platform from which you can quickly and efficiently access all elements and assets of your brand and use them effectively makes brand governance much easier. It also keeps your corporate design consistent as it grows.

So, what’s the secret to a strong brand-building platform?

In many industries, brands face limitations in their marketing endeavors. For example, in many countries, healthcare brands can’t advertise their products directly. These constraints can stymie a brand’s growth unless it can implement the proper brand management to handle such a restriction. 

Just as “no plan survives contact with the enemy,” so your brand strategy needs to be nimble enough to survive implementation. This is especially relevant when your brand is undergoing a rebranding process to create a new direction and identity. Of course, it is crucial to develop a business plan for your brand’s marketing. But all too frequently, brands deliver a solid strategy only to fail at the first hurdle. This is more often than not due to a lack of brand management from stakeholders and marketers.

Creating a core brand identity is crucial for any business; otherwise, your message and strategy will be heavily diluted. However, a common pitfall for companies building their brand is to live and die by this consistent messaging, which can often result in safer, less compelling marketing. The key to a strong brand-building platform lies in finding the perfect harmony between a consistent brand message and pushing the boundaries of creativity in its marketing.

Knowing when to follow the rules and when to push the boundaries is a great skill. You should have a strong idea of which areas require strict adherence to the brand and which areas can be experimented with. Creating a robust foundational brand-building platform allows you to operate with the consistency you need — and, equally importantly, enables your team members to collaborate on those projects that lend themselves to a bit more creative freedom.

With a strong brand-building platform, your brand can have a cohesive foundation while pushing the boundaries creatively. 

Whether you’re talking about a consistent brand message, room for creativity, or a collaboration of professionals, one thing is crucial when building a brand foundation: a strong, robust, and easy-to-use tool suite.

This might seem like a tautology: You need strong brand-building platform tools to build a strong brand-building platform. But brands that still use traditional methods of brand management (including shared PDFs, cloud folders, and endless document versions) find it much harder to keep up with their brand. Taking the time to ensure that the brand management tools you use are the best possible fit for the job will allow you to apply brand infrastructure principles much more effectively and efficiently.

Build or find a brand hub that meets your brand needs - from asset management to collaboration tools.

A successful brand-building platform moves beyond just digital asset management: It gives everyone the access they need to make your brand work, whether that’s creative tools, collaborative workspaces, or cohesive brand guidelines. A good foundation anchors all your teams’ work to your core brand without the need for email trails, confusing file versions, and far more PDFs than is healthy.

For many modern, forward-thinking brands, traditional brand management methods simply can’t keep up with the demands. Frontify’s integrated, user-friendly DAM and customized brand portals offer a one-stop-shop for all things brand, giving you a single answer to this issue. Having a single source of truth for brand storage and governance eliminates this confusion and lets your teams focus on what's important—implementing your rebranding efforts.

Toby Williams is a copywriter at Frontify, where he helps build the brand that helps brand-builders build their brand. Frontify is the brand-building platform for leading brands. By combining a user-friendly DAM with customized portals, Frontify enables creatives and marketers to design, organize, and collaborate.

Established in 2013, the SaaS company has grown to employ more than 300 people. Frontify is based in St. Gallen, Switzerland, and has additional offices in New York City, USA, and London, UK.

To understand how an AI chatbot like OpenAI’s ChatGPT can create entire storylines in a matter of moments, a brief insight into how artificial intelligence works is necessary.

First of all, AIs are nothing more than computer programs. However, these programs have the ability to evolve by acquiring knowledge on their own. This is done by training the AI systems on huge data sets to recognize patterns using algorithms, and learn from them. This is known as machine learning (ML), which in turn is divided into different models such as decision trees and neural and artificial neural networks. Neural networks are models that use the functioning of the human brain as a blueprint.

Another key element of AI chatbots is natural language processing, which enables the programs to understand and generate human speech. The more a user interacts with an AI, the more the program adapts to the user’s needs. What clearly distinguishes AI from our ability to learn is the incredible speed with which artificial intelligences sift through volumes of data in a matter of seconds, the scope of which is beyond the human imagination.

To visualize: When we research a topic, we spend a few hours reading a few articles, watching YouTube videos, and/or possibly listening to a podcast. In a fraction of that time, AI has combed the entire Internet for information that matches the key points of the topic.

A great example of what AI can do for storytelling in marketing is the Afri Cola website (only available in German). The marketing agency behind the site, WALLEK VON ZITZEWITZ Werbeagentur GmbH, had all the content generated by AI, from most of the coding to the images and individual stories of the different Afri worlds. Only the prompt engineering, i.e. the creation of the input commands, and the overall creative concept were created by humans. Users can view all the prompts on the site to understand the development history of each subpage, image and story (Afri-world). The result is impressive. And thanks to the radically shortened time span in which new AI-generated stories are created, the marketing agency publishes new Afri-Worlds on a weekly basis.

While the Afri website can certainly be seen as a positive harbinger of this rapid development of AI in marketing, it’s already difficult to imagine creative development processes without AI. Blogs, translations, graphics, videos and much more are generated virtually at the touch of a button. This not only saves time, but also money that would otherwise be invested in hiring external content creators.

Thanks to an AI’s ability to adapt to the user’s wishes and needs with each prompt, the results it delivers get better and better. The trick is in the phrasing of the prompts.

With a prompt like “Generate a good marketing story for product XYZ that contains 2,500 words”, AI chatbots may deliver a result, but most likely not one that can be used in any meaningful way. As a general rule, clear, keyword-rich, and targeted prompts lead to better results. A prompt should always include the following key points:

• Target audience
• Writing style and tonality
• Purpose of the story
• Form (number of words and/or characters)

If you’re looking for a completely new approach to a chain prompt, OpenAI recommends entering the following prompt in the search window and then using the questions to approach the marketing story step by step.

“I would like you to help me create the best possible ChatGPT prompt to achieve my goals. You should ask me about the topic of my prompt and then ask me for more details to help you refine the prompt for GPT-3.5, GPT-4, or ChatGPT.”

#1: AI does not evaluate

Despite the obvious benefits and impressive storytelling capabilities of AI, a healthy dose of caution is needed when using the results. No AI-generated content should see the light of day without careful post-production. There are many reasons for this, but they all boil down to the fact that artificial intelligence lacks human empathy.

ChatGPT, MS Bing Chat, and all other AIs access the data provided to them and derive the results desired by the user. But they do this without any evaluation, neither factually nor content-wise. It’s therefore quite possible that the stories produced contain racist—or at least politically incorrect—elements. The fact is that the AI data sources were all originally created by humans. That mountain of data contains content that has nothing to do with common sense or good taste.

#2: AI isn't a fact checker

Another point to keep in mind when using AI-generated content is that AI isn’t a fact checker. It’s simply a tool that produces content. When it comes to fictional storytelling in marketing, this may not be too important, as in the case of the Afri Cola website. But when it comes to strengthening corporate identity internally and externally, marketing technical products, communicating the brand globally, or launching a start-up, factual misinformation is unacceptable.

These factors lead to the most important tip for working with AI: any content created by AI must be expertly edited. Even though AI increasingly simplifies our daily work, HI (Human Intelligence) is still the key to success.

#3: AI provides similiar results for all users

Artificial intelligence has access to massive data sources from which it produces the desired results. AI chatbots such as ChatGPT Plus, Bing Chat, and many others scour the Internet in addition to the training data provided. At first glance, this may not seem like a significant problem. After all, those data sets are huge and growing. But in the long run, it creates a kind of vicious cycle. Marketing content for blogs, websites, newsletters, etc. is being generated by AI at a rapidly increasing rate. Meanwhile, the amount of new content created by humans is declining. This leads to a creative drying up of data sources, which is then reflected in increasingly similar content. This problem is mitigated in the context of marketing storytelling, which tends to involve more complex, creative textual content. However, when it comes to the creation of short content such as slogans, social media feeds or metadata, the AI-generated results of competing market players are relatively close.

As CEO of Folienwerke GmbH in Winterthur, I am very optimistic about the rapid development of AI in marketing. The potential is enormous and the capabilities of AI are already almost unimaginable. In addition, the use of AI can save a lot of time and money. As a digital service provider, if you close your mind to this, you’ll sooner or later fall behind or even lose out completely. That’s why at Folienwerke we take a proactive approach to AI and train our designers, storytellers, and project managers in image generation, idea ping-pong, and text prompting.

Folienwerke is the leading consulting and design agency for presentations in Switzerland. Storytelling is one of our core disciplines, which we either incorporate directly into the design of slide presentations and explanatory videos, or convey at eye level in our storytelling workshops. In this context, the topic of AI in strategic storytelling is becoming increasingly important.

For us, AI is an ingenious tool that we use for research, among other things. The time savings compared to conventional Internet research via Google & co. is immense. We also use AI to process old blog posts and other text content, to create images as part of slide design, and even to get inspiration for storytelling.

However, I would like to emphasize that HI (human intelligence) always plays first, second, and third fiddle in storytelling. Without human empathy and our sense of humor—in short, without heart and mind—I don’t think it’s possible to create a compelling marketing story that reaches the target audience on an emotional level. And this is ultimately the enormous power that makes storytelling—whether in text form, as an explanatory video, in classic narrative form in a podcast, or as a series of images on presentation slides—one of the most effective marketing tools there is.

Ellen Riesterer is the CEO of Folienwerke in Winterthur. With the leading agency for storytelling and presentations in Switzerland, Ellen has one goal: to enable communication between people in a given time frame with maximum results. Folienwerke offers individual consulting, implementation and training in the field of presentations. With a focus on storytelling, design and rhetoric, Folienwerke guides and encourages speakers to deliver authentic presentations.

The logo is an indispensable element of a presentation as it clearly identifies the sender. Individual logo elements can often be used for the design of the slides in order to ensure recognizability.

The exact placement of the logo on the slides is defined in the design guidelines. It’s important to keep a sufficient “safety distance” from the logo so that other elements such as text, symbols or graphics don’t come too close to the logo. In some cases, the logo can also be placed on photos, but care must be taken to ensure that the logo is easily recognizable. Usually, light and dark variants of the logo are available from which the best visible variant can be selected for the photo. Alternatively, the brightness of the image can be adjusted in PowerPoint so that the logo stands out clearly. To do this, click on the image in PowerPoint and reduce the brightness under Image format → Customize → Corrections → Image correction options...

PowerPoint slide masters can sometimes be problematic. Often, templates that mimic corporate stationery: the logo is in the top right corner, and there’s a footer that includes the page number, date, and copyright notice. The font sizes are designed for documents and are too small for presentations. In addition, the available slide layouts are often limited and don’t offer a variety of formats. With such slide masters, visual boredom is inevitable and the risk increases that the slides don’t match the corporate design.

Insert photos to fill the slide. The logo and footer will be hidden, but the photo will have its full effect. This slide layout is ideal for introducing a chapter or closing a section. You can also present reference projects or virtual company tours with a series of full-page photos.

Slide fills are usually corporate identity friendly because they’re perceived as independent sequences, similar to a slide fill video.

Image-word combinations are a mixture of the two formats above. You can place a large keyword directly over a full-page photo. Alternatively, you can divide the slide into two halves: on the right is a photo that fills half the slide, and on the left is a colored area with the large keyword. If you’re presenting multiple slides of this type, you can also switch sides by placing the photo on the left and the keyword on the right. This type of presentation is ideal as an inter-title and also works well in a sequence of full-page photos. The choice of colors and fonts ensures compliance with your corporate design.