CID

A Corporate Identity is a tool for success in today's global marketplace. Corporate branding provides a strong consistent image, and enables companies to build relationships with their customers, suppliers, and employees. A successful brand encourages customers to look beyond the service and assess the company through its culture including factors such as the people behind the company, their attitudes and behaviour, as well as modes of communication and the overall design and style of the company.

Companies are faced with an abundancy of competition that offers more or less the same products or services, which leads to an increased importance of corporate communications. Companies are having to find new ways of distinguishing themselves from the competition whilst still communicating who they are and what they do to their audiences. Basically, many of the same rules apply when this audience happens to be the job market.

Indeed, a strong Corporate ID is not only a valuable marketing tool, but also a highly important recruitment asset. This is especially the case for service based companies - whether we are talking about standalone organisations such as large consulting firms, or about the issues that arise within the narrower scope of a company providing services to other business entities that handle the core business of a larger corporation of which all take part.

In the latter case, the exposure of such a company to the outside world is, in general, of a lesser magnitude. This makes the task of promoting its values not only harder, but also more expensive regarding to the return of let's say, a directed recruitment campain.

I happen to work for such a company. It's my day job to make asessments of corporate security policy compliance, to provide internal consulting in various internet related projects of the corporation of which my company is a part, to now and then give small presentations to business and marketing people about an aspect of corporate IT security that happens to be a hot topic at that time, to deploy and use tools that measure the security level and detect anomalies on the network and hosts of the companies' IT infrastructure, and to throw paperclips at my colleagues. A strong and continuing commitment.

But back to corporate Identities, now. The company I work for, draws an image of commitment. It wants this core idea to become an associated value. One small but very important part of building a strong successful brand and identity, is looking at how it is communicated to the outside world, in regard to style elements and uniformity. These matter greatly. Therefore, the marketing department unit in charge of the recruitment campains rounded up all people with visually interesting hobbies, made a selection out of these, and organised six professional photoshoots.

The young and dynamic God you see in the picture below, on the left hand side, is me. I guide a thirty nine foot yacht by the dangerous sand banks of the North Sea with a steady hand and certain perseverence, as if the vessel was a large and trustworthy company. Look at the faces of me and my colleague, and taste the pledge of commitment.

We commit ourselves, in a stylish purple and always in small caps, is not just a futile saying. It breathes engagement, it means drive, steadfastness, even passion, and it definately entails strong perseverence. I'd like to conclude with a citation from Meriam Webster. It states aptly that commitment means official consignment, as to a prison or mental health facility.