BRANDING WITH PASSION (journey of a graphic designer to marketing - from a branding point of view)
Livi Florea became an Account Coordinator at Itani & Company over a year ago when she decided to make the leap from the world of advertising and design to branding and marketing. This is her story.
Passion is one of the most life-changing drivers. It is a force that transforms us by moving us out of our comfort zones by finding that new path that leads to unbelievable summits. Why do I want to talk about passion today? I always loved to write, create clever jingles, to uncover or think up a good name for a brand, doodle endless hours on a logo, to walk with my eyes closed imagining buildings that have the new logo written on them or situations in which a marketing material would stand out best from a pile of many others.
My passion for a creative graphic life was my core emotion that shifted my client servicing career to becoming a self-taught graphic designer and fully embracing my interest in copywriting. I thought I was doing a pretty good job of narrating a compelling brand story by being a graphic brand creator.
Meeting and working with Maya at Itani & Company Marketing Consultants was one of the most important turning points in my life due to the shift in my understanding of how a brand is actually built. Prior to that, I was seeing brand creation solely from a graphic point of view. I regarded the brand building as visual guidelines, the brand book, and the main corporate collateral that brings visual consistency to everything.
But a brand cannot be perceived merely as visual. Without strategy and substance, it is just an aesthetically pleasing logo and a toolkit that drives no emotional connection with consumers. My marketing journey with I&Co. led me to deep dive and learn about the brand-building strategy and how a brand serves as the true core of any company. How every graphic, verbal, written content, TV interview or story, every encounter are bits of the big picture and only together they can deliver the BRAND.
Designers, marketers, strategists, PR, media communicators and all brand-building professionals are valuable points in the assembling process of the brand. But only a company can truly tell its own brand story through the passion that lies within its team. This cannot be artificially induced.
