Branding for Social Innovation: The Importance to Communicate Consistently

Abstract

This paper focus on the importance of an identity system to support projects within the scope of social innovation. Considering big corporations or brands, with identity systems that secure acknowledgment of their target audience, their visibility increases in proportion with their identities exposition. This is beneficial not only for recognition purposes, but also posing as a quality assurance, thus improving the customer’s confidence. With the broadening of the influence of brand systems, the dimension of those who make use of them also changed: not only large and corporate organizations, but also organizations not intended for profit began to adhere to this way of identification in order to achieve increased impact. The blueprint commonly applied in corporate and large institutions has extended further to fields of social and sustainable institutions, switching the focus from financial profit to social welfare. This was approached consciously to expand the visibility and impact of projects, not only within general audiences, but also with financing entities. Because this need for prominence also became pressing for the social entrepreneurship area, this paper introduces a possible process for depicting the strength that a brand can give to the identity of non-profit and social organizations. Hence, a group of identities created for several Social Innovation international projects will be presented. It is advocated that formal consistency and clarity goes behind the exercise of logo development, thus assuming a strategy built on the brand’s value within the social innovation field.