Corporate Identity in the third millennium and the Iranian Designer’s Role in it

Today, the brand creation or branding, which is the so-called industrial identification, is one of the most common industrial terms under various researching. This word is associated with the creation of an emotional bond with stakeholders. Brand is defined as a name, term, sign, symbol, or design, or a combination of them, intended to identify the goods or services of one seller or group of sellers and to differentiate them from those of competitors. This concept has been changed significantly throughout the history under the light of industrial paradigms like most of definition related to the industry. At the beginning of 20th century, it was limited to create a uniform visual identity for a corporation, whereas in the new millennium it tries to create a culture for stakeholders of companies. Researchers believe that a brand can best be described as the sum of all human experiences, perceptions and feelings about a particular thing, product or organization. Brands exist in the consciousness of individuals and of the public. Based on the subject-analysis method, two principal branding evolutions (paradigms) are introduced making use of study its evolutional process during the last century. Each of these paradigms creates specific features of a brand. Tangible features of a brand are the remnants of modernism era, and the intangible features are chiefly proposed in the context of post-modernism. Based on this attitude, in the time of modernism the duty of brand managers was to design for a culture; reversely this duty has been transformed during the post-modern period to indicate the designing of a culture. While modernist approach dealt with image making, the post-modernist tendency is derived toward the creation of an identity for the corporations. In collaboration with the emergence of each new paradigm in the field of brand designing, there are relevantly novel roles introduced for those who are involved with brands in any conduct. Designers, among others, have an exclusively significant role in this regard, for whom certain roles of manipulation are presently assumable; designing corporate visual identity, communication design, service design and culture design. These four topics are namely the areas of touch in the present article, in regard with which a clear perspective of the new disciplines’ birth related to brands, and subsequently the designers’ role in branding is set forward. The Iranian artistic and industrial communities have less attended this subject due to the less applied studies in this filed in Iran. In the third millennium, the responsibility and role of designers in the brand designing are well much more extensive and different which is demonstrated in this research and a suitable and scientific solution is represented for branding in Iran. By making use of investigating the history of branding in the Iranian traditional society, a novelty model of branding, which is the so-called diligent pattern, based on Islamic as well as Iranian culture is presented. This sample changes the concept of branding borrowed from the western culture to the sustainable value obtained from the native culture.