rate identity policy. The introduction of a new corporate design is given more of a psychological than a purely functional significance. An organisation that wants to continue to grow from having a product culture to having a service culture can, of course, look at so-called visible, objective, measurable criteria: how do we ensure that our name recognition remains up to standard? How do we increase the profits of the organisation? These questions are quite relevant, but just as significant are questions about the fundamental motives underlying human behaviour.
This collective perception belongs to the intangible assets of a company. For this reason alone, corporate design should be given the attention that is given to every other area of investment.
The transition to client-friendliness requires clientfriendly behaviour on the part of employees. If the organisational identity (and therefore also the corporate design) can address the underlying motives that make a client-friendly attitude possible, it will be able to exercise greater influence over the behaviour of its employees, who will also find it easier to commit themselves to the organisation because their experiences with it will correspond to a number of their basic psycho-social needs. For them, the organisation has acquired psychological significance, and a relationship has been established. These employees will happily support the organisation and make excellent ambassadors for the new ambition. But employees that do not stand behind the organisation because they are unable— or unwilling—to assume a new mental attitude are in danger of becoming alienated. The new style does not fit them. Therefore, if a corporate design wants to be more than pure cosmetics, it will have to find a connection to people’s psycho-social frames of reference. A thorough knowledge of these psychological dynamics is in fact one of the basic tools of the designer. Corporate design concerns nothing less than the personality features of an organisation. It is not cosmetics, but essence.
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Conclusion We argue that historical awareness and the psychological significance of the organisation are the pillars of corporate design. Designers fill a crucial role, now more than ever, in the transformation processes that every company occasionally goes through. But an important condition for change is continuity in the organisation’s image. Above all, corporate design is an instrument for transformation and, at the same time, a guarantee of continuing corporate recognition. A design that is new, surprising and historically consistent, and that corresponds to the basic motives of the employees? Few advertising agencies can handle this paradox. Most of them see a given cultural context as oppressive. By fits and starts, they like to present changes and breaks in trends in a corporate design as ‘progress’. The client does not benefit from this in the least. The internal and external images of the organisation are even more confused than they were. But the biggest mistake is the break with the perception that has been carefully built up in the minds of hundreds of thousands, even millions of observers.