Last week, I traded an iPhone 4 to my colleague Tosh (The iHub Brand Identity Ninja) in exchange for a new ReCorporate logo. Why? Because a creative and dynamic brand identity is absolutely key to both corporate and personal success.

If you haven’t already, find a graphic designer who understands brand identity and do whatever you can to create a killer identity for your brand. People often make assumptions about who you are as an organization, company, team, or person based on nothing more than their first visual impression of you or your work.

Take a look at Shopping.com. I have no idea what their domain is worth, but if Social.com went for 2.6 million, it’s got to be at least seven figures. They’re sitting on the best possible domain for e-commerce. In fact, they may actually be the most effective, economical and efficient online shopping option. Yet, I would be willing to bet my salary for the next 30 years that Shopping.com gets several orders of magnitude less traffic than Amazon each day.

There’s probably a long list of reasons why Shopping.com isn’t as successful as Amazon, but their lack of creative and fresh branding is near the top. Any human being with a partially-functioning sense of sight would dismiss Shopping.com as a lesser option for online retail than Amazon, based on nothing more than their first impression of their respective homepages.

It’s hard to compensate for a bad brand identity. If you plan to try, you need to be the best in the world at what you do — your reputation has to market itself.

Whether for yourself or for your company, you need a dynamic, creative and unique brand identity to accompany your reputation, assets and past success. It will exponentially strengthen your product offering, marketing initiatives and brand loyalty. Convince people you are the best after nothing more than their first look at your brand — trying to persuade them after the fact is a battle you don’t want to fight.