What do you imagine when someone says "Coca Cola"? Rivers of red, ornate handwriting and a bottle that looked the same 100 years ago? That's it! That's the point of corporate design. Its purpose is to give your company a clear face and make it differ from other faces in the crowd.
When facing a new logo assignment, we don't just draw pictures, but think hard and even harder and try to build a really meaningful corporate design that would grasp the gist of your identity. Colours help a good deal, typeface matters a lot, graphical features and illustrations as well... simply everything must fit together. We don't guesstimate, corporate design has quite a few rules that's good to know.
Once the corporate design is ready, we get down to codify it in a manual and start designing every little trifle, ranging from b-cards to t-shirts to toilet labels (they've got them at CocaCola too).