During the Design Project of a Brand Visual Identity, it is common to do a collection the competitive Brand Marks that exist in a given market.
The grouping of Brad Marks in grids or visual analysis panels is called as competitors map. 

However, these existing competitors maps don’t go beyond the quantification of the existing graphic components or other quantitative data.

On the other hand, looking at the research problem context, in the Portuguese business reality, the agri-food sector is composed of a majority of SMEs (small and medium-sized enterprises), most of which do not invest in communication and advertising.

The Brand Communication is particularly limited to Brand Marks, label and packaging. And therefore, it makes sense to study Brand Marks as an isolated identity component. The Brand Mark occupies a central place in the brand communication processes and the commercial activity of SMEs, so it seems to us a good starting point for the study of the Brand Mark, particularly as a Brand Mark succeeds in international markets.

The study of the most successful Portuguese Olive Oil Brands, in terms of exports, will allow us to advance in the knowledge about the way in which Brand Marks are understood in external markets and how they are graphically adjusted to different cultural codes.

The project proposes to study and define criteria and parameters of analysis of Brand Marks, improving the components and the structure of the competitors maps subdividing the semiotic components: Semantic, Syntactic and Pragmatic, from which we can define some design principles of Brand Marks.