When you hear about McDonalds, Coca-Cola, Opel and similar popular names you often hear that they are a brand. But what exactly is brand? How to build it and create it? To fully understand what branding is I recommend that you learn what the elements of a good brand are and what a good brand can give to you and your business. Keep reading to find out.
Brand is some name that we give to our product, service or business. Branding is the complete process of creating that name and making it popular to the public. You can apply the process of branding to a single product or to your whole business. Most of the companies are protecting their brands by getting a service mark from some agency that can give them that. Before you apply for getting your own trademark it is important to make sure that no one else is using that name. You can do all that research by yourself but it is always a good idea to pay a professional to do that for you. And when you do that you can start with creating your own brand.
That’s when visual branding comes to life. Visual branding will help you to make an impression and attract audience to your product or service. But, it will do that only if you do it right. There are five different elements you must take care of when starting the process of visual branding.
- Name
Choosing a name for your brand isn’t exactly the process of visual branding but since you include it (visually) to your brand it must be strong and powerful. When you pick a name it must sound great and easy but it also must look good. If you can’t make it yourself then hire a professional designers to make you a good visual brand name.
- Visual style
All elements must be consistent. If you brand name and its whole identity is about something romantic then every visual element must be in that same style.
- Attractive logo
Logo is an image of your brand. With an attractive logo you can say a lot to your customers. For example, you can present your business, explain what you do and what can they get from your services or product. All of that with just one “image”. So you can understand why a logo is the most important part in visual branding process. If you are no expert in creating logos then find someone to make it for you because it is worth paying money for a good logo.
- Colors
Another thing that is very important with visual branding are colors. If you read my article about color trends then you probably know that colors can cause lots of emotions and other effects. So, before you do anything try to figure out what emotions you want to cause with your audience and then decide which color to use.
- Typography
And the last important element of visual branding is typography. Typography is a style of fonts you are using with your visual identity. If you use bad font and bad style then the results won’t be good. Don’t use some playful fonts for a serious brand and don’t use fonts that are hard to read.
Advantages of good brand
You can probably understand what you get with a good brand but I will still mention some of the biggest benefits of a great visual branding process.
- Building loyalty – if you create a unique and popular brand that will make you look better and different among competition it could cause good emotions with audience and attract them to your product, service or business. That will help you to get their trust and increase loyalty to the brand.
- Identity – you must create an identity for your business. And the best way for doing it is to create a good brand. Develop a great brand for your company and make it easily recognizable.
- Stability – if you don’t build a brand for yourself then chances for “going into shadow” are a lot larger. Good brand gives an identity to business and makes audience think that company will last longer on the market.
- Shows pride – maybe you created a good brand for free and maybe not but if it is good then people will think you invested some money into it and that you want to succeed. That will help with increasing loyalty and creating trust with customers.
Visual branding done right – examples
Here are some examples of a good brand. These companies obviously put a lot of time into creating their own brand name, designing logo and making ever other element perfectly created. Their process of building brand wasn’t just based on good design, it was created with marketing tricks, great campaigns and similar stuff. So, let’s see who these companies are.
- Coca-Cola
Coca-Cola is a great example of how company can related with their customers and audience. Since 1886 Coca-Cola had to change a lot to stay in business. That meant changing their logo, starting a lot of campaigns and connecting with audience. And they done it perfectly. A great example of connecting with audience is their commercial during 2012 Super Bowl. The commercial included two polar bears, each rooting for other team.
- Geico
“15 minutes can save you 15% or more on car insurance”. You probably heard about that tagline and you probably know about their mascot Geico. The job of that mascot is to get people attention and promote Geico car insurance. This is a great way to promote car insurance because Geico created an interesting character that explains to people what all the benefits of good car insurance are. And all of that through funny situations.
- Apple
Apple products are often described as very simple and easy to use and come with great quality. They are also very expensive but I won’t talk about that here. Apple products make customers want to say “I have an Apple product”. People like to brag about that to others. Apple also succeed in connecting with customers through emotions. They design their products in a way to make people lives easier. And that’s how they earned the trust of their customers.
There are lots of other brands I can mention here but I think those three will be enough.
Visual branding tips
Now that you saw how some companies communicate with customers and create their own brand it is time for you to do the same for yourself. To help you with that here are some tips that should help you.
- Define audience – before you start creating a visual identity you have to define who your audience will be. How till you create your name, logo and other stuff if you don’t know for who it is?
- Reach emotions – great way to communicate with your audience is to cause some emotional reaction to them. Try to tell some story with the visual identity of your brand.
- Keep it simple – you don’t have to make things complicated for it to be good. If you put too many things into your visual brand then it could confuse your audience and make it unexciting.
- Be consistent – like I mentioned above, always use the same style and same colors. Don’t use red color for one element and blue color for some other element. Keep everything similar because it will attract customers more.
- Logo – logo is one of the most important parts of visual brands and it simply must be good. Keep it simple, understanding and try to tell some story with it.
- Templates – if you are creating some images then creating some template can be very useful. Pick some style, size, filters, placement of text and similar stuff and then put that all together into one template you will use every time. That will help you to save some time and to be consistent.
- Video – you can also present your brand through some video. Lots of people will rather watch a video of some brand than read about it.
- Devices and other products – great way to reach to your customers is creating a campaign for giving away free products like hats, shirts or some wristbands. That will obviously make customers happy (they got a free gift) and probably make them interested in more information about your product.
And that’s it. Go to work now and start with creating your own brand. Keep in mind all the elements of visual branding process, make a research about companies with best brand and take all the tip above in mind when going through that process. Good luck!
