The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
The visual brand — it can say a lot or little. What it's not about is as important as what it proclaims about the brand. Carefully thinking through the values, the messaging and, most importantly, who the customer is, will make your visual brand a persuasive and emotionally connecting experience for customers. Yes, even technology companies, who notoriously think they are about the bits and bites, recognize that their unique technology solutions must translate into a visual brand that reaches out to their market.
The visual brand is not just the logo or identity. It's the entire family of items that work with that identity and convey a message. Each piece needs to be a part of a whole that consistently communicates to the customer about the product.
The Large Corporate Brands-Building on Past Equity
For the large national and multinational brands it's about building reinforcing elements into the visual brand and using advertising and media to build a repeatable experience for customers that will reinforce the meaning of the brand.
Southwest Airlines' brand is represented by a simple logo type treatment of red, blue and yellow applied everywhere, from plane to Web site. To the public, this visual branding calls to mind all the cumulative press, media and customer experiences of those who know the brand. I wouldn't say that the identity and the visual brand make a promise — they represent and reinforce a promise that customers experience directly and through the media.
In the banking arena, Wells Fargo has a well-defined brand, supported by clear rules about the use of colors, type faces and the ever iconic stage coach image. How can the customer differentiate between Bank of America, Wells Fargo and Citibank? Not easy to say these days, with an ATM being a primary means of communication with most banks. We've seen that the Bank has continually reinforced the meaning of the brand by leveraging unique aspects of the bank's history. It all comes together to project a consistent and unique—"ownable"—image of what the bank is.
Lucent Technologies is an example of a company that took nearly 100 years of corporate equity, threw it out the window, and spent nearly $300 million on a new brand that only defeated its original intention — to establish credibility in the consumer phone products space. With the original splitup of AT&T Bell Laboratories, the creative, technology-driven part of AT&T was spun off as its own company and then launched after an extensive renaming process as Lucent Technologies. The Japanese-style circular brush stroke was the new ID with a stark black and red color scheme. After spending extensive amounts of money on national advertising to launch the brand and pushing new products out to the consumer and corporate markets, they never made a significant connection back to the Bell Labs until the company was already in trouble and loosing money. The consumer could not connect to the brand and the products did not represent a sufficient increase in value for the customer to be attracted to it and pay for it.
Your Brand Does What?
Smaller companies, new product launches and newly named or merged corporations face the challenge of how to communicate the brand without spending the millions many companies havee on branding campaigns.
A great deal of what stands behind the brand needs to be focused on the brand messages you develop and the clarity that's communicated through the visual message, the name and other elements, which all come together to create a unique and valued customer experience.
Imagine you have one chance to meet someone and have a complete experience of them. You perceive them through their appearance, hear them talk and then you find affinity, or not.
There are a few key considerations in the development of a visual brand that should be considered:
Four Key Questions for the Visual Brand
Where does this go? Always keep in mind where the brand is mostly going to live. On your web site, on your business card, in online media. Depending on the nature of your business, signage may be a critical area. Color, shape and form become strong secondary reminders of who you are for customers.
Who's your market? You need to make sure that what you're developing both fits into perceptions within your market and is distinctive. Who is your customer, what do they look for? Security? Comfort? Radical new ideas? All these should become part of the subtle psychological components of the brand. Consumer goods companies are extremely aware of this.
What's your competitors look like? Be very much aware of who your competitors are and how they present their brand. This is the market environment customers see you in. If you are not distinctive, presenting an alternative, or are not clear about what you offer, your brand will disappear into the background.
Who do we not want to look like? You need to know who you don't want to look like. There could be a subtle similarity between your brand elements, colors and identity and a company with incredible negative equity in the market.
— Steven Donaldson, President, RadiantBrands
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