It’s no secret that if you hope to market your brand, you need to develop a consistent image for consumers to latch onto. This is a truth that permeates every single level of the industry – there’s a reason the most successful brands have developed the most iconic logos, fonts, and colors in their visua identity. Everyone knows the shape of the Disney logo and castle, the red and white of Coca-Cola, or the golden arches of McDonald’s.
To study what these companies do right, you might imagine that the health of their branding identity is predicated one some kind of secret formula – or perhaps even the success of the brand gives somewhat basic design legitimacy. In actual fact there is a secret here, but it’s pretty easy to figure out – they all use simplicity in their branding.
This way, you remember how the visual identity looks, you can identify it out of many other comparisons, and you’re more likely to think of that brand when you need to. If your own branding seems to be hard to remember or causes confusion in your clients, you may have developed a too-complex branding identity. In this post, we’ll discuss how to achieve that and more:
Overstuffed Colour Schemes
Overstuffed colour schemes not only look confusing, but they can feel busy and exhausting to remember or think about. That’s not exactly the impression you want to leave. Use the Coco Chanel rule – before you leave the house, take one thing off your outfit. The same approach can be applied to marketing, where keeping simple color schemes together, perhaps even only two that merge together well, can be applied to most of your branding and graphic designs.
How Do Your Customers Perceive Your Branding?
It’s your business, so your opinion about your marketing motif matters. However, and with respect, if every other customer disagrees or thinks that your genius approach just doesn’t make sense, well, there’s a difficult disconnect there that needs mediating. That’s why it’s always helpful to run focus groups or studies, or even take surveys, to see what customers think of your marketing material and if it’s memorable or not. Encourage them to be honest. Anonymize their responses. It will give you more insight than you had imagined.
Is The Visual Motif Unified?
You can have the coolest visual motif in the world, but if it doesn’t align with your other visual materials, it may seem outdated and odd. Just look at Twitter now, rebranded to X with black colors, but with many distinct hallmarks of the old branding around the internet that adds a relatively disquieting clash depending on where you’re viewing Twitter integrations from. That’s also why it’s important to consider your professional print services so that your physical visual materials are just as clear and rich as your digital designs. In the long run, this will make the most difference.
With this advice, you’ll be sure to keep your business branding both simple and clear, everything you need for a smart and effective marketing package.