- Bad branding can negatively impact business through lost opportunities like calls, sales, and loyal customers.
- Branding can appeal to consumer psychology by evoking feelings like trust, excitement, and hunger through tactics like colour selection.
- Strong initial branding provides momentum that helps businesses connect with early customers and opportunities.
Bad branding is a spanner in your works. It’s the phone calls you didn’t get, the lost sales, the loyal customer who went elsewhere, the perfect staff member who took the other job.
Sure, anyone can slave away 80 hours a week and grind away to success. But why not invest in your brand and let it do some of the heavy lifting for you.
A good brand has a mission that should set it apart, it should be memorable, versatile, it should take advantage of consumer psychology, it should evoke feelings and it should tell your business’ story.
Here are 4 tips to change how you view your brand and instantly improve your business performance
- Leverage psychology in your brand
- Treat your brand as an asset
- Get your brand right at the start
- Create a brand, not just a logo
Use your brand to play to consumer psychology
Good branding makes you feel. It evokes feelings like trust, excitement, calm and even hunger.
Why do Mcdonalds, Burger King, KFC, Pizza Hut, Dominoes, Carls Junior, Coke and Pepsi all use red in their logos?
Because it’s the easiest way to get our attention and to symbolise hunger without having to spell it out. They’re tapping into primal instincts and visual triggers associated with hunger, passion, excitement and many more feelings and emotions.
Why do more than 50% of Fortune 500 companies use the colour blue? Because blue conjures up feelings of trust, freedom, wisdom and many more psychological triggers that all assist in winning more business.
Colour is just one of the ways psychology is leveraged in branding and logo design. Shapes, lines, geometry, composition and fonts have a great impact on our psychological response to a brand too.
Tying all of these things together is crucial to getting heightened performance out of your brand.
The best place to start before you design a logo is the psychology behind the messages you are trying to send to your target market.
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When you use a logo builder or a cheaply designed logo, you’re missing the guts of what a robust, well thought out brand strategy can do for you.
It’s your opportunity to tap into the emotional, impulsive nature of human beings and to make your job of growing a business that little bit easier when you have basic psychology on your side.
The question shouldn’t be “Can I afford a good logo?”. The question should be “Can I afford not to have a brand strategy?”
Treat your Branding and Logo Design like an Asset
A brand is an asset, both on your balance sheet and to your business performance.
Good assets like equipment, work vehicles and computers are assets that pay themselves off because of their performance and reliability.
You wouldn’t buy an Acer when you need an iMac or buy a drill from The Warehouse if you need a Makita.
The same thing goes for branding and logo design. A cheap logo and brand will only go so far until it’s limited by poor messaging and the inability to perform against competitors.
A brand strategy will keep paying dividends for long after you have put it in place.
Hot Tip!
Don’t code your logo and brand design as an expense.
Branding and logo design can easily be miscoded as an expense. Branding, logo and website design can be coded to brand assets on a business’s balance sheet.
By having brand and logo assets on your balance sheet, your business financials will look more attractive to investors and/or the bank (if you’re looking for funding).
If you’re ever selling the business, the extra money at the bottom line will be added into your EBITDA sale multiple too 🤑
Good branding and logo design is a launchpad
“I’ll get a cheap logo now and rebrand when I have money”. Or, you could shoot your business in the knees and see if it can drag itself towards sales and growth.
This common mistake happens all too often when people fail to see the purpose of a strong brand and how crucial it is to early-stage business success.
A bit of energy and a small investment into your brand identity in the beginning stages of business will generate a lot of business momentum, a lot faster than you would imagine.
If you don’t have a strong narratively driven brand, you risk failing to connect and to display who your business is and you and what you are about.
Usually, in business, you will start by targeting your dream customers. Their opinion of you and their decision to do business with you will be heavily based on your brand.
If your brand is cheap and half-cocked, it will seriously harm your early-stage efforts with those important first few clients.
You only have one chance to make a first impression. It pays to make that impression a lasting one and show yourself off at your best.
Having a clear brand strategy will make your business mission clear to your target market/s, increasing your chances of early-stage success immensely.
The first stages of branding and logo development start with a story. Not a logo or image. Google any material on building a brand and it will usually express the importance of beginning with a narrative, the meaning to your target market. This is good advice.
Creating a flavourless brand may have worked for companies 20 years ago, but they had the advantage of being first to market, or at least early to the game.
Now with such flooded marketplaces, you have to be hungrier, smarter and more creative to own your spot in business.
Take the handbrake off your business from day one. A well-designed brand will help to generate more business and ultimately give you a great return on your investment.
A logo isn’t a brand
Don’t mistake your logo for a brand. A logo is one of many brand assets that you should accumulate.
Other brand assets include:
- Messaging
- Brand Story
- Slogans
- Colour Schemes
- Fonts
- Jingles
- Sounds
- Imagery
- Design systems
- Brand Ambassadors
When you start your branding journey, start with your customer personas/profiles and your messaging.
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Why? If you really understand your customers’ psyche and their needs and then your own purpose, you will be far better placed for your brand to make an impact.
Think of it as a tool kit for creating a brand that is genuine and creates a powerful connection.
Good messaging will look like this.
DOWNLOAD OUR MESSAGING TEMPLATE
You shouldn’t think of a logo on its own. You should think of your logo as a part of your overall branding and design assets.
Hot Tip!
Having a brand that shows your uniqueness is essential to winning over your own specific target market.
If you have a brand that looks like everyone else’s, every time you advertise you are advertising the competition too 😒
Share your comments or feedback and let the Pinpoint team know if you have queries to do with your digital marketing.
