One of the reasons business owners undervalue the power of graphic design is because they mistake Brand Identity for Graphic Identity.
The identity of your brand speaks to the reaction a customer has to the overall experience with your products and services. The components of brand identity include and exceed the fundamentals of positioning, purpose, and yes, look and feel. At BS LLC we are obsessed with getting these fundamentals correct. Why? Because a Graphic Identity illustrates or “brings to life“ the Brand Identity.
Are you a manufacturing company that is built upon robust materials, remarkably tight construction tolerances, and expert engineering? If so, your Brand Identity may be defined by confidence, dependability, and strength. Your Graphic Identity would therefore tend toward colors, shapes, images, typography, and messaging that reflect these themes; moreover, it would suggest the emotional experience that your Brand Identity promises to new customers and reinforce this experience to existing customers.
The dance between Brand Identity and Graphic Identity should be an intimate one. If a brand’s identity is not accurate, or worse, never really addressed at all, the resulting Graphic Identity is likely to be disjointed, confusing, or low-quality.
We all have emotional reactions to images. Just take one characteristic—color, for example. Red evokes aggression, action, and urgency. Blue has always represented thoughtfulness, calm, or even intelligence. This is why we see so many automobile and motorcycle racing teams utilizing red while many banks and financial institutions use blue in their visual identities. Most of us would prefer a financial advisor who was calmly and rationally building a solid financial future for us rather than an impetuous, aggressive one!
Therefore, a Graphic Identity that accurately reflects the Brand Identity enables the customer to “see themselves“ reflected in the brand. In short, this reinforces trust. For new customers, “This is a brand that I can relate to,” and for existing customers, “I’m glad I encountered this brand; it’s the right one for me” are inherently targets of a good brand design process. Without a pre-existing environment of trust, it’s impossible to consistently pitch prospects for new business, and increasingly challenging to grow business with current customers.
Hopefully we’ve shown you how a brand’s Graphic Identity can be accurate or inaccurate, strong or weak. But here’s another important characteristic of graphic design and how it can support your business: consistency.
Think of the myriad number of ways a brand represents itself to both prospective and current customers. Here’s just a quick, off the cuff list: Signage, packaging, printed communications, email, websites, apps, infographics, uniforms — the list goes on!
If your organization is large enough, you don’t have just one graphic designer producing these materials; most likely you have several different internal and external parties doing so. How do you ensure consistency across all of these different touch points? Can you imagine what the customer impact would be if the colors weren’t consistent, or the imagery and language were different between a brand‘s online catalog and its in-store experience? How would that affect perception, how would that affect behavior, how would that affect the bottom line?
This little thought experiment should make it clear that a well-designed and tightly defined identity presents much more than brand differentiation; it creates a psychological ecosystem that feeds sustainability and growth.
Think about that the next time you’re tempted to purchase a ready-made logo from an e-commerce website!
