Target market, Product line-up and Business Core; A brand identity takes these three aspects of your business and builds an identity around them. Marketing materials give an instant emotional response as your target market interacts with them. Products are defined by how users perceive them, and brand materials carry that perception. Your business identity is communicated through the images, text, layout, and content in your marketing materials.
Good graphic design takes these various aspects of your brand and integrates them into a strategic system of virtual and physical materials. Do you have a retail location? If so, do your brand materials on site match up the brand materials on your website? Does your product packaging match the feel of your brand online or on site?
How Does Graphic Design Affect Branding?
Virtual Branding
Websites are increasingly more versatile branding tools than people think. Rather than just a site that people browse on a desktop, websites are delivered on multiple browsers and apps on desktops, laptops, tablets, mobile devices and smart devices.
Your graphic design on your website therefore needs to be seamless with your physical presence. If you deliver physical products or services, your website and physical branding should be seamless. For example, when Amazon sends out their products, their boxes are recognisable, from the brand identity on the box to the tape used to seal it. When a holiday sale goes up on the website, the boxes they send out reflect that sale.
Whether you are a large retail outlet, small manufacturer, or services provider, your physical and virtual brand experiences need to match for your customers.
Sales Branding
The point at which a lead becomes a customer is another important aspect of your brand identity. You need to build seamless graphic design on sales materials, office and retail locations, and even clothing for service organisations.
This point of actually making the sale is different in many different industries. Good branding and graphic design teams will understand that your unique business and market needs may require different point of sale branding. If you are a retail organisation, your checkout line is incredibly important for branding, and for increasing profitable activities (like selling candy and magazines in grocery stores).
On the other hand, if you offer a service in people’s homes like plumbing, IT or security services, the most important branding moment in the sale is when the customer opens the door. Although they have already decided to purchase with you, if the brand experience they get when they open the door is poor, they will not use your service again.
Packaging Design
Everyone has heard the proverb, “Do not judge a book by its cover.” Just because we hear this proverb does not make it any easier to avoid judging products by the packaging they come in. Many, many businesses have come out with a great product only to have no one sell it because the packaging just doesn’t work.
Graphic design is an important part of package branding in 3 ways. Graphic design has to communicate how the product fulfils a felt need. Graphic design has to be placed in such a way that it is visible in the default display pattern for the product. Graphic design of the packaging needs to communicate enough of your brand that retailers, wholesalers, and consumers will find your business if they loved that product.
As you see, brand is the identity that a target market associates with your business, and graphic design is incredibly important for building that identity. From the colours and text on your website to your packaging and physical locations, graphic design integrates with other aspects of your branding to provide a positive and seamless experience of your business to all your customers. ]
Let us know how your graphic design impacted your brand identity.
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