A great design has never been more important in the world of business. Customers are more aware of and sensitive to branding and logos than ever, because the world’s biggest companies have created a standard for good design.
There are so many reasons why your business needs a great design to brand itself and be successful. From a marketing standpoint, it is critical to develop a universal design to brand your business.
In this article, we’ll break down what a great design is, and why design is so very important to your overall branding and brand strategy.
What is a Good Design?
A great design is so much more than a pretty picture. No matter what area of business your design will be used for, there is so much power held within. Design gives you the capability to tell a story, persuade customers, and create an identity for your company.
Taking the time to focus on your brand’s design will be time well spent. A brand’s design isn’t developed overnight. Most brand design takes inspiration from the founders of the company and weeks of planning. Any successful brand you’ve ever seen has had a tedious amount of hours spent just planning what the design will look like.
A great design is a design that has been well planned and thought out. There’s a number of factors that go into how you can craft a good design, but design is subjective. The overall look of your brand depends entirely on why you started your brand in the first place, and the type of consumer you’re going after as well.
When designing different aspects of your brand you need to hit a few essential criteria if you want to have a brand that successfully evokes emotion in your target audience.
Captivate Your Audience
First and foremost, a strong design should captivate your audience. Design encompasses the visual elements that an audience sees first, so these elements should work to capture their attention and draw them in.
These design elements should evoke some kind of emotion from your audience, in order to captivate them well. This can be a shock factor or even just a feeling of awe from the beauty of your design. Regardless of the emotion you choose to evoke from your audience, it should be intentional and reflected in your design choices.
Tell a Compelling Story
A great design should tell a compelling story to your customers.
- Have an emotionally loaded story, ready to tell.
- Don’t be afraid to tell it.
- Find a way to integrate your story into web design, product design, etc…
Think about the story that your brand wants to convey. Is there a way you can tell that story when designing various parts of your business? Do your logo, website, and other brand locations have that story embedded within?
Sometimes a story can be as simple as what your brand believes in or cares about. If your brand’s goal is to save the planet or the ocean, design elements using ocean waves and very blue water can help deliver that story.
Build a Brand Personality
What makes your brand more human? Creating a brand personality may help you with this question.
We’ve seen so many businesses that have dry design elements that don’t embody any human characteristics at all. These are the companies that fail at engaging the consumer in their brand’s story.
Pick a human emotion and run with it. You may have to go back to why you started your business in the first place and think about what you were feeling at the time. Why did you feel so strongly about starting up that business?
Take the emotions you feel when you answer that question, and apply them to your brand’s design strategies.
This will make your brand come to life. Whether people can directly see your brand’s human characteristics or not, they’ll surely be able to feel them if you’ve implemented them into your design properly.
Another great way of figuring out the direction of your brand’s personality is through looking at your target audience. Your target customer is much more likely to buy from you when they can align your brand’s human characteristics with theirs.
If your brand is upset with something, and your target consumers are upset about the same thing, employ emotions of anger or sadness in your design elements. Utilize different colors, styles, and written content that exhibits those emotions.
A brand should be as human as possible. Once this is achieved, the ability for the average consumer to connect with your brand will massively increase.
Where a Great Design Should Be
You may be asking at this point where you actually employ these design elements.
The obvious answer is everywhere! Think about all of the places your brand is located. It should be on your website, social media pages, your storefront logo, your interior retail design, in any advertisements you’re running, business cards, flyers, etc…
There are so many places where your brand’s design comes into play. Any type of successful rebranding campaigns do so uniformly. Every avenue of your brand’s positioning should be congruent with one another and along with that comes your brand’s design.
Why is Good Design Important?
In the simplest terms possible, having a great design will impress your target audience. People are exposed to thousands of brands every day. What is going to make your brand stand out amongst them and form a lasting impression? And why is it worth it?
Create Meaningful First Impressions
As a general rule, people tend to have very short attention spans. Because of this, their first impressions are often quick and based upon very superficial elements.
According to research by Google, people establish a “gut feeling” that helps them decide whether or not they will stay on a webpage in 50 milliseconds. For this reason, your design needs to be compelling enough to give users a positive first impression in a very short amount of time. This applies to all areas of business, not just your webpage!
Customers want to see a design that gives them a good feeling in relation to your business. You can create this feeling in many ways, but just know that a quick glance at your design could be what convinces a customer to stay and do business with you.
Stand Out From Competition
The average consumer is exposed to a vast amount of advertisements and brands each and every day. In order to stand out from the others, you need to have strong design elements throughout every piece of content people may see from your brand.
Remember that often times, people will choose a company based upon design elements.
Boost Brand Awareness
One of the best ways to generate brand awareness, among new and returning customers, is to create engaging content that captivates users. The reality is that badly designed content is simply not engaged with as much or in the same way as content that is designed well.
If you want people to engage with your brand, you need to have a beautiful design that captures their attention. Design connects you to your customers by creating an impactful or emotional connection to your brand. And a connection of this sort will lead to strong brand awareness over time.
Customers don’t fall in love with brands that sell them good products. Customers fall in love with brands that have beautiful design that evokes emotion and stimulates customers to buy. Sure, quality products/services are essential if you want to develop a customer base, but what do you think gets them there in the first place?
Not only can you improve your brand awareness with a unique and beautiful design, you can make your customer interactions much more special. One great way to understand this is to write down your favorite brands on a piece of paper. Take the top few brands you wrote down and examine why you like them.
Sure, their products feel and look solid, and their services may be up to par, but is that all you enjoy them for? What makes you feel truly good about these brands is the emotions they evoke in every aspect of their business, from packaging design to website design.
Branding is Dependent on Design
As you can see, in order to position your brand in the market, you need a strong and compelling design. This design should remain consistent anywhere that people are interacting with your brand, so that you are able to create a strong brand identity.
With a great design, you can facilitate meaningful relationships with customers, stand out among your competition, and build your brand.
At the end of the day, it comes down to the emotions that you brand evokes. Does your brand evoke the right emotions? Always remember your roots and who your current target consumer is, and you should know exactly what kind of emotions you want to evoke.
