Branding: Beyond the Visual
When we think about branding, we typically conjure up images like the Coca Cola logo or the Target bulls-eye mark. While this makes total sense, it’s also a huge diminution, consciously or not, of the complexity of a brand. We are visual creatures who devote half our brains to processing visual information,¹ so recalling a visual makes more sense than thinking about pretty much anything else. It’s clearly not our faults that we operate this way…it’s simply evolution.
The thing is (and to a certain extent I know I’m preaching to the choir), a brand is not solely about the visual cues it creates—it’s about the sum of its parts.
Sure, you can have an awesome visual identity and roll out collateral that looks good and serves a functional purpose, but if you’re not considering the aspects of a brand beyond the visual you risk solely catering to aesthetics and lose the opportunity to craft a truly meaningful story.
And that’s in the best of cases.
In the worst of cases, you’re probably following a trend that’s working now but will likely lose relevance in the near future — without much added thought to how this trend might be applicable to the brand beyond the visual.
Don’t get me wrong, I wholeheartedly believe in creating beautiful things for the sake of beauty, but when you’re tasked with crafting a brand you’re responsible for a whole lot more than its good visuals. In a society bombarded by imagery every second of every day (keep swipin’, keep swipin’), it’s imperative as creatives that we truly take the time to think about the meaning of the work we’re doing and how this work resonates and serves society.
So what’s a designer or studio to do in order to create a brand that is both visually engaging as well as genuinely meaningful to a client and their audience?
I’ve debated this issue with myself and my studiomates for some time. The conclusion we have reached is that, while it’s undoubtedly important to develop a unique and gorgeous visual identity, it’s equally as important to give this identity the chance to be informed by some version of what our industry has termed “brand strategy.” Personally, I’m not a huge fan of the term (I don’t particularly like official-sounding things), and, in all honesty, I’m still a bit perplexed by its varied meanings. It seems like almost everyone I meet has a different interpretation of its definition and what exactly its process entails. For those reasons, I prefer to simply think of brand strategy as a precious phase of the creative process that helps uncover the story and originality behind a brand.
This process in our practice at Ludlow Kingsley requires us to align ourselves with the business and design goals of our client through research, conversation, and tons of questions before diving in, at all, to the visual aspects of the identity. This need stems from an observation we had been observing for some time:
Many clients come to us fully able to tell us about their business, but fail in their efforts to communicate their story.
There is a difference and this difference is what imbues a brand with humanity and this humanity is what we want to encapsulate in every brand we work on. Typically, clients are too close to their own product or service to be able to grant the perspective needed in order to get a clear picture of who they are and how they want to be perceived. Brand strategy helps us get there. Going through this phase grants us the time to collect, learn, and question everything we know about their product/service, industry, competition, audience, and goals in an effort to attain:
1. A clear understanding of the brand story as a whole (where is the humanity and how do we talk about it); and
2. The differentiator(s) that allow the brand to stand out from everything else in our overly saturated marketplace.
This is not an easy task, not in the least. It takes time, nuance, and experience to be able to tease this out, but it’s well worth the effort. With a brand story and differentiator in hand, developing a visual identity with a unique point of view is all the more possible. In an ideal world, these visuals communicate a larger brand story — one that we’re hopefully at least somewhat conscious of.
More on this to come!
