Before there was a screen to fit comfortably in your pocket, this distinctive fruit captured audiences with “crisp” appeal. Apple’s brand has skyrocketed over the years with the evolution of the iPhone alongside technological advances like voice recognition, but where would it be without the iconic apple itself? The same goes for Nike’s “Just Do It”, or Dos Equis’, “Most Interesting Man”. Unique, impressionable brands strike an emotional and memorable experience long after a marketing campaign has ended.
They depict how we define ourselves in that particular moment in time and lives on through pop-culture. Excellent branding and graphic design services provide more than just a campaign, but a story we go back to as a measure of how far we’ve come. Today, these stories are repurposed and rebranded into sharable content like memes or voice-overs, connecting newer generations with multimedia’s original landscape: traditional media.
What is Branding and Brand Identity?
Branding is the subtle art of utilizing logos, packaging, typography, personality, and other visual and emotional elements to convey a brand mission. It’s a method of experimenting with emotional, visual, historical, and human experience that allows for products to stand out from others in the marketplace where quality is often comparable or compromised. Establishing uniqueness in brands takes a trained eye and a skilled creative team to properly fashion brand identity.
Brand identity refers to the face or voice of the brand that allows the audience to connect with its mission within the ethos of the industry or marketplace. As brands evolve and adjust to trends in the marketplace, brand identity steps in to represent its overall core ideals and values. How customers interact with a company’s brand identity leads to brand awareness and helps define its strategic marketing objectives.
In order to establish a powerful brand identity, the following elements should be considered:
- Clear brand purpose and positioning
- Thorough market research
- Likable brand personality
- Memorable logo
- Attractive color palette
- Professional typography
- On-brand supporting graphics
The Difference Between Graphic Design and Branding
In the digital marketing world, branding and brand identity usually fall under the category of graphic design. While this is true in some ways, the two require inherently different skills. Defining this can help you narrow down your search when seeking branding and graphic design services.
High-Quality Graphics Improve User Interaction
Graphic design acts as the skeleton or bones of your brand. It includes all the design aspects mentioned above which are required to build the elements of your brand’s identity. Taking into consideration the visual and emotional elements that allow customers to connect, good graphic design makes an impressive impact. When done just right, graphic design ensures your brand’s visual messaging is cohesive, consistent, and easily adaptable to fit a variety of formats.
Whether it’s through a social media campaign, e-mail marketing, or infographics, high-quality visuals impact the experience a customer has while interacting with your brand. Professionally constructed visuals grab an individual’s attention much faster than low-quality, stock, or non-existent imagery. Nearly 70% of online shoppers agree that the quality of images on an e-commerce site helps establish their purchasing decisions.
Consistency and Strategy Increases Customer Loyalty
While graphic design helps illustrate your story, branding is its narrative. Not only does branding contain a company’s personality, beliefs, or values, but it also includes everything from how customer support is handled to the use of stock photography on the product pages of your website. Simply put, it’s the relationship a business has to its customer base.
Staying up to date with consistent, branded messaging without over-doing it leads to customer loyalty. One bouquet of flowers per year just won’t do it, but neither will a rose garden. This is how digital marketers become experts at delivering your brand’s message – through organic interactions with your customers through the right placement, conveyance, and competitiveness.
If the key to any good relationship is consistency, then the lock is relevancy. This is done by finding the right balance between meaningful aesthetics and impactful strategy. Once this is established, a level of trust with your customer base allows for your brand to gain market share based on “gaps” within your industry. Whether you know it or not, your customers are observant of these gaps in brand messaging, and once overcome can even create influencers for your brand. For example, take MAC’s “Back to MAC” campaign. In an effort to close the gap on the public’s perception of the company’s environmentally un-friendliness, MAC put eco-accountability into the customer’s hands.
Branding is the story a company tells through its actions and interactions with the public, and the art of branding is what makes these exchanges as harmonious as possible. When your brand is your customer base, and your customer base is your brand, you’ve found just that – harmony. All in all, an agency’s ability to add depth to your brand and trim the excess or unwanted interaction is what determines a successful branding strategy.
UX and UI Design: How Branding and Graphic Design Impacts User Behaviors
Once your branding and graphic design elements are set in place, user experience (UX) is how agencies study a potential customer’s interaction with your brand. User experience design is applied when improving the usability, accessibility, and positive feedback gathered from UX research or data gained from your website. This could mean anything from how information is assembled to how easy or difficult it is to convert on your site.
User interface (UI) design pertains to any design element on your website that includes interactivity. Not only does this type of design help improve user experience on your site, but it can also help establish goals or behaviors you wish to see. Examples of UI elements include:
- Microinteractions or responses to user activity
- Animated elements and transitions
- Use of brand colors and typography
- Interactive Elements (buttons, links, checkboxes, form fills)
Data Street Marketing | Your Branding and Graphic Design Specialist in Meridian, MS
At Data Street Marketing, we have a consistent track record for delivering high-quality graphic design and branding services to our clients in Meridian, MS. Whether you are in need of a logo design or re-design, motion graphics, or UI design for your website, our team is experienced and qualified to handle a variety of needs. Contact us today to inquire about our branding and design services near Jackson, MS today!
