Exploring the Role of Visual Branding in Product Success

Emerging businesses must contend with any number of challenges as they aim to gain market shares and maintain sustainable cash flows. Depending on the industry, it can take months or even years to reach positive revenue. As soon as they’ve launched, they need to balance various key factors such as inventory, product quality, and customer service on a daily basis, plus retain enough bandwidth to deal with strategic aspects of the business, such as growth. Still, while these things are essential for ensuring the continued sustainability of a business venture, they are hardly the only ingredients for success. As much as it might hurt to hear, success also comes down to whether the products you sell “look the part.” That’s where visual branding comes in and that’s our topic for today.

Whether you serve a more general consumer market or a more restrictive B2B or B2G clientele, visual branding is essential for gaining the recognition and trust needed to generate sales. While logic plays a vital role in some buying decisions, the choice to buy also rests with individual human beings whose emotions can influence their decisions. This brings us straight to the persuasive power of visual branding.

What is visual branding?

Visual branding involves the strategic use of visual elements to represent your brand’s personality, message, and values to prospective buyers while making customers proud of their choice to purchase your brand due to these elements. Consider the green that is prominently featured on Starbucks products, which represents their commitment to the principles of ethical sourcing and sustainability. Consumers stand in line to pay for an overpriced cup of coffee (compared to brewing one at home) and carry the cup around so everyone knows they value the principles Starbucks represents. There are even cases of consumers saving their Starbucks cups to refill from home or at another coffee retailer because of their identification with the brand.

The elements of visual branding include:

• • Brand logo, including the colors and images chosen to represent the brand
  • The typography or font chosen. Think of the script used for Coke products. Companies often commission a custom script, which they copyright to ensure uniqueness.
  • The color palette is also important. Consider John Deere green, which is a copy-protected color unavailable for other brands.

    

• Shapes comprise some elements of the brand, such as the original hourglass shape of the Coke bottle.
• Images are used along with the logo and in marketing materials to create branding.

Why visual branding matters

As human beings, we are all hardwired to connect emotions like trust and happiness to things that we can see. Our healthy appetites for visual media like films and social media content can directly attest to this. Indeed, major businesses and even governments spend billions of dollars a year on finding the right logos, fonts, and professional product design services precisely because improving these elements makes these institutions appear more trustworthy and activates other emotions that drive decision-making.

Unfortunately, many other business decision-makers, especially small business owners, may not realize the value of these branding elements, even if they impact their own everyday purchasing decisions. To an extent, this is understandable, as most businesses must allocate scarce resources to meet immediate operational needs and garner immediate returns. Plus, many smaller companies or new businesses lack the expertise on their team to create these visual elements. However, without adequate branding or product design, a business’s growth will effectively plateau as it struggles to gain the trust of new customers.

Building a brand involves more than simply hiring a graphic designer to create the company logo and other images. First, the company must conduct research to determine the position other brands in their market fulfill for members of their target market. A product positioning map like the one below is one example of how such research can help identify gaps in the position of existing products (such as the hole between a Pontiac and a Buick) in the minds of consumers to find a place they might fill.

Next, the company must determine which elements can help it represent the position it intends to fill.

What better visual branding does for product success

While it is a way of appearing professional, visual branding is also about creating a strong identity that resonates with your target market, as discussed above. On a product level, effective visual branding can mean the difference between being overlooked and developing a strong customer preference or even customer loyalty. Investing the resources to give your products a positive visual appeal will help achieve the following:

1. Improved overall brand recognition

A product with strong visual appeal can make your overall brand more memorable. Well-renowned companies with strong visual appeal, like Apple and Nike, generate instant recognition of their brands and products among consumers, which acts as a shortcut for the totality of the brand. This recognition can help your business and other product offerings stand out in their respective niches. Over time, the positive brand equity that your brand develops leads to the next benefit.

2. Enhanced trust among your target audience

The aesthetics of your product effectively serve as an emotional argument that convinces or dissuades certain types of customers from buying from you. If your product’s visuals align with what your key customers are looking for, you can expect trust between you and your client base to grow, as well as purchases to increase accordingly.

3. Better communication of brand values

Visual cues within your products have the power to tell your brand’s story without spelling it out with words. For instance, if you offer something that’s branded as “eco-friendly,” using green or earthy tones alongside natural materials can help convey that commitment. Similarly, including vintage elements, even if non-functional, can communicate your product’s heritage as well as your brand’s commitment to tradition. For that reason, you may want to revisit your brand’s values when reshaping the overall look of your product lines.

4. Consistent visuals boost marketing effectiveness

Consistent visual branding across your product lines and marketing campaigns serves to improve recognition and drive sales. Keeping a unified theme will eventually create a memorable identity that customers can easily associate with your brand. For this reason, companies create a style guide detailing these elements to guide employees and their hired agencies in the proper use of branding elements, including the colors (in hex codes or RGB to ensure the exact color used matches branding elements), font, images, and even things as detailed as the spacing required around the logo or other branding elements.

5. Drives emotional connections

Much like works of art, the colors, shapes, and imagery you choose to include in your product can evoke specific feelings in your customers such that the brand develops a personality that your target market identifies with (see below). Whether you’re talking about individual products or brands as a whole, investing in visual branding can help you trigger emotions that positively influence purchasing decisions.

6. Simplifies decision-making for customers

Clear and impactful visual branding helps your products cut through the noise, allowing customers to identify and choose your product quickly. This is partly why even dominant brands continue to spend heavily on visual design, as it’s necessary to keep customers coming.

7. Adds perceived value to your product

Properly aligned visual designs can elevate the perceived quality of your product without requiring you to invest significantly more in its production inputs. This can help your product justify its price positioning as a premium or value-added item.

Take charge of your products’ visual branding

Being deliberate in your product’s visuals is more than just blending in or standing out. Business decision-makers must recognize that it also plays a direct role in shaping customer relationships and experiences.

If you want your products to succeed, it’s time to consider how your products and overall brand appear to your customers. Whether it’s refreshing your logo, updating your website design, or tweaking signature items, even small steps can help create a stronger identity that draws customers in. If you’re not sure where to start, a design service that works with businesses like yours might be able to give you the initial direction you need.

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