How Great Design Impacts Your Brand

As an artist and designer for over 30 years, this is the part of the brand strategy process that I find the most exciting, fun, and rewarding.

In my opinion, the success of a brand starts and ends with great design.

Great design is about creating harmony and balance through the use of colors, shapes, textures, graphics, space, images, and typography.

Without beautiful, memorable, and engaging designs, your brand will get lost in the crowded marketplace and be perceived as boring and insignificant.

Customers recognize and value professionalism. Therefore great design does not only determine the success of your brand, but it also increases the level of trust people have in your products or services.

In fact, a recent study of 63 companies on the Financial Times Stock Exchange showed that the companies that put an emphasis on design outperformed the ones that didn’t by over 200%

Investing in great design now, will reward you in future growth and profits.

To help you understand the importance of design, let’s take a look at 9 proven ways great design will positively impact your brand.

#1: Great Design Creates a Strong First Impression

A potential customer’s first experience with your product or service is not the first time they use it, it’s the first time they SEE it.

Every day customers are constantly bombarded with thousands of marketing messages, all competing to get our attention.

The best way to instantly capture the eye of the consumer is with great design.

In fact, studies have shown that people will make a decision about whether or not something is visually appealing within 50 Milliseconds.

With this short amount of time to make a first impression, it is critical that design becomes one of your top priorities when developing your brand strategy.

One of the best places to start is with your brand’s most valuable visual asset, your logo.

Your logo is typically the first visual identifier of your brand to the consumer.

Whether it appears on your website, on your product packaging, in your social media posts, magazine ad, or on billboard, it must be attractive, memorable, and descriptive to generate a positive response from the customer within seconds.

Unfortunately, great logos aren’t easily or quickly designed.

Professional designers often require weeks, if not months, and dozens of design mockups before the final logo is ready for the world to see.

Great logo design requires expert knowledge of color theory, typography, and spatial representation.

Designers also need to consider the brands personality, vision, and values. As well as who the target audience is and the competition.

Oftentimes companies will rush through the logo design process so they can slap it on a website and call it a day.

However, it’s this first impression that will create a positive and memorable experience for the consumer. So please, don’t skip over this valuable step.

But it’s not just your logo that you need to worry about.

In today’s digital world there are dozens of potential touchpoints where a consumer may experience your brand for the first time.

It may be your website, blog, landing page, email, facebook post, ad banner, YouTube video, or Instagram story … just to name a few.

This is why it is critical that no matter where and when a consumer sees your brand for the first time, that the design experience is always positive.

#2: Great Design Helps Your Brand Stand Out

Standing out in a world where we encounter over 5000 marketing messages every day takes extreme dedication.

Great design is the number one way your brand can cut through all the noise and be seen.

We are visual beings. Depending on what the consumer sees, they will make a decision about your brand before they are even able to comprehend your message.

Great design will first attract the attention of the consumer. Then, once you have their focus, you can then present them with your strategic messaging, your offer, and your value proposition.

But it will be your visual identity that engages and makes the rest of this process possible.

Not only will great design attract the customers eye, it will detract it from the competition.

For example, if there are two similar products sitting next to each other on a shelf, one with better design than the other, which would you choose to look at?

Humans perceive beautiful things as being better, and are even willing to pay a premium price based on how nice something looks, regardless of whether or not the product actually functions better.

#3: Great Design Promotes Brand Consistency

Consistency is a key element when developing a cohesive brand and increasing brand equity.

A brand’s success is directly tied to it being memorable.

Without consistency, the consumer will perceive your brand as chaotic and disorganized.

For example, if you are constantly changing your brand colors, typography, or image treatments, the consumer won’t have the opportunity to get to know you, or trust you.

Changing a few colors may not seem like a very big deal, but compounded over time, it will cause confusion and could lead to the failure of a business.

Plus an additional bonus of creating consistent design is it will elevate the perceived quality and value of your products or services.

#4: Great Design Builds Trust

Virtually every business in existence today has a website.

And that website is typically the first interaction a brand will have with a potential customer.

So it is critical that your website provides a positive visual experience, is easy to navigate, and quickly gives the visitor the information they are searching for.

A professionally designed website will gain the trust of your audience and increase the chances of them converting.

In contrast, a poorly designed website that is too busy, distracting, difficult to navigate, ameatur, boring, slow loading, and includes too much text, will have a negative experience on the visitor and most likely be perceived as untrustworthy.

#5: Great Design Makes Your Brand Memorable

As I previously mentioned, humans are visual creatures.

We remember things that we have seen, and often describe our experiences through visual memories.

Studies have determined that adding visuals to text can improve recognition by up to 400% when compared to text only.

A memorable brand is created through intentional and carefully chosen design decisions based on the desired outcome.

A brand’s logo, color palette, typography, and imagery should all work in unison to invoke an emotional experience from the consumer.

These visual cues, and feelings connected to them, are what makes a brand memorable.

Once again, this is also why consistency and uniqueness in design matter so much.

If you are constantly changing colors or typography, your customer’s brain never has a chance to create a memory of your brand.

#6: Great Design Motivates People to Take Action

Whether that is a button to buy now, a form to enter their email, or a link to share a post,

Effective calls to action are often enticing text that is paired with a well-designed visual.

This combination of both text and graphics has been proven to increase conversions over text only applications.

#7: Great Design Makes Social Media More Engaging

Your company’s website is no longer the only online presence you need to succeed.

Today, social media has become the number one source for marketing and plays a huge role in promoting a brand and connecting with your customers.

And it’s not necessarily what you post on facebook, linkedin, twitter, instagram, or pinterest that is the most important.

Instead, what is most valuable to the growth of your brand is engagement and sharing.

When someone shares a post, a tweet, or a photo, they are telling their friends and family that this brand can be trusted.

And the posts that get shared the most are the posts that are well designed and include graphics or images.

In fact, a 2017 study by Buffer found that tweets that included graphics increased social engagement by more that 150%.

Without design, your social media marketing messages are just plain text and will rarely catch the eye of someone scrolling through their daily feed.

But great design will engage with them and increase the likelihood of them sharing your post.

#8: Great Design Ensures You Appeal to your target demographic

Great design may attract attention, but if it’s not engaging with the right audience, then it’s all for nothing.

Therefore, your designs need to be strategic and appeal to your target demographic.

When designing your logo, website, social media posts, and marketing campaigns, remember your brand’s personality must align with the personality of your customer.

For example, if you are a rugged, tough, and adventurous brand, your designs shouldn’t be soft, elegant, and use a pastel color palette.

When great design is properly aligned with your brand personality, it will appeal to your target demographic and support the customer experience.

#9: Great Design Improves User Experience and Increases Conversions

In addition to making your products and services look appealing, great design has the additional task of simplifying information so it is easier to understand.

Our world and the technology we use is constantly becoming more and more complex.

The job of the professional designer is to create structured interfaces, translate data, and present products so the consumer can quickly and easily digest the information.

For example, when a customer lands on your website, the experience should be positive and simple.

They should know in a matter of seconds exactly who you are, what you do, how you can help them, why you are the best solution, and finally how they can either get in contact with you or buy now.

Great design will lead your potential customers through an enjoyable experience that ultimately ends with increased conversions.

Be sure to invest heavily in your creative team and the designs they create.

Professional designers won’t just be making your business cards look nice, they will apply extreme attention to the small details that you may overlook.

They will consider who you are, what your values are, who your audience is, how to beat the competition, how to express your brand personality, and how to communicate this information in the best way possible.

Great design will give you a competitive edge, drive powerful marketing results, and allow you to stand out.

So that’s about it. You should now have a better understanding of how impactful and powerful great design can be on the success of your brand.

To continue your training and dive deeper into how to design your brand’s visual identity and the guidelines necessary to consistently create great designs, check out my free 7 Day Brand Bootcamp by enrolling below or by visiting 7DayBrandBootcamp.com.

I’ll see you there!