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Creating a durable and relevant visual identity is essential to the success of your eCommerce brand. But how do you achieve both at the same time?
Before a customer tries your products, reads your blogs or even scrolls through your social media channels, they have to digest your brand visually. It should go without saying that your brand’s visual identity is going to be one of the most important factors in your brand succeeding not just in the long run, but at all. However, for a new brand, ensuring that your visual identity gets enough people’s attention, without dating yourself or cheapening you in the long run is difficult to perfect.
For a new brand to catch hold, it has to be significantly memorable, of a specific time, and be for a specific group of people. However, in order for a brand to endure the test of time, it has to be malleable, able to bend to changing consumer expectations and changing times, or potent enough to disrupt them itself.
Whilst there are larger factors at play than how a brand presents itself visually, such as the industry the brand is in, the type of customer the brand serves, the brand’s history, to a consumer visual identity is usually the only thing they have a tangible hold of if they’re encountering your brand for the first time.
So, what goes into a brand visual identity and how do you ensure yours is both relevant and able to endure the test of time?
Whilst the term visual identity is used to refer to a full suite of brand’s visual components there are certain elements that act as the building blocks of this suite, which is what we’ll be discussing here.
From here, you can derive other elements that further enhance the brand visual identity such as your packaging, your web design, and, crucially, your presence across social media and the wider digital world.
A brand’s visual identity can be absolutely stunning from a visual perspective, it’s got a great logo, a great colour palette, the typography looks clean and the imagery is high-quality, if it doesn’t reflect the brand’s vision, align with the product or service offering, or appeal to the intended customer base, then it’s likely to fall flat. Especially if you are a new to market brand.
The main things to consider is your brand personality and your target audience, each of which will inform the other. For example, if you were a clothing brand who focused on comfort and relaxation, having more extravagant branding may not be the way to go, as it wouldn’t relate back to the ideal customer or their perception of such a brand.
Think about the kind of customer who is likely to buy your product or service, the price point of the product relative to your competitors, and the type of industry you exist in.
This is not to say that an unaligned visual identity can’t work. If, for example, your brand sets off with the intention of being a market disruptor or brands itself ironically, such as a brand like Liquid Death.
Liquid Death are a great example of a brand who are successful more so through their brand positioning and branding than the quality of their product. The brand was looking to stand out in a crowded market of water brands, all of which had very similar branding. Liquid Death instead opted to brand itself more akin to a beer brand, meaning it immediately stood out on shelves and appealed to a very specific customer base, who have obviously received the product well.
Identify if there are any trends when it comes to colour palettes, logo design, or other branding elements and how you can look to buck these trends with your brand.
A really basic example would be how we forewent the trend of leaning into heavily gendered colour palettes with our client Verve. We found that the fitness supplement space was heavily dominated by brands catering to either men or women, but few to both. We therefore went the route of consciously branding verve as a gender neutral product for both men and women, going for a more pastel based colour palette as a result.
Whilst bucking the trend is all well and good, a prospective customer isn’t going to opt for your brand if it’s too far away from what they’re familiar with, an issue that liquid death have had to combat since their inception. A great example of this would be sports drink company PRIME.
PRIME, on paper, follows the branding trends of most other soft drink companies. Bright colours, a simplistic logo, a bold font, but the way these elements are arranged on the packaging makes the product immediately stand out on shelves. Arguably, the packaging design is technically poor, but you can’t argue with the results.
When it comes to building your brand’s visual identity, you need to have a clear hold on who your customers are, and what they’ll want from a brand like yours. This can be distilled down to the simplest of elements too, do they want to see lifestyle imagery or product imagery? What kind of influencers or partners would they like to see using your product? The answers to these kinds of questions will go a long way to helping you build your brand’s visual identity overall, it’s then up to you to decide the minute details that make it up.
Trends in web development, marketing, and design overall are going to come and go, as trends do in any industry. Over time, it’s likely that your brand will look slightly different as it weathers the storm of these changes, but ensuring that it is nimble enough to weather them is a challenge that you’ll have to find a solution to.
Some brands are simply too big to fail at this point, but if you’re starting a new brand, it’s essential that you start strong, in order for your branding to endure cultural changes. Keeping to design best practices, using a refined colour palette, and having a simple but recognisable logo are going to set you on the right track
If you need a team to uncover your brand’s visual identity, cut out the noise, and ensure that it’s focused for the long haul, you’ve come to the right place.
We were founded by retailers for retailers, so we know exactly how to get under the skin of your brand, and shoot it into the stratosphere of the eCommerce world. To find out more about our visual identity service, click here.
Heading up creative direction, branding, ux and ui design, Chris acts as the guide for both internal and client side creative endeavours. Chris’ creative career spans over 15 years and his portfolio includes some of our flagship projects over the past few years, including P&Co’s mobile app, and working on athletic supplement provider Verve.
