
The Power of Visual Branding
In short, your branding holds a lot of power. But you’re not here for the short version.
So, what is visual branding?
Visual Branding consists of your logo, your colours, your fonts. Things like photo style or illustrations can also fall under this.
Why is it important?
Your visual branding is how customers perceive your business or company. It’s how they remember you.

Colours
For example if you’re driving past supermarkets, and see a glimpse of blue, you’ll immediately know you probably passed a Tesco, or if you saw a glimpse of orange, you know it’s most likely a Sainsbury’s, the same with green and Asda. All you’ll need is a glimpse of a colour, and you’ll immediately be able to link the colour to the company.

Many businesses make the mistake of not sticking to their brand colours, and then wonder why they’re struggling to keep customers. If a customer can’t remember who you are, they won’t remember if they had a good experience with you or not. Which can be a double edged sword, but let’s assume you’re not trying to hide away from negative experiences, and that you only give your customers happy and positive ones.

Looking at a colour is faster and easier than reading. Going back to babies, you don’t teach a baby to read first, you teach them colours and shapes. Reading comes much later. It stays like this way into our adult life. We look for colours and shapes first before reading.
Going back to the supermarket example. If all of their logos were the same…

You would be forced to read to understand what supermarket you’re standing in front of for example. Or if you were looking at an advert, it would be so easy to mistake the supermarkets. You would be forced to read and look for the name to find out what the ad is for. Whereas if the advert was using the shade of blue and red that tesco uses, you would immediately link it to tesco.
Our brains love to link things together. It takes less brain power to link something we already know, rather than working it out on the spot.
This is especially important if you are B2B (business to business). Directors and managers usually have less time, their to-do lists are endless, and they will save time where they can. So if they have to stop and think about your business, they’re likely to move on. As important as it is to gain new customers, it’s just as important to keep current ones.

Fonts
Okay, so you understand colours are important. But how are fonts important?
Fonts hold a lot of power as they are what your customers will look at when you’re passing all the information. Start mixing multiple fonts and font styles and you start looking indecisive. Multiple fonts look unprofessional. Personally, to me it can look like sentences have been copied and pasted from several sources and the format (font, colour, background) from those sources also gets copied. It looks like unoriginal/stolen information. I will insert some random text below to visualise what I mean.

The first paragraph looks like the sentences have been pasted in from different places, Frankenstein style. It looks like it wasn’t thought through very much. It looks cheap, like someone didn’t care enough to work out how to make everything consistent.
The second paragraph looks simple and easy to read. The things that need to be emphasised are done so cleanly. It looks professional, and it doesn’t distract me.
Seeing the first paragraph, instead of focusing on the message, all I can think about is who wrote that message; why didn’t they have time to fix the format; if they didn’t have time, why didn’t they hire someone; if they rushed writing this message, will they rush the service I’m paying for?
Logo

[source: unknown]
These images circulated and were very popular back in 2018, and they are a great example of how powerful visual branding can be. If you never came across the actual brands before, these images would look ordinary to you, but the familiarity of those brands immediately make us uncomfortable seeing them used ‘wrong’.

This is also why having a good logo is important. It’s what people are going to remember. Whilst working at SLT Media, we have worked with a lot of creative professionals too, who have created their own logos, and with those companies we found that they’re very likely to change their logo and brand colours every few months, because they’re never truly happy with it. I can understand this completely myself, I have made a lot of things for us, SLT Media, and I often find myself wanting to fix things and change things. But we understand that changing too often will cause problems for current customers and linking our visual brand to who we are.

This doesn’t mean rebranding is a bad idea. But that’s a whole other topic for another day. In short, rebrand only when it’s necessary – and let a professional help you out. We’re always happy to help, whether it’s just advice, or helping creatively.
To summarise
Keep consistent. Keep everything consistent. Your colours, fonts and logo is how your customers will remember you. Help them remember you, and they’re more likely to come back.
Consistency = Success.
This formula applies to everything in life. In your personal life. In your business. Stay consistent.
