Every brand wants to stand apart from its competitors, build an audience and connect with them. Visual branding is very helpful in accomplishing this. How it helps them, is what we’re going to discuss here. So keep reading.

Preserving brand identity

As industry landscapes are getting dense with competitors, brands have to deal with an identity crisis. Visual branding can preserve a brand’s identity, which depends on how fans perceive the brand.

Brands do their best to improve the perception. They put ads in newspapers and online, write blogs, host events, offer giveaways, etc.. But even after doing all these, many of them fail to preserve their identity. Visual branding can change this. Adding visual elements to promotional materials can make the adverts more effective and more powerful.

As audiences are exposed to such content coming from a brand, they start to redefine the brand. A brand’s identity consists of its vision, its ethos and its approach - everything remains the same, only these are presented in a more entertaining way. With visual branding, the recipe (Brand identity) remains the same; only the ingredients change (Visual).

Infotainment

While non-visual branding is all about providing information, visual branding informs as well as entertains. It captures the essence of infotainment. A case study depicting a brand’s journey may bore audiences, but an animation video featuring the same will never do so. In fact, it will un-complicate things that are apparently complicated.

People have a predilection for graphic and multimedia content. Who wants to read an insipid blog post when he can get all the information from an infographic, along with a visual treat? What’s the point of wading through a whitepaper when a video with a 3D character can explain everything?

It’s an old-school approach to keep information and entertainment separate. Visual branding shows how they add up. The blend, called infotainment allows brands to tap into it and serve their audiences better content.

Expressing emotion

Brands are no longer only focused on selling stuff. They’re focused on connecting and engaging with their audiences as well. The best way to connect and engage is through emotions.

In one of my previous posts, I discussed how a brand needs to appear sympathetic to audiences, so they can obtain the benefits of empathy marketing. Now, empathy is an emotion and a brand can never tickle its audience's’ emotions with a straight face, it needs to appear humorous, empathetic or amused.

Visual branding can help a brand change its persona. Through rebranding itself with the use of visual content, an otherwise boring brand can project itself as congenial and entertaining. As a result of this, audiences start taking the branded messages more seriously than before.

Visual depiction of emotions is more credible than non-visual depiction. A funny face depicts fun, a sad face or bodily gestures depict depression. Letters and words can never express emotions in such an ostensive manner. As brands are becoming overly reliant on visual content to exhibit emotion for audience engagement, visual branding is on a rise.

Better communication

Lack of clarity at the time of communication is a problem for branding. Visual branding brings clarity in communication. There’s no need to scribble down volumes of words when an image can send the message across.

See the image below:

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The image above shows a young guy with a cigarette in his mouth. The smoke emitted from the burning end takes the shape of a gun, pointed at him. On the bottom right side, we see the texts “Kill a Cigarette and Save a Life. Yours.”

There’s no ambiguity and no lack of clarity. The target audiences of the campaign are people who are habitual smokers. The image above reminds them of the dangers of smoking. The texts that accompany the visual are action statement, motivating audiences to perform an action.

Another example. Look at the image below:

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The onlookers can ignore the texts on the banner but they are sure to notice the transformation of the woman in the picture. Had there been no image, they would have been unsure about the usefulness of the weight loss supplement. The image serves as a visual depiction of what the supplement can do to their bodies (If they are over-weight).

Hence, visual branding ensures clear communication and less resources required for communication. By using more and more visual content, brands make it easier for audiences to visualize its personality.

Brand storytelling

As brands are aiming for personification, they are adopting storytelling as a technique. One reason storytelling can be imported to branding is that we humans are programed to listen to stories. Storytelling not just facilitates visual branding, it also helps brands don a humane avatar.

In this article on TweakYourBiz, Eric Haskell beautifully explained how brands can appear as humans by telling stories and the role of graphics and multimedia in it. For brands, the benefits of visual storytelling are below:

#Benefit 1: They can quickly capture the growing handheld user-base. Mobile users love multimedia content. Brands can lasso them by showing them short animation videos or a series of graphics that tell the story of the brand.

#Benefit 2: Through visual storytelling, a brand can make significant progress in lead capturing. It can introduce itself to the site visitors by telling stories about it, the hurdles it has crossed so far, the happy clients it has served. The story can be told using audio-visual media elements, so audiences like them.

#Benefit 3: Storytelling allows brands better harness the power of social media. They can upload original images and infographics on channels like Pinterest, Instagram and Facebook and grab the users there.

To put it simply, storytelling is not storytelling unless it’s carried out by visual and audio-visual content. Such content lays the stone for visual branding.

Experiment is on

Visual content promotion completes content marketing, which is now the bottomline of SEO. The best thing about visual content is it is open to experiments.

Graphic designers, 3D developers, animation experts are all experimenting with it, with the hope of producing visual content that is few notches up the existing content. Brands need to keep their eyes open and observe how things are shaping up. 

Image Courtesy: pixabay.com