Your visual brand – how should your company look?
Once you know your brand voice, this defines how your company sounds, looks and acts. And the most obvious place to start is your logo.
Your logo might be an icon with your company name next to or below it, or it might be just your company name in a cool font. Or, if you’re Nike or Apple it might just be a symbol on it’s own. You’re not these companies though, so more likely it will be one of the first two options – but there’s no reason you shouldn’t aim high!
In the digital age your logo needs to do a lot of work. It needs to be recognisable as a tiny thumbnail on your social media profile pic and also work just as well on the side of your building. Digital has also changed our interaction with brands. Before, we would always do business direct with people and get to know them. Now, we now do businesses with a brand. This is why there has been a shift from a brand conveying purely information about a company (for example, it used to be that you would always know what a company did just from their logo) to instead creating a feeling. Did you notice how Amazon’s ‘A to Z’ underline became a smile? TUI (formally Thompson’s Holidays), Argos and others have all ditched their strap lines and started slipping smiles into their logos. They want you to know they are happy to see you and that spending money with them is going to make you feel good!
You will also see that the most successful logos are the simplest. Some company’s logos look like visual essays – they have tried to fit every element of what they do into it along with a strap line that could be technically classed as a paragraph. This just results in a visual mess, and when you shrink that visual mess down to the size it will appear on a phone screen it’s going to unusable. Pop into your marketing potting shed and get out your pruning shears. Trim back your logo so that you could show it to someone for a single second and that person could then describe it back to you correctly – because a single second is how long someone could actually see it for the first time and you want them to remember it.
One of the most important pieces of advice I give someone on branding is to remember that your logo never works in isolation. The only time you will ever see your logo on its own on a blank sheet of paper is when the designer first presents it to you. And if they are a good designer, they will never do this. They will understand that a logo is part of a much bigger machine and some of the most successful brands in the world just use a simple name written in simple writing. It’s how you use that logo that makes it into a brand. Take a look at Oatly Oat Milk, their logo is great but it’s just the word ‘Oatly’ in a rustic font. The brand that we’ve all fallen in love with actually comes from the huge murals they paint on the side of buildings, or the inventive messages they write on the side of their cartons. Go to the Oatly website and it might be a while until you actually find a picture of their products. They have invented ‘The Oatly Way’ of doing business, which states ‘We are not a perfect company, not even close, but our intentions are true. We would like to be judged by the good we do and not just the pretty words we say.’ As vegans, that’s our kind of company! They have fun with us, but are serious about making the world a better place. That’s their brand, which is far more than just a logo.
Oatly’s success means we’ve seen many other brands trying to copy them or coming out with similar quirky branding for plant milk. Ironically, the reason Oatly first cut through the plant milk market was because their quirky branding stood apart from early plant milk brands which tended to look similar to dairy, with dreamy-visuals of nuts falling into swirling milk. Now this rustic, hand-scrawled, counter-culture look is seen across many plant-milk brand as each tries to ‘out-ethic’ the other.
In some ways, making your brand look like it sits alongside your well-known competitors can have some advantages. You can never directly copy, but you can use the visual elements that customers have created a mental link with (for example, a rough hand-drawn logo = an ethical company) without having to spend vast amounts of money creating that link in their minds. Thank you very much big competitor for building that shortcut for me to use! However, if you are jumping on that branding bandwagon then so are others.
It is really important that your brand develops its own voice and sometimes you need to zag when everyone else is zigging. Let’s look at Minor Figures Oat Milk. While everyone else’s plant-milk products look like they have just come out of a vegan tattoo parlour, Minor Figures produced a brand that consisted of a plain white carton with a simple and elegant line drawing of someone in a duck costume by illustrator Andrew Rae. The person has removed their head to show it’s a young woman underneath. She is having a coffee. She might be waiting for a bus. You can’t help but double-take when you see this on the shelf amongst all the other plant-milks screaming for your attention. Is this a mistake? Why is she dressed as a duck, and why has she got sunglasses on, did she have them on under the duck-head? Amongst a shelf of brands all shouting with loudhailers, this understated confidence is the one that actually stands out.
