Business Identity: Imagery as Brand Reinforcement

admin | September 2, 2010

They say a picture is worth a thousand words. To the savvy marketer, it could just as easily translate into thousands (or tens of thousands) of dollars.

Perhaps your business is suffering from an identity crisis – struggling to capture the attention of your target audience. By employing a simple psychological technique, you can begin to burn a lasting impression into the minds of your prospects and visitors.

It’s not mind control — the answer is imagery.

The use of imagery is a powerful psychological technique that has been used across a myriad of industries; in fact, you’ve no doubt been influenced by imagery many times as a consumer and never realized it.

Employing Imagery to Improve Brand Recognition
One of the tenets of a successful business is having strong brand equity. If a potential customer cannot remember your name, brand or product within moments of leaving your website, your chances for converting them into a customer are significantly diminished.

As human beings, we have photographic memories. This skill has been hard-wired into our genetic make-up long before words and written language were even conceived. Our ability to recall an image and associate it with a particular subject or event is far greater than our capacity for remembering simple text alone.

If you want a visitor to remember your business name, products and principles – give them an image that defines your business. There are a number of ways that this can be accomplished:

A memorable logo or tagline
Images that educate
Images that evoke emotion
Images that demonstrate benefits
Imagery that tells a story

Serving up text alone will render your message forgettable – pair the same message with imagery, and the pictures will subconsciously trigger the brain to recall the textual content that was present alongside the displayed imagery.

Burning Your Brand into their Consciousness
We have a massive capacity for picture recollection, and nearly all pictures trigger a memory. Knowing this, we should strive for a cohesive image that will reinforce our brand with consistent color, logo, tagline and images.

For example, if you want a child to remember the word “dog,” show them a picture of a dog and every time they see that picture they will repeat the word ‘dog’. This same memory technique is even more powerful with adults.

Your logo is the print embodiment of your brand, and it will be immediately associated with it. Slogans may be catchy, but a logo is memorable. People may be able to remember a slogan, but they are not likely to recall where they read it and what it represents.

Of course, this principle is not relegated simply to logos. Imagery can be interspersed into textual content to trigger positive emotional responses. Images that represent happy memories or feelings can subconsciously influence consumer opinion. For someone promoting children’s toys, powerful imagery would constitute images of happy children – for a business offering stress reduction services, they might opt for imagery that features a waterfall, or a tranquil sunset.

Best Practices

Select an easy-to-read font for your logo, tagline, web headers, etc.

Avoid falling prey to selecting fonts that will portray your business in a less-than professional manner.

Select a color scheme that relates well to your business niche. Do you offer environmental products? If so, consider selecting nature-inspired colors for your color scheme.

When designing your web pages, be sure to pair colors that will be both pleasing to the eye, and easy-to-read.

Don’t panic if you don’t have a logo. There are many affordable services available on the net, including several do-it-yourself formats. For the true do-it-yourselfers, consider adapting stock art or clipart to create your logo. Just be sure that you familiarize yourself with the usage rights before you create your masterpiece.

Choose a name that reflects your business. If you need inspiration, make a list of the key descriptive terms for your business, and then look those words up in a dictionary or thesaurus.

Creative = Memorable. A great example of this is Three Dog Bakery®. TDB’s website immediately conveys a sense that the company cares about pets. The principals of the company share their story about their dogs on the website; this makes them instantly relatable as people. Clever plays on words, like their “dogalog,” are sure to strike a chord with avid pet owners, and that is precisely what they should do. From the lively color scheme to the whimsical graphic images, this is a site you’ll remember long after you’ve cleared your browsing history.

Remember, a consumer must be presented with your advertising message on the average of seven times before making a purchasing decision. Don’t dilute the value of your brand by being inconsistent. Instead, reinforce your image with every contact. Consistency pays dividends.

The subconscious triggers work in two ways: first, they will immediately influence our emotions and second, they possess the power to remain ingrained in our memory. If we were to happen across these same images in the future, we are likely to associate them with the business where they first saw them, as well as the context in which they were offered.

You probably cannot recall the first line of the last book you read; however, I’d venture to say you can recall the cover color and any photo or illustration it featured. Now, as you begin to focus on that cover, you’ll notice that more details about the book will come to you. This is a perfect example of the psychological triggers at work.

Employing this knowledge will not only prevent your business from facing its own identity crisis, but it will enable you to begin the process of burning your brand into the subconscious mind of your potential customers.

About the Author:
Traci Hayner Vanover, aka The Promo Diva®, is a business consultant and coach that specializes in the unique marketing and promotional needs of small businesses, authors and startups. Drawing on over twenty years of Fortune 500 experience in the fields of marketing research and promotion, Traci’s blog utilizes pop culture and trends to illustrate business concepts and principles, and blends helpful tips and resources with a healthy dose of humor. Traci is the founder and publisher of Everything Small Business Journal. To connect with Traci, visit her on Facebook or Twitter.