How do you visually tell your brand story?

Brands gotta step up their game. If over half of your audience is asking for video content, you better deliver! You wanna stand out in this crowded digital jungle? Give the people what they want, and do it with authenticity. The beauty of visual storytelling? It’s universal. No language barriers. A picture, a graphic, a video – that speaks to everyone, everywhere. So, if you’re building a brand or trying to send a message, you better invest in visual content.

I'm an architect that works primarily with Fortune 500 brands. While these companies have plenty of marketing, advertising, and branding experts, most struggle to understand why making ideas physical, tangible, and felt by the human senses is critical to getting ideas into consumers' minds. Everything about the human body and mind is designed to use our senses subconsciously to feel our way through the world to make sense of things long before they become conscious ideas. Therefore, to leave an indelible imprint on consumers, start with attracting, engaging, and influencing the senses first. This sensory input can happen through real touch, taste, smell, or feel or be activated in mediums such as film, music, and literature as surrogates.

As a brand designer, businesses always have a perception who they think they are versus what the customer defines who the business is. The truth lies somewhere in between, which is why is essential for businesses to do the deep dive into brand journeys from the beginning. This helps to build the foundation of what the visual story telling will say and look like. Overall, it will connect with their audience with much more impact than aesthetics alone.

The key to defining your brand story starts with focusing on what your brand changes. In other words, how does your brand transform people? What did you notice needed changing when you started your business? People buy products and services to change and transform themselves from one state to the next, such as fat to thin, poor to wealthy, bald to hairy, old to young, etc. One question that always helps me find a company's story is asking, "What would the world miss if your brand weren't around?" Another set of questions that leads to great story material is, "What are you fighting against? And who or what is the enemy? For Apple, it was PCs. For Whole Foods it was highly-processed food. And for Harley, it was metric bikes.

We call this the brand framework or a creative cocktail! There are so many methods of going about this but utilizing these same questions to find the answers. Depending on the client, having options of methods can help them to find the answers to these deep questions. Often times, it uncovers hidden opportunities or markets they didn't know they could tap into. Bonus!

Forcing yourself to pick the "right" visual style can be stressful and unfruitful. The secret to finding your visual style is to start with a "Field of Meaning" with cultural artifacts and pop culture reference points that get close to capturing the character, personality, and spirit of what your brand is saying or trying to communicate to others. If your brand is fresh, then dirt, water, trees, or tractors might be your style. If your brand is strong, then rough hands, strong jawlines, and steel might reflect aspects of your visual style. The key is to find that place in society, history, or culture where your brand soul resides and to excavate that quality to study it in more detail.

We search until we find the origin of our core visual DNA. We use this visual reference point when developing our visual assets for a client's brand. This visual reference may be a cultural artifact or pop culture image, but we test our visual language against these reference images to ensure they capture the same spirit, mood, and character were looking to achieve. The more we implement this look across other items and projects, the more we test out the depth and integrity of our ideas to see if it works on a website, billboard, or vehicle graphics. Over time we develop a catalog of visual components that we can use in different configurations and applications.

Once our visual language is developed, we test it informally with various audiences to hear what perceptions they have about the brand. If their perceptions of our brand are far off from what we intended, then we know we have some adjustments to make to sharpen the brand perceptions. We'll continue makine the necessary refinements until we hit on the right public perceptions. We also keep testing the material periodically as cultural movements and shifts can impact the relevancy of visual material.