Creating Meaningful Brand Journeys with Colour, Shapes, and Rituals

The success of a marketing or loyalty campaign often hinges on how well it engages users. Visuals are integral to guiding users through the journey, evoking the right emotions, and ensuring your brand message resonates. But what makes graphics so vital in a gamified experience, and how can marketers leverage them effectively?

Why Graphics Matter in Gamification

A gamified journey is designed to create engagement through a structured narrative. This often involves a combination of tasks, challenges, and rewards, all of which need to seamlessly guide the user to take action. The key to ensuring your audience doesn’t drop off halfway? Keep them emotionally connected—and this is where your choice of graphics becomes paramount.

Effective visual elements play an important role in conveying the right message, at the right time. They enhance user experience by making interactions feel intuitive, by signalling emotional cues, and by sustaining motivation throughout the journey. Good visuals are more than just aesthetic decoration—they help shape behaviour and nudge users into deeper engagement with your brand.

The Psychology of Colour in Gamified Experiences

Colour psychology plays a massive role in influencing human emotions and behaviour. Marketers have long known the impact colour choices have on consumer sentiment, but in gamified marketing, this becomes even more critical. You’re not only dealing with static ads or product pages—you’re orchestrating an interactive, layered journey where users’ emotions dictate whether they progress or drop out.

I would recommend working with colour design specialists when your campaigns are missing that emotional connection.

Here is only a quick snapshot of some colours, (there is a lot more to it!) on how you could strategically use them in your gamified campaigns to elicit specific sentiments:

• Red: Passion, urgency, and excitement. Red grabs attention and is ideal for call-to-action buttons or highlighting time-sensitive rewards.
• Blue: Trust, calm, and reliability. Perfect for brands that want to instil confidence, it’s also great for loyalty programs where you want customers to feel secure and valued.
• Yellow: Optimism and energy. This is a great colour for the early stages of a gamified experience, particularly when you want to motivate or celebrate achievements like hitting a milestone.
• Green: Balance, growth, and rejuvenation. Green works well for feedback messages (like congratulating a user for completing a task) and can reinforce ideas of sustainability or health.
• Purple: Creativity and luxury. Use purple when you want to emphasise exclusivity in your gamified rewards system or tap into your audience’s sense of creativity and imagination.

Shapes and Their Emotional Influence

In gamification, shape and form also carry psychological weight, often without the user realising it. Shapes are the building blocks of an interface, and they can subtly reinforce your brand message or the sentiment you want to evoke during the user journey.

• Circle: Symbolising unity, harmony, safety, and protection, circles are inviting and non-threatening. They work well in onboarding processes, where you want users to feel comfortable and supported as they start their journey.
• Square: Squares are associated with stability, balance, security, and reliability. If you’re creating a loyalty programme, incorporating square elements in the design can promote a sense of trust and long-term value.
• Triangle: The sharp edges of triangles suggest energy, excitement, and action. Use triangles to drive urgency, such as highlighting limited-time offers or emphasising the next big step in the user’s journey.
• Rectangle: Often linked to comfort, tradition, and formality, rectangles offer a sense of structure and safety. You might use rectangles in areas that detail terms, conditions, or in sections where users need to feel grounded in the process.

If you look at great movies like for example 'Lord of the Rings', they made great use of the combination of colours and shapes: everything in the hobbit village was rounded and bright cheerful orange and yellow glowy colouring, any time there was pending doom you had dark triangular shapes like the gates or mountains to give that impression of danger, urgency and choice having all kinds of outcomes.

Creating Emotional Ties with Imagery and Rituals

When designing a brand campaign, remember that graphics should not only be about aesthetic appeal; they should tell a story. And what better story is there than your own? Many brands have missed the mark by focusing solely on contemporary design trends without looking at the emotional value of their origins. Consider incorporating imagery that ties back to your founders, company history, or even the location of your operations.

For example, a brand originating from a historic city might incorporate local architectural shapes into its design, creating a subconscious connection to heritage and longevity. Similarly, a product with a unique manufacturing process can use visual metaphors or images that resonate with that process—this makes the user journey feel more personal and connected to the product's story.

Incorporating rituals is another often-overlooked element that can deepen customer engagement. Whether it’s the way a product is made, how customers are onboarded, or traditional practices linked to the brand, these rituals can be reflected in the gamified journey through both content and visuals. This makes the experience more meaningful and allows users to connect emotionally.

Top 3 Things to Incorporate into Your Next Gamified Campaign

1. Use Colour to Guide Emotions: Align your colour choices with the emotions you want to evoke at each stage of the journey. Consider the sentiment behind the task at hand: Are you pushing users to complete a challenge or inviting them to explore and feel secure?
2. Leverage Shape Psychology: Implement shapes that resonate with the desired emotional response. Use circles in nurturing stages, squares for reliability in loyalty programmes, and triangles for energy and momentum when quick decisions or actions are required.
3. Tell Your Brand’s Story through Imagery: Don’t overlook your company’s unique narrative. Incorporate imagery that reflects your origins, product process, or brand rituals to create a deeper connection with your users.

By incorporating the power of colour, shape, and storytelling into your gamified campaigns, you’ll not only capture attention—you’ll retain it, nurturing stronger and more emotionally invested relationships with your audience.

P.S. Want to take your gamified journey to the next level? Explore our Gamification Nation Playbooks—they’re packed with strategies and ideas to help you design gamified experiences that engage, delight, and deliver results. Let's start building your next success story today!

Warm regards,

An Coppens