How Branding Works: A Practical Example

Posted by Jozzua on Mar 19, 2009 in Featured | Comments Off

Let’s do a quick experiment. For this to work, I need you to look at my slides below. I used this as a presentation on my talk about branding and design. Look at it and try to figure out what the gist of my talk was all about.

Ready?

Start slide-flipping:

Did you look at all the slides? Did you try to figure out what it was all about?

Now read the following:

Imagine. Imagine you are going into a building. Once inside, you stare up HIGH at the ceiling and see a playing card (baraha). You stare at it. It’s MAKING your neck crane. The card is facing you. As look at the card, it gets bigger and brighter. The colors are becoming CRISP and CLEARER.

You can see the playing card very clearly now.

What card do you see?

No really, what card did you see? Leave it at the comments section below so I’ll know if the experiment work.

In my design talk last night, people saw a RED card. Hopefully, you would have thought of a diamond. If my presentation was effective, you should have seen a King of Diamonds.

Did you?

This was an experiment in branding and subliminal communication. The idea is – if you consistently show certain design elements to users, you can associate it with something familiar. In this case, the King of Diamonds.

Branding works much in the same way.

Branding is the process of associating your brand with the user’s experience. You can do that by Consistency, Uniqueness and attaching a familiar emotional connection to your brand. To remember this just think of CUE (Consistency, Uniqueness, Emotional Connection)

In the slides above, you will notice the red diamond symbol prominently displayed. The word “king” and other symbols relating to kings are also shown there. Even the slides images are slightly slanted so that you would think of diamonds.

To see a better example of subliminal communication, take a look at Derren Brown’s video.

Now for your branding to be effective, you have to attach your design to a certain user experience. Think of dispositional branding. If people are in a certain situation, what brand would they think of? What website would they go to? Answer to following questions:

1. What website would you go to read news updates?
2. What website would you access to find out what’s happening with your friends?
3. What website would you go to when you want to order food online?

Think about your answers to the questions. If you were able to reply quickly, then those websites have impressed themselves as memorable brands to you.

In Martin Lindstrom’s book, Buyology, he describes how users have associated the “NO SMOKING” sign to smoking. Instead of being deterred from taking a cigarette, smokers want to light a cigar even more. The symbol impressed itself with the smoking experience.

You can do branding on things like your plurk, twitter, facebook, multiply and friendster avatar. Is is consistent enough that people would associate it with you – a person, as a brand?

Now think about your website’s design. Does it impress a brand image on your users? Does it give a memorable feeling to your users when they drop by? Will they remember your website?

Think about branding and design the next time you update your blog’s theme. It can just make you memorable.

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