Once your audience forms their opinion, you don’t get a say
When forming your brand, naturally you’ll have an opinion on who you want to be, how you want to be perceived and how you’d like your audience to think of you. This is the image you’ll likely strive hard to convey and that you’ve spent considerable time building. Unfortunately, as much effort as you put into thinking about how you’d like consumers to think of your business, they’re the ones who have the ultimate say on what your brand is. Once their opinion is formed, it’s notoriously hard to change, so it’s of paramount importance that you make that vital first impression count as it’s the best chance you’ll have to bring your audience towards your way of thinking before they make their own decision on what they think of you.
Aligning your brand message Consistency is key
While it goes without saying that the brand image you wish to convey must be consistent with the products or services you supply, it’s important that your marketing efforts are also consistent and coordinated. If the feel of any part of your advertising campaign doesn’t ‘feel’ in line with the rest of your efforts, it can taint the perception of your brand and lead to your business being taken less seriously. When consumers are accustomed to seeing, co-ordinated, well aligned, consistent campaigns from the brands they know, a mish-mash of disjointed themes in an uncoordinated campaign can make a business seem less professional by comparison. Once that opinion is formed, it can be hard to change the mind of your audience, making it more important to plan every aspect of your marketing effort.
Imagery is key to a consistent brand identity
When you think of the big name brands, quite often, their brand identity is distilled down into a single, simple, idea over time, which is now so clear that the mere sight of their logo alone is enough to communicate their identity. To the point where that logo would look out of place when used out of context. Think of a dingy bargain basement computer shop, then imagine that the store has an Apple iStore shingle over the entrance. The combination just feels wrong, because the coordinated image of Apple’s brand, clean, bright white, hi-tech, and premium is as far away from that kind of shop as possible. If your brand imagery is to achieve that level of coordination and recognition, every visual aspect of your marketing effort must align.
At Ikon, we have decades of experience delivering marketing campaigns and the imagery therein as part of coordinated marketing strategies which help brands to communicate their message in a consistent manner. When a picture speaks a thousand words and those unwritten words can communicate to your audience in a matter of seconds, it takes a commercial photographer to write visual poetry to entice, to inspire and to do so in line with the wider theme of your coordinated brand marketing campaign so that it’s both professional and believable. To find out how we can help you manage your marketing efforts into a focused, coordinated campaign in order to mould that vital first impression and convey the message you most want to communicate to new sets of eyes, get in touch with Ikon today.
