Everyone wants their brand identity to be memorable and effective. However, with so many advertising channels now available, it can be a struggle to make your brand stand out among the noise.
And with so much consumer data available to businesses these days, tailored advertising means it’s harder than ever to get your share of potential clients’ attention.
To effectively capture an audience and build a successful brand, it’s vital that your visual identity and your design strategy are coherent and client-focused. When it comes to achieving this, the key to success is the consistent understanding and application of Design Thinking.
Design Thinking – Putting People First
Design Thinking is a visual strategy founded on two vital ideas:
- Putting design at the heart of everything you do as a brand.
- Putting your customers at the heart of everything you design.
Design Thinking is about implementing People-Centred Design and it’s crucial to cultivating an effective visual identity. It’s about keeping the client at the centre of your design efforts from the conception of your product to your marketing of it, and everything in between.
With an increasing number of consumers looking for an “experience” when they purchase goods and services, more and more brands are upskilling in Design Thinking. This holistic approach to marketing teaches that you shouldn’t just design your visual identity with a view of simply leading customers to your product. Rather your visual identity should be a client-centric focus in-and-of-itself. Your visual identity needs to be something that potential clients can identify with immediately. It’s no longer enough to build a visual identity for your product that highlights its positives or showcases how it is superior to market rivals. You need to design an identity that focuses on the customer’s wants and needs.
Research Your Market
Design Thinking teaches that in all your design efforts, your focus should be on the potential client as much as it should be on the product, if not more. This school of design requires in-depth design research into your potential consumer base. The successful implementation of People-Centred Design must begin with rigorous analysis, testing and research into your brand’s would-be clients. You should be asking:
- What kind of visual story will your target audience want to be told about themselves?
- How does your target audience see your product in their life?
- What is the visual identity of your target audience?
Learn from Your Target Audience
This final question is key and one that often goes overlooked. When a brand is trying to forge a successful design strategy, it always has a plan readily available to it in the form of the visual identity of its target audience. This is why Design Thinking places such an emphasis on customer research and analysis. Once you’ve established your target audience, you’ve basically got the blueprint for your visual identity!
