Branding is Important for your identity

As mentioned earlier, one of the tasks of visual design is to make sure that a site has visual consistency. That is, all of the pages must look like they’re cut from the same cloth. They’ll have the same logo, and same color scheme, and (for the most part) the same layout. A visitor who has viewed one page in the site should be able to recognize immediately all of the other pages within the site. Additionally, that consistent look and feel should support the “branding” of the site. What, then, is branding? It’s the overall impression made by a product or the entire organization. It encompasses logos, packaging, Internet Internet advertising, presentation, reputation, and, of course, the web site itself. An effective brand has an identity, a personality, and an individuality of its own, with a distinct look and feel that appeals to its target audience. It evokes emotion and separates a product, service, or organization from its competitors. Most importantly, it’s memorable. Let’s look at some examples of effective branding:

- Oreo cookies. We can recognize an Oreo from just a small piece, and most of us immediately think of an associated glass of milk, and twisting the cookie apart (or not).

- Jaguar. The name instantly conjures up an image of a cool, high-performance, luxury vehicle with the evocative jungle cat hood ornament. We see sleek lines and a leather interior and imagine being the envy of all of our friends if we owned one.

- Ben and Jerry’s Ice Cream. The overall image is funky and humorous. We can practically taste Ben and Jerry’s rich icecream in unusual but wonderful fl avor combinations.

- UPS. Very boring, very brown but a UPS truck can be recognized blocks away. That boring brown has come to epitomize reliability, and UPS has capitalized on that image, to the point where the company uses the tag line “What can Brown do for you?”

- Cheerios. Again, they are recognizable from just a tiny piece.

Other examples of effective branding include Disney, Godiva Chocolates, Victoria’s Secret, Olive Garden, Harry Potter books and movies, and Nike’s “swoosh” mark. Now let’s look at an example of ineffective branding. Think of the difference between Offi ce Depot and Offi ce Max…OK, time's up. Can’t come up with anything? That’s just it. Ineffective branding is in evidence here because there is little differentiation in the consumer’s mind, little that is memorable. Their names, logos, and products are similar; the stores even have a similar look. Most consumers would just as happily go to one as the other and might not even remember which one of the two is located just a few blocks away in their own city.

A web site, then, must refl ect the branding of its organization or product if it is to be memorable. Ideally, a coherent visual identity consistent with branding would allow visitors to guess the name of the organization even if we removed the name and logo from all of the pages. A coherent visual identity imparts a “sense of place” and, again, makes a site memorable.

Not only does the visual design furnish an instant impression of a site’s branding, it also affects the site’s perceived credibility, as verifi ed by a Stanford University study: “The number one factor by which people actually judge Web site credibility was by their fi rst impression of the visual design…If it doesn’t look credible or it doesn’t look like what they expect it to be, they go elsewhere. It doesn’t get a second test. And it’s not so different from other things in life. It’s the way we judge automobiles and politicians.” –B.J. Fogg, Director of the Stanford University Pervasive Technology Lab

Notice that what is being judged here is not just the ambiance or mood of a site, but its credibility. Today’s web is a dangerous place; identity theft and web sites that install malware (adware, spyware, viruses, and so on) have trained web surfers to be cautious about the sites they trust. Yet now we are told that it’s not a site’s privacy policy, not its warranty statements, or not how long the site’s been around that builds trust, but its visual design. With the visual design carrying such a heavy load, we certainly cannot give it short shrift.