You might ask yourself why some companies are so successful. Is it that they offer products and services of higher quality than those of their key competitors? Do they choose robust business logo design or catchy taglines for their brands? Or do they invest more in marketing research than their competitors? While they do all that, they also invest more in branding.
A branding process may not cost you millions, but it requires a lot of research and creativity. You have to consider the brand design (packaging, font, colors, and themes), your social media presence, the pricing and quality of your products, taglines and slogans, customer service, and your company culture. Here are the top 10 branding trends you must keep in mind when branding your new business in the future.
1. Simple Flat Logos
When designing, most companies are going for comfortable, practical, and aesthetically pleasing designs. Therefore, you must create an easily recognizable logo and one that can be used or replicated on many objects and platforms. Choose a type of logo and font style that is easy to understand and can perfectly capture your brand’s personality and voice perfectly. Most brands are going for simple logos with clean lines and without imagery.
2. Sustainability
Climate change and global warming are no longer niche concerns because all consumers and brands are interested in them. Most consumers choose to buy from eco-friendly and sustainable brands, including when it means paying more. They also expect brands to prove their commitment to resolving environmental problems and preserving the planet.
Most brands have responded to the demands by adopting ethical business processes and implementing sustainable initiatives to retain the loyalty and trust of their customers while limiting their carbon footprint.
3. Interactive Branding
Sharing images on social media platforms, publishing blog posts, and calling it a day is no longer enough. Customers expect a responsive experience from any business they patronize. That means your customers want to contribute to the content they consume and influence it by interacting with the stories, visuals, and videos.
Research has shown that only businesses interacting with their audiences manage to capture their attention and increase their landscape. Interactive branding allows business people to experiment with creativity and tell captivating stories about their products or services.
4. Data-Driven Branding
Today, both consumers and companies are generating a lot of data. The good news is that any business person can use the data to understand how their customers relate to their brand. So, it is time to use business intelligence and analytics tools to gather, analyze and manage your consumer data. This will help you conduct effective market research and formulate good product strategies.
5. Inclusivity and Diversity
According to a recent survey by The Female Quotient and Google, around 63 percent of consumers take action after seeing an advert that they consider diverse or inclusive. The survey also showed that over 69 percent of Black consumers prefer buying from brands that positively reflect their ethnicity/race in their adverts.
Being inclusive and diverse in your business branding is easy. All you have to do is embrace and include people from various backgrounds with stories your target audience can relate to. That may include destroying stereotypes and showcasing how people can be.
6. Typography-Driven Branding
This is another top branding trend. Most businesses are experimenting with eccentric, bold, stylish, and experimental typefaces full of character. That should tell you that it is time to ditch the boring, old, and plain typography and try your creativity by creating letter logos.
Add edgy strokes, funky lines, 3D elements, illustrations, variable styling animation, and colors to your fonts to make them more vibrant and grab your audiences’ attention. The text you select for your brand visuals should not necessarily be words that support your brand images. Tweak the positions, order, and letter size of your typography to know what works for your business.
7. Balance and Harmony
Balance refers to arranging visual brand elements to create structure, unity, stability, emphasis on the elements, agreement on parts, and beautiful visual effects.
Balance and harmony will make your brand more convincing, showing that you have invested more in your brand design and content. It will also help your audiences understand your business messages. So, try to attain harmony and symmetry in your business branding.
8. Hand-Drawn Branding
Hand-drawn script fonts are another top trend that any person planning to design a brand for his/her business should consider. Hand-drawn fonts are not only eye-catching, but they also provide branding elements with a realistic and natural appearance. They are a good choice for businesses within the creative sector, businesses selling confectionary or kid’s products, and those focusing on beauty and design. If you are in any of the three industries, go for fonts that employ classic calligraphy.
9. Emblems
People easily remember emblems because they are memorable and symbolic. They convey the brand’s purpose, tell a story, and remind people why the brand exists. Unlike brand logos, emblems allow brand designers to experiment with many designers so that they can infuse more images, colors, graphics, and other essential details. However, an emblem must express the business’s primary ideas to be effective.
10. Gradients in Logos
Many brand designers incorporate three-dimensional (3D) layers, gradients, depth, and shapes in logotype designs and other branding elements. They are doing that mainly because 3D gradients accentuate color contrasts and give logos a distinctive and energetic look.
A gradient logo will offer you enough room to mess around with various colors and produce solutions. You can pair the gradients with animations to bring all elements to life. To get an impressive effect, you can use Photoshop gradients.
Conclusion
Some years ago, brand-to-consumer relationships were more about transactions. That has changed; today, it is about creating trust, connections, emotions, and loyalty. A business brand covers more than the imagery. It covers how you act, what your business stands for, and the experiences you provide to your target audiences.