People often say “don’t judge a book by its cover” - however, in marketing, it’s ironic that the exact opposite is made the case. In a market inundated by information, first impressions have the capacity to greatly affect consumer behaviour, capturing mental real estate in a market built on stimulation and engagement. Research has shown that the first few seconds of a customer’s visual interaction with a brand can make or break the consumer’s decision to build a relationship with it. More often than not, this involves the brand’s signage design as an integral factor.
Aside from communicating the name and product of the brand, signage that effectively draws in customers can connect with them on a deeper level - specifically, through the art of storytelling. In this blog, the team at Hype Print discuss the impact of storytelling on your signage designs, and how you can harness its advantages for your brand.
Why Storytelling Works in Branding
Narratives and folklore have withstood the test of time for a reason - they exist as a social commodity, revealing our shared love of stories as a means of exploring values, morals and perspectives that we resonate with. At its core, storytelling provides for human desire connection through allegory and projection. It has the capacity to go beyond simple delivery of information, because of this, to create an emotional journey with its audience.
A survey conducted by Headstream showed that 75% of consumers think it’s important for brands to incorporate storytelling into their marketing strategies. The report also states that 55% of customers who like a brand’s story will most likely purchase from them in the future.
Take for example Coca Cola’s viral “Share a Coke” campaign, where the company replaced its iconic logos on its bottles with popular names, nicknames and terms of endearment. This simple change added a form of personal connection in a simple bottle of Coke, and created innumerable ways to integrate the Coke product into our social conventions, cultural vocabulary and natural conversation. At its launch, this campaign also helped the company sell 250 bottles to 23 million customers.
While your signage may only be a small part of your overall marketing strategy, storytelling has the potential to do some heavy lifting regarding audience impression, recognition, and conversion. It can move audiences from being casual lookers to buyers and loyal customers.
How to Tell Your Brand Story Through Your Signage
Compressing an identifiable context into something as condensed as your signage can seem challenging. But the key is to ground it with data and information to help guide your design language into creating effective signage for your business. Here are some tips to help guide your process.
Identify Your Story with Personable Details
Start ironing out your story by creating a formal list of items, the likes of your products, audience demographics, location, industry, and values. These can be the stepping stones to help you formulate your story. For instance, if you serve a niche audience, name them. Or if there’s something special about your company’s geographical location, emphasise it.
However, remember that your brand is also much more than the five Ws (who, where, when, what, and why). To showcase a more authentic side to your audience, it’s important you dig deeper to identify your values, passions, and what makes you different. This will helps individualise your brand with a series of heuristics that audience members can reflect as being inherent and relatable at the grassroots level. Connecting with audiences who are interested in the same things forms the backbone of communication here.
Know Your Audience
Knowing who your target audience allows you to create stories that tap into values, aspirations, and emotions that resonate with them. For instance, a luxury goods company might highlight the exclusivity and elegance of its products, as a means of appealing to audience perspectives like taste level, appreciation of quality, social credit, etc.
Know Your Competitors
Standing out in a saturated market means you also have to be aware of who your competitors are. How does their brand storytelling work, and what design elements do they use on their signage to help convey this? How does your story differ from theirs? This will help you identify what unique factors you can highlight in your own signage design to stand apart from them.
Again taking a look at their lineage of design, the storied history of competition between Coca Cola and Pepsi reveal very different approaches to logo design - both, however, communicated a very clear intent to brand themselves in the context of the life and times of the era the brand lived in, and the signifiers that communicated this as commentary on the brand’s relevance in people’s lives.
Apply visual cohesion
When it comes to the design part of your signage, the goal is to make your narrative seen, felt, and heard. This comes down to aligning the visual elements of your design to the story. Ensure that the design, typography, imagery, and colours work cohesively to provide an immersive experience for the viewer.
Approaches to imbuing your brand with a mission statement, goal, value or otherwise is, as can be seen, a complex and varied process that depends on the appeal of your business.
For more information about the power of signage design or if you want to create professional and effective signage for your business, check out our page or contact us today.
