Good brand design isn’t important? Look at the bad one!
Everyone knows branding is a vital part of every business, but do you know one of the most vital parts of branding is brand design? Maybe you think you just need a logo to operate a business, but no!
And if you think “Good brand design is not important”, you’ll change your mind by reading this article. The brand design will establish what your firm stands for and differentiates it from its peers.
So let’s see what “miracles” happen when a brand has a good design.
1. The impact of Good brand design cannot be underrated
Recently, an analysis of how 300 companies performed over a five-year period was published by McKinsey & Company.
Research by the McKinsey Company found that good design has a certain correlation with business performance, and this is true not only for image-intensive industries like fashion, retail, and F&B, but also for the following industries: Medical technology, Consumer packaged goods, banking,…
“Can the positive impact of a good brand design be measurable?”.
With this mentioned research, the answer is “Yes”; it shows that market leader brands that have best design practices, also have a number of metrics significantly outperforming their peers, achieving:
- 32% higher revenue growth, on average
- 56% higher shareholder return, on average
Good design expresses some brand’s advantages: professional, competent, and detail-oriented; it is the first factor that comes into contact with and helps consumers evaluate the quality and have a sense of reliability.
The survey also found that many people quickly judge a company by its design elements (logos, etc.), especially online:
- 50 milliseconds is how long it takes people to assess a website
- 55% of visitors spend less than 15 seconds on a website
- 75% of consumers say they judge a site by its design
Steve Jobs once said, “It’s not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.” In other words, design isn’t simple about aesthetics; it’s about making the whole experience better.
So let’s look into a bad brand design to understand why your brand needs to have a good brand design!
2. A business strategy that doesn’t keep up with a change in brand design? Is this change worth it?
Let’s see Yahoo! case.
Everyone knows the fall of the empire “Yahoo!”
The biggest mistake of this brand is probably the wrong direction of business strategy, which we all know.
However, there is another side we can look at to better understand one of the reasons why “Yahoo!” lost position previously achieved.
“Bad” brand design is not necessarily an ugly brand design, it is bad for many different reasons.
Back to the story of Yahoo!
Appeared in 1995, Yahoo! is the product of two Stanford students David Filo and Jerry Yang. They created Yahoo! simply as a tool to help them keep track of their favorite things online.
After more than 10 years of operation, Yahoo! had not had a clear direction or long-term vision for its brand while the need for a machine to help search everything on the Internet of the world’s netizens dramatically increased.
This absence, combined with the event – Marissa Mayer took the position of CEO of Yahoo, which led to an ineffective brand identity launch in 2013.
Marketing campaign – “30 days of change” was born with the main activity that every day Yahoo will put out a different version of the logo on its homepage. And on September 5, 2013 (US time), the official new logo will be announced globally by Yahoo!.
The Yahoo!’s New Logo 2013 with the old one
Although it has chosen a new logo, Yahoo still wants to introduce to users the different icons as an eloquent demonstration of its “renaissance” under Marissa Mayer.
The new logo was introduced on the 31st with the announcement of the change of the brand identity, this logo was invented to express the message: “We wanted the new logo to reflect a distinct yet sophisticated Yahoo: modern, fresh but also completely consistent with the history of operation while showing the individuality and pride of the company.”
Mayer then goes on to describe the new logo design with an explanation of why the company decided to remove the previous footer lines but doesn’t say anything about how the change will affect the company’s branding. How did the brand design express the brand message?
In the end, the new logo with new colors and fonts partly reflects the desire to change Yahoo! “New design with new experiences”. However, in reality, Yahoo still did business in an outdated way: Selling advertising space, and no one knows how Yahoo will replace that way? Yahoo’s new logo and new brand identity didn’t help in this situation, the avenue still did not increase.
This is the reason why the brand design of Yahoo! is considered a “bad brand design”, and also a testament to the saying that “A bad brand design is not necessarily” an ugly brand design”, sometimes it’s bad just because it comes from a business that is not invested, focused on writing a brand story, a brand strategy, or it simply doesn’t convey any of the brand’s message.
3. CONCLUSION
According to Don Norman, the father of modern UX, design thinking can be applied to many different fields by looking at whether consumers are feeling satisfied on multiple levels.
Therefore, when designing a brand design, we need to pay attention to 3 levels of design thinking:
- Visceral: Is this creating an instant positive first impression?
- Behavioral: Is this experience intuitive and pleasurable?
- Reflective: What larger meaning/message/story is being conveyed?
When a design helps employees in the brand answer these 3 questions and customers associate it with these elements of your brand, it is considered a “good brand design”, the rest is left to the brand strategy, and the intrinsic quality of the product determines.
And we craft your brand design based on the above three questions! Come and see us with only one click!
