I’ve been beating my drum lately about the importance of pairing your content with appropriate visual imagery, and there’s a good reason for that: most people are far more visually oriented than textually oriented. A really good graphic designer will be able to take all of the brand information and persona information that you worked so hard to develop, and translate it into imagery that expresses your company’s value proposition to your ideal customers.

Your brand’s graphic design, which gets condensed into your logo but is present in every one of your sales documents, is a structure for consistently delivering your brand promise to the people with whom you want to do business. Consistency is always a good thing in marketing. It creates confidence and communicates predictability.

Did you ever wonder why big corporations don’t tend to mess with their logos? It’s generally because there is a huge amount of brand recognition tied up in a logo and people’s understanding of a brand personality is triggered when they look at the logo. It captures emotion and communicates it to the viewer.

Consider the McDonald’s Logo. Can you remember a time when it looked any different than it does now? It’s red and yellow and has a curvy, happy, sunshiny feel to it, which is completely in line with the product the company offers and the mood it wants to create when people in its target audience think of the company:

Now look at the Kodak logo, which is also red and yellow, but which strives to serve a different audience with a vastly different product. I remember this logo on the boxes that held the reels of film my father created with his state-of-the-art Super 8 camera back in the 1960s. As far as I can tell, the logo hasn’t changed in decades. There is a dramatically different feel to the Kodak logo, even though it has pretty much the same colours as the McDonald’s logo:

How about cars? The car companies spend mountains of money on their marketing and for good reason. It’s a competitive field. But their logos don’t tend to change from year to year either.

Toyota, for example, has a nice silver and red logo:

But so does Cadillac:

The two companies have very different price points, and we expect a very different product experience from each one. Although these two logos use similar colours, their customers—for whom they no doubt have created personas—have very different values, priorities, spending habits and lives. The logos allow each company to communicate visually to their ideal customers that they are a perfect match.

What is your logo saying about you? And are you carrying your logo’s brand promise into all of your marketing materials? When someone comes to your website, will they experience an immediate match between what they see there and the marketing imagery they saw on your business card, your trade show signage, the brochures you mailed or emailed out, and your newsletter?

If you’d like to find out more about how Crossman Communications can help you tell your business story through your online content, please connect with me directly at susan@crossmancommunications.com. You can also book yourself in right away for a free consultation at www.meetme.so/susancrossman.