2020 and your business brand: tips to making it a great year

Well Happy New Decade to everyone. 2020 has certainly got a good ring to it in my view. What's your 2020 vision for your business – how will you communicate that through your business brand this year and beyond?

I was reading an article on the Creative Review website earlier from D&AD CEO Patrick Burgoyne and one of the themes was about design blandness and his hope for the end of 'blandification' of brands in recent years. Where trends are to go for san serif typefaces and the general sterilisation, where any legacy quirks and character have been removed. I couldn't agree more.

I rather like clean forms and bold graphic design. Why do I agree with that? Well it's the word 'quirks' that got me thinking.

Brands are like people and we all have quirks

As business people we all talk about business vision, our brand values, living those every day, yes great but at the same time I believe that your business brand should be more like the people that it represents and who it’s trying to appeal to.

Like everyone in your business we all have quirks. For the people that know me I have lots: some are very visual like my tattoos, some less so like I'm rather shy in social situations. I have many others but I'll not bore you with those now.

For a long time I sort of tried not to tie some of those parts of me into Glued where I'm joint owner. But I have realised over time that those quirks that make me also make part of my business. So part of those bold and striking parts of me can be seen in some of the bold colour and use of caps in our visual language for Glued. Obviously I'm not the whole of Glued so we have other cues: Rob thought provoking approach in some of our language.

So my first tip for you when looking at your brand: look within your business, what collective personality and quirks do you have and how can they be celebrated and brought to life in your brand?

Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater

If you want to refresh your brand this year it's always tempting to just change everything. Sometimes this can be the right thing to do if you need to completely reinvent yourself BUT most of the time you'll lose recognition. It comes back to those quirks again; overtime a brand will have developed some unique visual personalities that your customers and staff come to understand and expect.

Throwing them all away could well cause problems which I've touched on above. So how do you know what's good to keep and what is worth moving away from? Well the easiest way is to ask people: ask your staff, ask your customers, use a survey, we often do such things for our clients: it will make your customers feel valued and give you some really good insights.

If you'd like to know more about this, read our case study about Risk Evolves 

Evolution not revolution 

Finally I come back to brands being like people: we all evolve, we get older and wiser (well I'm not sure wiseness comes with age but hopefully we all gain more knowledge) so I would say that a great brand identity should evolve overtime. Taking people on a journey that they recognise, keeping some of those quirks that make your brand human: remember people buy from people so surely your identity, your logo, your brand needs to have a little bit of personality to make it able to connect with your current and future customers.

I hope this has given you a bit of food for thought on how to get the most from your brand in 2020 and beyond.

Best wishes,

David, Creative Partner.

 

About Glued: 

Glued is a design agency based in Leamington Spa, Warwickshire. We work with organisations of all sizes across the West Midlands, Coventry and Birmingham. We love to help organisations grow through the use of effective design, storytelling and web creation: basically anything that requires a visual style to tell your story.