A successful brand is one that conveys a consistent message across a range of interactions with its customers. A key component of this is the visual appearance of a brand’s products and services. A Visual Brand Language Strategy (VBL) is a protocol that ensures the visual and physical aspects of your products and services align with the aspirations of their brand and enables meaningful connections between product, brand and user. Successful VBL strategies result in a strong visual consistency among offerings in a portfolio, provide a foundation for differentiation within the market and establish a unique and valued relationship between brand and user.
VBL development represents a merger between the creative expression of design with a logical, rational approach that ensures it is aligned with marketing and business objectives. It begins with defining the core values of the company and the brand and then translating those into aesthetic visual themes that most effetely communicate the brand message.
Insight’s experience in defining and working with VBL strategies inform a strategic approach to their creation. Naturally, this means working closely with your marketing organization to intimately understand your brand and its messaging in past, present and future tenses. Insight is experienced in helping organizations define their core brand values by leveraging our research expertise in understanding consumers and their needs, desires and emotions. Similarly, we are skilled in translating existing brand values, marketing strategies and customer segmentation into the building blocks of a new VBL. Regardless of our entry point, we make sure that a VBL strategy effectively conveys the essence of your brand in ways your customers can identify with so your offerings can make strong and lasting emotional connections with them.
Additionally, we realize that VBL strategies are only as effective as their ability to be implemented, so we work closely with your organization’s development, operational and commercialization teams to identify ways to align potential strategies with operational strengths. We factor in the processes you rely on to create manufactured goods and align our VBL development with them; the creativity and experience of our design team ensures that excellence in design is not compromised by commercialization preferences. Similarly, we pay attention to the types of materials that need to be used and strategize on ways we can specify color, finish, and material of a VBL that are cognizant of your products’ functional requirements and cost targets.
VBL also transcends physical products and is an effective tool for creating consistency across interaction elements like GUIs and other display related elements. Insight employs the same steps for informing VBL for interfaces as it does with product, driven by brand values and ensuring meaningful connections between your offerings and your users. As product offerings are increasingly based around interactive experiences and information delivery, brands need to be supported in the digital sense just as much as in the physical.
The result achieved by following our Visual Brand Language process is a compelling end solution that builds brand equity through consistent effective message delivery. It is built off the core values of a company and one that resonates with your customers in ways that are tangible and viable for the organization to implement.