The 3 Ingredients to a Memorable Brand

In the span of less than a second our brain takes an image, splits it up into 3 core parts and then shoots back information that either passes one of two checks “like it” or “disregard it”.

Sometimes people can instantly tell how they feel about an image the moment they see it and other times it takes hours to come up with a proper response. All the same our brain still deconstructs an image into 3 core parts.

These core parts are color, image (logo) and text (name).

Colors

Our brains are hardwired to react to color. We stop at red lights and go at green, we know flashing red and blue lights mean the police and even assign emotions to color. It’s no surprise that color has a huge impact on a brand.

It’s hard to get a color that not only stands out but resonates well with as many people as possible.

There’s a good brand test that focuses on color here  but I modified the image (shown below) to show the true importance of colors. Can you guess all the brands correctly? (Answers and colored version in the link)

For more on the power of color and branding see here and here.

Image

This is where you let the creative juices run wild. Some brands choose to not have images, not every brand needs it. 

To make it easier you can break down what the image will be like a mascot, a logo that describes the business or something completely abstract.

An image needs to grab attention, be bold and interesting and most importantly be memorable. If a person walking on a busy New York street who sees thousands of images a day specifically recalls your image after just seeing it once then congratulations you have a very successful brand image.

Some shapes already carry a meaning and changing them even slightly can truly alter a meaning.

AT&T is a good example of how slightly changing an image dramatically alters the meaning behind it. Taking the classic globe image with blue bars and shading it slightly gave it the illusion that it is a sphere and not a circle. One interpretation of the new logo is cellphone signals wrapping itself around the globe, a meaning that was not present in their previous flat logo.

Text and Name

The last thing that people absorb is the text and name. If your brand has an image than it doesn’t need text, in some cases even if you put text next to the image it can be just as memorable without it (the above AT&T image is again a good example of this). In most cases the brand image is the name itself.

Did you know that Google over the years has slightly changed its font bit by bit in order to keep a modern appearance?

Text is something that a lot of companies think doesn’t matter as much but it does.  Just like everything else text is another way of conveying the personality of your company. What if Google had used the Comic Sans font instead of its current font?

Google

The text of an image is often overlooked and is just as important in representing the brand as all the other components.

Although some brands get away with never changing their text, it all depends on what type of text represents your brand.

A good test is the image below which swaps to extremely popular brands. Why not tell me what you see at first glance. 

It proves the point that a memorable brand has a personality and a story to tell and swapping it with another brand makes it lose all of that relevance. If you did glance your brain would immediately tell you that Yahoo is left and Google is right.

Stay tuned for more posts and comments are always appreciated! Also take the brand test (both in monotone then color) posted above, see how good you are in recognizing brands!