his year, based on submissions via our brand automation tool, Brander by LimeHub, we identified interesting insights (results below) into how bias may be affecting the accuracy of a brand – and consequently its revenue potential.
Strong Brands Drive Revenue Uplift
Visual communication, including the branding that reflects a brand, is critical to the success of a business reaching its full potential. Effective branding helps consumers, including those in B2B, make decisions faster by clearly communicating the market positioning and differentiation that those consumers can base their purchases on.
For example, if a business competes on price, it’s critical that its branding reflects this point of differentiation to help its target market, who are looking for cost-effective solutions, to decide confidently and quickly. As consumers, we receive visual communication cues from things like shapes, colours, sounds, illustrations, etc. which is why getting branding right is fundamental, and directly linked, to revenue potential.
The 12 Brand Archetypes
A core component of branding is effective (and reflective) brand development, including the alignment of a brand with one of 12 familiar archetypes including:
- The Creator
- The Sage
- The Innocent
- The Explorer
- The Outlaw
- The Magician
- The Hero
- The Caregiver
- The Ruler
- The Everyman
- The Lover
- The Jester
Choosing the right brand archetype - that accurately represents your brand - and ensuring consistency across positioning, messaging, and design, will provide certainty to consumers and help in the sales conversion process. Conversely, inaccuracy and inconsistency will confuse potential consumers and prolong the sales cycle or drive them to competitors.
Brand Research Results
As part of the product and market testing for Brander by LimeHub, which automates brand development initiatives and incorporates psychological data in a process that reduces the influence of bias, we uncovered some interesting insights that demonstrate how bias (and ego) inadvertently creates ineffective brands.
The most common anomaly surrounded The Creator archetype which is characterized primarily by innovation and differentiation. Of all the submissions, 31% identified as The Creator however of those only 33% considered themselves “highly differentiated” in their respective markets. To be an innovator and disrupt markets, differentiation is essential. In a world where so much has been invented already and markets are increasingly saturated, it’s rare and exceedingly difficult to be truly innovative. Why then do such a large portion of brand owners identify with this archetype?
The answer lies in the variables of our data however our hypothesis – that we as individuals tend to consider our own personal brand, rather than the businesses, during brand development - can be extended beyond. Brands change over time and a large portion of the market we tested was early stage (albeit across a variety of industries). Without effectively removing the element of bias, in the early stages of a company brands often align with the founders (rather than the product/solution) who are typically entrepreneurial in nature and instinctively seek out market opportunities and innovative ways of solving problems – a core characteristic of The Creator.
But even as organisations grow as individual entities, they do not become independent of people and their biases when developing an evolving brand. This poses a significant threat to the performance of the organisation which is why it's so important to navigate brand development impartially and by using experts in the field for guidance.
Removing bias in brand development is the key challenge we are working on solving by using technology to automate brand development from a purely objective, and data-driven approach. Follow our progress with Brander by LimeHub however in the meantime, check out some of our favourite brands that have nailed their visual communication.
Examples of Effective Visual Communication
MailChimp
MailChimp is a legendary disruptor in email marketing, known for competing on price. While launched in 2001, it was only until 2009 when they introduced the freemium offering that catapulted them to stardom (going from 85k to 450k users within a year).
What we love about MailChimp is that their branding, while evolving with the brand, is recognisable, consistent, and playful. Their colours, fonts, shapes, and illustrations visually and accurately communicate their position in the market (marketing automation) as a cost-competitive option.
Oracle
Oracle is one of the largest software companies in the world by market capitalisation and revenue. They are a leader in the enterprise B2Bsolutions sector and while their branding isn’t exactly inspiring, they do communicate accurately to their audience who are largely technical. Without going into the detail of the branding, one visual that we admire is the design of the navigation on the home page.
At first sight, the dropdowns seem to be in contradiction to the design excellence one would expect from a company with a big budget. But upon further inspection, this is mastery of understanding an audience and visually communicating that fact through a simple navigation component that mimics system architecture design layers in solution documentation.
As designers we hate it. As marketers we love it.
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