Introduction

Beyond simple marketing, working on a brand raises all the questions needed to create a product: What solution does my product provide? For whom is it intended? How is it positioned in its market? What is its value proposition?

All the answers to these questions will lead to a coherent, meaningful image. Think of branding as the foundations of a robust architecture. In-depth knowledge of your product is the key to building a solid, adaptable brand image. Understanding your product's purpose, its market positioning, its target audience, its possible evolution... helps shape a visual identity that truly reflects its foundations. They are essential to the stability and uniqueness of the whole, and help lay the foundations for branding that is both durable and scalable. It's a difficult balance to strike!

Branding opens up a new dimension for entrepreneurs. Don't just rely on aesthetics, add a story, keywords, follow your thread, be flexible and transparent to gain trust. It's by fully exploiting their brand that companies can establish themselves effectively in the marketplace.

Conclusion

Make your product legible so that it's visible and therefore sustainable!

1. More understanding

Branding greatly facilitates access to information by creating coherence and hierarchy for greater readability and understanding. By translating your values and key messages into visual elements, your product becomes more accessible to your target audience. Everything becomes clearer! 

For a successful branding strategy, it's vital to establish cohesion between the substance - i.e., the message, your key words, the essence of your product - and the form - represented by your typography, colors - and other graphic elements specific to your brand image. It's exactly like Jean-Luc Godard's metaphor of the chair and the table. When these two aspects are harmoniously linked, branding becomes a powerful tool for communicating effectively with consumers and creating a lasting connection, right from the first glance.

For example, when we created the branding for Escape kit - the do-it-yourself home escape game for the whole family - the idea of a modular identity represented by cut-out paper shapes that can depict different faces and animals made perfect sense! It's fun, lively, imaginative and do-it-yourself, and the values and key words are sublimated through branding.

A brand must be in line with the values of your product, and at the same time be easy to read (large, small, black and white, color...). When someone is unable to read or understand the properties, benefits, history or usefulness of your product, it creates doubt or even disinterest in the target audience. In a matter of seconds, you can lose their attention. The less effort a customer makes to understand a brand's product, the easier it will be for them to make a purchase. Branding has to make the product easy to read, so that the customer really wants to take action. Design isn't just aesthetic, it's also practical and visually enriches thought. 

We call this principle Affordance.

A little vocabulary?

Affordance is the ability of an object or system to evoke its use or function. Neologism proposed by American psychologist James Jerome Gibson.
Interface design is another striking example of this approach. Thanks to the layout of the elements, the colors and the typography used, the user can clearly understand what he needs to do, such as click on a button, fill in a form or move from one page to another. If it's well done and easy to understand, actions are taken intuitively.

Conclusion:

Work on your images to make your words and intentions really stand out.

2. More flexibility

For creators of products, whether physical, digital or hybrid, timing and adaptation are major issues. The product is constantly evolving, and time condenses considerably, especially when the budget is limited. The customer also places fewer barriers in the way of possible changes. They know they have to be able to bounce back and adapt to meet tomorrow's challenges and those of today's consumer. Things are less long-term. Branding is built in parallel with design, evolving with consistency. The challenge is to maintain coherence and not lose your focus or dilute your design! Preparing your visual identity for a world in perpetual evolution ensures that it remains alive and adaptable over time. Involving the graphic designer from the very start of the project, so that he can grasp the context, saves a considerable amount of time. When well executed (whether in-house or outsourced), it represents an excellent way of changing the perspective on your product and imagining it in a universe that increasingly enhances it.
Today, we communicate before, during and after product development. Project leaders have to do everything at once, for better or for worse!

By way of illustration, a graphic charter that is flexible, yet framed by clear rules, enables you to maintain the integrity and coherence of your brand identity, while leaving room for creativity as new developments arise. By allowing a degree of flexibility, it enables appropriate adaptation to different communication media and contexts, while preserving the essence of the brand and product. However, it's important to strike the right balance to avoid overloading the image of your product and therefore your brand with too many colors, new typography or additional graphic elements, at the risk of diluting your existing identity and losing its initial impact. A balanced approach ensures that both your brand image and your product remain identifiable, impactful, enduring and true to its founding message.

A little vocabulary?

A graphic charter is a document that defines the visual and stylistic rules to be followed to maintain the coherence of a brand or company's visual identity.

To create the branding for the "Alba" brand of organic, fresh, nutrient-rich baby food, we started with the initial visual elements and logo. A simple graphic charter was put in place to provide flexibility for the client, so that they could constantly adapt their landing page according to customer feedback or product adaptations.

Conclusion

Take risks, test and adjust.

More confidence

Design is about creating a better, more beautiful world. It's a utopian ambition, to be sure. But we need things that fill us with wonder, and design is a first-class asset in satisfying this need, especially for brands. How many times have we opted for one product over another on a shelf, simply because of its attractive packaging? Does this aesthetic appeal inspire confidence? 

Beauty and good design often evoke a sense of reliability, and it's natural to think that if a brand has invested in attractive packaging, it has surely also invested in the quality of the product it contains. So, even without certainty about the quality of your product, we tend to interpret it positively or negatively according to its appearance. As Raymond Loewy said back in 1952: "Ugliness sells poorly".

Design therefore has a powerful ability to influence our short-term purchasing behavior. Branding then plays a crucial role in giving the necessary confidence to make a first purchase, while influencing the first interaction with the brand. This is commonly referred to as the halo effect. 

A little vocabulary?

The halo effect, the notoriety effect or the contamination effect, is a cognitive bias that affects the perception of people or brands. It is a selective interpretation and perception of information in line with a first impression.

For the creation of an organic and natural wine label for a winery, we took eco-design a step further, using 0 adhesive paper. The visual is painted on the sealed bottle with vegetable wax, which is also used to glue the label string containing all the legal information. The same label is made from recycled paper containing 15% grape waste, giving it a slightly purplish color. All these details make the packaging more original, curious and therefore attractive. You want to get closer, to touch it, and when you read the explanations, the customer feedback is more than positive! 

If you take a stand on environmental matters or human well-being more broadly, don't hesitate to communicate on your graphic choices (for example, for eco-inking in print or accessibility on the web), your types of media, your packaging limitations... Consumers are increasingly demanding this, and it's becoming a key element of trust. 

Don't hesitate to humanize your brand image, giving it personality, transparency and a warmth that will make your potential customers feel even more confident!

The role of graphic design doesn't just stop at branding, it's present throughout the entire customer experience. Consumers are immersed in the brand's universe through a series of stages before, during and after purchase. The attention paid to these stages includes a brand's visual and aesthetic universe, its media, its goodies, its packaging, its e-mails, its communication on social networks... Visual coherence between all the different communication media will positively fuel this trust, making the brand even more enduring.

Conclusion:

Don't forget the 'wow' effect for a more beautiful world!

4. General conclusion

Design has the ability to redistribute a company's cards, its image and its history, by transforming its entire universe. Like a wave of a magic wand, it reinvents a brand, a product, a service...